Purpose: Golf coaches may recommend "blind" putting drills in which golfers close their eyes to improve their feel. Research on specificity of learning suggests, however, that adding or removing a source of sensory information after practicing under differing circumstances can cause performance decrements. Specificity of learning is also…

Understanding other people's emotional states involves integrating multiple sources of information, such as someone's smile (affective cue) with our knowledge that they have passed an exam (situational cue). We explored whether autistic adults display differences in how they integrate these cues by showing participants videos of students receiving…

Seminal work by Werker and colleagues (Stager & Werker [1997] "Nature," 388, 381-382) has found that 14-month-old infants do not show evidence for learning minimal pairs in the habituation-switch paradigm. However, when multiple speakers produce the minimal pair in acoustically variable ways, infants' performance improves in…

Purpose: Speech perception is facilitated by listeners' ability to dynamically modify the mapping to speech sounds given systematic variation in speech input. For example, the degree to which listeners show categorical perception of speech input changes as a function of distributional variability in the input, with perception becoming less…

Chinese directional complement (DC) constructions, as a subtype of Chinese multiword sequences, are challenging to acquire for second language (L2) learners. However, little is known about L2 Chinese learners' acquisition of figurative DCs and their comprehension of literal and figurative DCs. This study investigated whether the acquisition of…

This study investigates the acquisition of genericity in L2 French and L3 English. While some exponents become generic by assembling morphological, syntactic and discursive cues, definite singular nominals additionally require the well-established kind restriction. It is a pragmatic and language-specific constraint. The participants are L1 Arabic…

The present study investigates the role of three structural factors ("word order," "case-marking," and "verbal morphology") in the comprehension of the Korean suffixal passive by Korean-speaking children. To measure the relative impact of each factor on the comprehension of the passive, we devise a novel method where…

Mole, molar mass and the Avogadro number are used constantly to measure the amount of substance in chemical changes. However, students have difficulty in understanding these concepts because they are not familiar with measuring very small amounts of matter that cannot be seen and weighed in daily life, like atoms. The mole concept was developed to…

The article focuses on the hitherto unresearched impact of nudging on the successful completion of HEIs studies. The aim of the study is to find out how HEIs students accept different forms of nudging and how individual forms of nudging can contribute to the successful completion of studies. The explanatory paradigm is anchored in nudge theory.…

Effectively coping with peer victimization may be facilitated by deploying attention away from threat (i.e., bullies, reinforcers) and toward available support (e.g., defenders). To test this premise, 72 early adolescents (38 girls; M[subscript age] = 11.67, SD = 8.14 months) watched video clips of youth actors portraying a bully aggressing…

Purpose: Visual cues from a speaker's face may benefit perceptual adaptation to degraded speech, but current evidence is limited. We aimed to replicate results from previous studies to establish the extent to which visual speech cues can lead to greater adaptation over time, extending existing results to a real-time adaptation paradigm (i.e.,…

All banknotes have security features which are intended to help determine whether they are false or genuine. Typically, however, the general public has limited knowledge of where on a banknote these security features can be found. Here, we tested whether counterfeit detection can be improved with the help of salient elements, designed to guide…

Constructing causal mechanistic explanations of observable phenomena is a key science practice that is often challenging for students as most mechanisms involve interactions of unobservable entities and activities. In this study, we examined how gesturing with a computer simulation that depicts the molecular mechanism of thermal conduction…

Empathy for pain in daily life is more complex than in lab settings and involved higher cognitive abilities. In order to investigate the role of executive function in preschoolers' empathy for pain, we investigated the role of three subcomponents of executive function (inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility) in children's…

The effect of time pressure on metacognitive control is of theoretical and empirical relevance and is likely to allow us to tap into developmental differences in performances which do not become apparent otherwise, as previous studies suggest. In the present study, we investigated the effect of time pressure on metacognitive control in three age…