Recent curricular developments suggest that students at all levels need to be statistically literate and able to efficiently and accurately make probabilistic decisions. Furthermore, statistical literacy is a requirement to being a well-informed citizen of society. Research also recognizes that the ability to reason probabilistically is supported…

In this dissertation research, we argue that spatial alarms and activity-based social networks are two fundamentally new types of information and influence diffusion channels. Such new channels have the potential of enriching our professional experiences and our personal life quality in many unprecedented ways. First, we develop an activity driven…

This article discusses results from interviews with two undergraduate students in an introductory proofs course. The researcher assessed the participants' general proof schemes and built models of the participants' conception of probabilistic independence and mutual exclusivity. The participants were then tasked with asserting a relationship…

It is good scientific practice to the report an appropriate estimate of effect size and a confidence interval (CI) to indicate the precision with which a population effect was estimated. For comparisons of 2 independent groups, a probability-based effect size estimator (A) that is equal to the area under a receiver operating characteristic curve…

This article discusses 3 ways in which adaptive developmental mechanisms may produce maladaptive outcomes. First, natural selection may favor risky strategies that enhance fitness on average but which have detrimental consequences for a subset of individuals. Second, mismatch may result when organisms experience environmental change during…

Although the trend of marital dissolution has diverged by education in recent decades, literature was not clear about whether African Americans experienced a significant educational difference in marital dissolution. This study hypothesized that educational differences within the African American community have emerged and that the growth in this…

Few studies have examined the effects of the high-probability instructional sequence in the treatment of food selectivity, and results of these studies have been mixed (e.g., Dawson et al., 2003; Patel et al., 2007). The present study extended previous research on the high-probability instructional sequence by combining this procedure with…

In this paper, we discuss the importance of teaching power considerations in statistical hypothesis testing. Statistical power analysis determines the ability of a study to detect a meaningful effect size, where the effect size is the difference between the hypothesized value of the population parameter under the null hypothesis and the true value…

There is an ongoing controversy regarding the relationship between covert attention and saccadic eye movements. While there is quite some evidence that the preparation of a saccade is obligatory preceded by a shift of covert attention, the reverse is not clear: Is allocation of attention always accompanied by saccade preparation? Recently, a…

As any empirical method used for causal analysis, social experiments are prone to attrition which may flaw the validity of the results. This article considers the problem of partially missing outcomes in experiments. First, it systematically reveals under which forms of attrition--in terms of its relation to observable and/or unobservable…

Regret and relief are related to counterfactual thinking and rely on comparison processes between what has been and what might have been. In this article, we study the development of regret and relief from late childhood to adulthood (11.2-20.2 years), and we examine how these two emotions affect individuals' willingness to retrospectively…

We describe a Bayesian approach to evaluating children's abuse disclosures and review research demonstrating that children's disclosure of genital touch can be highly probative of sexual abuse, with the probative value depending on disclosure spontaneity and children's age. We discuss how some commentators understate the probative value of…

Two experiments are presented that examine how the visual characteristics of Japanese words influence eye movement behaviour during reading. In Experiment 1, reading behaviour was compared for words comprising either one or two kanji characters. The one-character words were significantly less likely to be fixated on first-pass, and had…

We evaluated the strategy of increasing precursors to compliance on the compliance of 2 preschool boys. Modeling and differential reinforcement were used to increase specific responses to his name being called prior to the opportunity to comply with an instruction. The precursors were stopping the ongoing activity and orienting to, making eye…

We investigated the time course of associative recognition using the response signal procedure, whereby a stimulus is presented and followed after a variable lag by a signal indicating that an immediate response is required. More specifically, we examined the effects of associative fan (the number of associations that an item has with other items…