Using the arguments over college admissions as a point of departure, this article analyzes the idea of merit in education. Situating the concept of merit historically and philosophically, it advances the argument that merit should be considered not as an individual construct but as an institutional one. The debates over merit focus on which…

Taking into account various models and findings pertaining to the nature of analogical reasoning, this study explored quantitative and qualitative individual differences in intelligence using latency and eye-movement data. Fifty-five university students were administered 14 selected items of the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices test. Results…

Plaut and Booth developed a distributed connectionist model of written word comprehension and evaluated it against empirical findings on individual and developmental differences in semantic priming in visual lexical decision. Borowsky and Besner raised a number of challenges for this model. First, the model was not shown to be capable of…

Computer-mediated communication in individuals with Asperger syndrome, Tourette syndrome and normal controls was explored with a program called Bubble Dialogue (Gray, Creighton, McMahon, & Cunninghamn (1991)) in which the users type text into speech bubbles. Two scenarios, based on Happe (1994) were adapted to investigate understanding of figure…

The present study investigated fluid and crystallized intelligence as well as strategic task approaches as potential sources of age-related differences in adult learning performance. Therefore, 45 young and 45 old adults were asked to learn pictured objects. Overall, young participants outperformed old participants in this learning test. However,…

This article analyzes if working memory (WM) is especially important to understand "g." WM comprises the functions of focusing attention, conscious rehearsal, and transformation and mental manipulation of information, while "g" reflects the component variance that is common to all tests of ability. The centrality of WM in individual differences in…

Using a sample of 1227 Swedish adolescents we examined peer relations across contexts and for multiple peer targets (three ''Very Important Persons'', VIPs). Specifically, we examined the relations between antisocial behaviour and the types of relationships individuals had with their VIPs (e.g. friend, romantic partner), the contexts in which they…

The present study aimed to examine how differences in functional lateralisation of language are related to interindividual variations in interhemispheric connectivity. Utilising an fMRI silent word-generation paradigm, 89 left- and right-handed subjects were subdivided into four lateralisation subgroups. Applying morphological and diffusion-tensor…

This study explored the coping processes of couples experiencing infertility. Participants included 420 couples referred for advanced reproductive treatments. Couples were divided into groups based on the frequency of their use of eight coping strategies. Findings suggest that coping processes, which are beneficial to individuals, may be…

The authors investigated absolute and relative metacomprehension accuracy as a function of verbal ability in college students. Students read hard texts, revised texts, or a mixed set of texts. They then predicted their performance, took a multiple-choice test on the texts, and made posttest judgments about their performance. With hard texts,…

Central questions in psycholinguistic studies on bilingualism are how bilinguals access words in their two languages, and how they control their language systems and solve the problem of cross-language competition. In their excellent paper "The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision", Dijkstra and…

By making the general curriculum the reference point for all considerations, The New Era proposals set forth by the President's Commission are devoid of all considerations of individual differences. Rather than tailoring IEP's to the particular learning characteristics of individual children, it is suggested that one kind of good, scientifically…

Statistics anxiety is prevalent among students whose academic background has little statistical training. The development and psychometric properties of statistics anxiety scales and the factors affecting statistics anxiety have been extensively studied for more than twenty years, but few studies focused on how to reduce the statistics anxiety for…

We attempted to simulate the main features of letter-by-letter (LBL) dyslexia in normal readers through stimulus degradation (i.e. contrast reduction and removal of high spatial frequencies). The results showed the word length and the letter confusability effects characteristic of LBL dyslexia. However, the interaction of letter confusability and…

When children are asked questions that invite them to react and respond thoughtfully to what they have read, teachers can gain a great deal of insight into the thinking habits of their students. Discussions of ideas offer teachers valuable opportunities to observe their students' thinking habits and skills, the breadth and precision of their…