We investigated participants' task set preparation by measuring changes in pupil diameter during a blank interval as they prepared for an easy (i.e., prosaccade) or difficult (i.e., antisaccade) trial. We used occasional thought probes to gauge "on-task" thoughts versus mind wandering. In both studies, participants' pupil diameters were…

When do children acquire a meta-representational Theory of Mind? False Belief (FB) tasks have become the litmus test to answer this question. In such tasks, subjects must ascribe a non-veridical belief to another agent and predict/explain her actions accordingly. Empirically, children pass explicit verbal versions of FB tasks from around age 4.…

Human adults are adept at mitigating the influence of sensory uncertainty on task performance by integrating sensory cues with learned prior information, in a Bayes-optimal fashion. Previous research has shown that young children and infants are sensitive to environmental regularities, and that the ability to learn and use such regularities is…

Although the school ICT coordinator's role has been institutionally defined by the Andalusian Education Administration (Spain), individual factors may be key in the emerging role-building process. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) of the priority given by coordinators to their different functions and a subsequent cluster analysis of the MDS solution…

This study tested whether the bivariate association between simple reaction time (SRT) and executive function (EF) performance that has been observed in early childhood represented a between- and/or within-person association. Up to three repeated assessments (i.e., fall, winter, and spring assessments from September to May) were available for 282…

Three rational number notations--fractions, decimals, and percentages--have existed in their modern forms for over 300 years, suggesting that each notation serves a distinct function. However, it is unclear what these functions are and how people choose which notation to use in a given situation. In the present article, we propose quantification…

The formulation of learning objectives is considered an important task for teaching at all educational levels. However, teachers tend to trivialize learning objectives and consider them as part of an administrative requirement. This study sought to characterize the specific learning objectives for two school mathematics tasks posed by primary…

Commencing students in universities today are very diverse with regards to their academic preparation, language, and cultural background. Some of these students are also first in family to attend university. With such diverse student profiles and previous learning experiences, it is possible that some students may not be confident to employ the…

Two of the central issues in comparative judgement (CJ), which are perhaps underexplored compared to questions of the method's reliability and technical quality, are "what processes do judges use to make their decisions" and "what features do they focus on when making their decisions?" This article discusses both, in the…

Research on the question of creative benefit accompanying dyslexia has produced conflicting findings. In this meta-analysis, we determined summary effects of mean and variance differences in creativity between groups with and without dyslexia. Twenty studies were included (n = 770 individuals with dyslexia, n = 1,671 controls). A random-effects…

Although retrieval practice is a more effective learning strategy than restudy, students oftentimes prefer the latter. Previous studies have investigated this suboptimal decision at strategy level. The present study, however, focused on the learning task level: How perceived mental effort and perceived learning during task performance influence…

Some previous studies have shown that increased stress hormone levels have beneficial effects on memory encoding; however, there is no clear consensus on which encoding-related processes are affected by stress hormones. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between interindividual differences in neuroendocrine response to acute…

In this study, we investigated effects of morphological processing on handwriting production in beginning writers of German. Children from Grades 3 and 4 were asked to copy words from a computer screen onto a pen tablet, while we recorded their handwriting with high spatiotemporal resolution. Words involved a syllable-congruent visual disruption…

Students often look to the standard algorithm, which requires rewriting the task, regrouping tens to create enough ones to subtract, and other opportunities to make errors. However, when the authors apply structural thinking, the resultant strategy is an efficient and elegant shortcut and even brings a positive connotation to the word…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate implicit learning in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) by employing a visual artificial grammar learning task. Method: Thirteen children with DLD and 24 children with typical language development between the ages of 8 and 12 years completed a visual artificial grammar learning…