Relational thinking and dealing with variables are two essential aspects of algebraic thinking. Relational thinking means viewing mathematical expressions and equations as a whole rather than as individual computing processes. It is characterized by using relationships between mathematical objects, and refers to the relations of equality and…

Deficits in social referencing have been associated with autism spectrum disorder. It may lead to deficits in language, symbolic abilities, and other social-cognitive behaviors. When deficits in social referencing are detected, teaching such behaviors should be a priority, but effective teaching procedures are lacking. We consider social…

Reward is thought to attenuate forgetting through the automatic effect of dopamine on hippocampal memory traces. Here we report a conceptual replication of previous results where we did not observe this effect of reward. Participants encoded eight lists of pictures and recalled picture content immediately or the next day. They were informed that…

Individuals with developmental disabilities demonstrate deficits in intellectual and adaptive functioning that can include difficulty describing past events; accurate recall may be improved by learning to engage in precurrent, or problem solving, behavior. Visual imagining is a problem-solving strategy that involves seeing in the absence of the…

Tact is the most important verbal operant (Skinner, 1957) due to the uniqueness of stimulus control and its role in facilitating acquisition of another verbal (e.g., mands, intraverbals) and nonverbal (i.e., listener) operants (Sundberg, 2015). Teaching tacts to children with ASD and the research on this area, however, are largely focused on…

E-texts have many advantages over their paper counterparts, especially when they are reflowable and available as open educational resources (OERs). Unfortunately, research suggests that e-texts are, on the whole, less memorable than p-texts, in part due to their relative lack of visual navigational landmarks that help to anchor recall. The…

Studying musical text effectively reinforces grammar structures and vocabulary taught in class while simultaneously developing cultural literacy, a critical component in second language acquisition. Musical text facilitates a multimodal learning experience as it combines the verbal and aural modes, and is often accompanied by the visual mode. In…

The present study investigated how response mode (oral vs. manual) modulates the Stroop effect using a picture variant of the Stroop task in which participants named orally, or identified with a manual keypress, line drawings of animals (e.g., camel). Consistent with previous color-response Stroop studies, relative to the nonlinguistic neutral…

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and…

In signaled active avoidance (SigAA), rats learn to suppress Pavlovian freezing and emit actions to remove threats and prevent footshocks. SigAA is critical for understanding aversively motivated instrumental behavior and anxiety-related active coping. However, with standard protocols ~25% of rats exhibit high freezing and poor avoidance. This has…

The number-line task has been extensively used to study the mental representation of numbers in children. However, studies suggest that proportional reasoning provides a better account of children's performance. Ninety 4- to 6-year-olds were given a number-line task with symbolic numbers, with clustered dot arrays that resembled a perceptual…

Generalization of learning can arise from 2 distinct sources: failure to discriminate a novel test stimulus from the trained stimulus and active extrapolation from the trained stimulus to the test stimulus despite them being discriminable. We investigated these 2 processes in a predictive learning task by testing stimulus discriminability…

In two experiments, participants tracked the identity and location of moving words. The task bears resemblance to one performed by air traffic controllers who track multiple moving aircraft, where they are identified with relatively complex alphanumeric call signs. In Experiment 1, stimulus familiarity was manipulated by comparing the tracking of…

Previous studies on skill acquisition have taught targets in stimulus sets composed of different numbers of stimuli. Although the rationale for selection of a stimulus set size is not clear, the number of target stimuli trained within a set is a treatment decision for which there is limited empirical support. The current investigation compared the…

The role of awareness in differential delay eyeblink conditioning (EBC) has been a topic of much debate. We tested the idea that awareness is required for differential delay EBC when two cues are perceptually similar. The present study manipulated frequencies of auditory conditioned stimuli (CS) to vary CS similarity in three groups of…