Recent studies in the literature have shown that syntax remains a significant barrier to novice computer science students in the field. While this syntax barrier is known to exist, whether and how it varies across programming languages has not been carefully investigated. For this article, we conducted four empirical studies on programming…

Using more complex items than those commonly employed within the information-processing approach, but still easier than those used in intelligence tests, this study analyzed how the association between processing speed and accuracy level changes as the difficulty of the items increases. The study involved measuring cognitive ability using Raven's…

Although frequently used with recognition, a few studies have used the Remember/Know procedure with free recall. In each case, participants gave Know judgments to a significant number of recalled items (items that were presumably not remembered on the basis of familiarity). What do these Know judgments mean? We investigated this issue using a…

Many words have more than one translation across languages. Such "translation-ambiguous" words are translated more slowly and less accurately than their unambiguous counterparts. We examine the extent to which word context and translation dominance influence the processing of translation-ambiguous words. We further examine how these factors…

Our study investigates the challenges introduced by students' use of lexically ambiguous language in evolutionary explanations. Specifically, we examined students' meaning of five key terms incorporated into their written evolutionary explanations: "pressure", "select", "adapt", "need", and "must". We utilized a new technological tool known as the…

Binary cueing systems assist in many tasks, often alerting people about potential hazards (such as alarms and alerts). We investigate whether cues, besides possibly improving decision accuracy, also affect the effort users invest in tasks and whether the required effort in tasks affects the responses to cues. We developed a novel experimental tool…

Recent studies have shown that the interpretation of graphs is not always easy for students. In order to reason properly about distributions of data, however, one needs to be able to interpret graphical representations of these distributions correctly. In this study, we used Tversky's principles for the design of graphs to explain how 125…

Background: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show particular difficulty comprehending and producing object ("Who did the bear follow?") relative to subject ("Who followed the tiger?") "wh"-questions. Aims: To determine if school-age children with SLI, relative to children with typical development (TD),…

Memory performance predictions are subjective estimates of possible memory task performance. The purpose of this study was to examine possible factors related to changes in word list performance predictions made by younger and older adults. Factors included memory self-efficacy, actual performance, and perceptions of performance. The current study…

Multidimensional computerized adaptive testing (MCAT) is able to provide a vector of ability estimates for each examinee, which could be used to provide a more informative profile of an examinee's performance. The current literature on MCAT focuses on the fixed-length tests, which can generate less accurate results for those examinees whose…

Poor sleep is a common feature in autism even though patients themselves do not necessarily complain. The impact of poor sleep on daytime cognitive functioning in autism is not well-known and we therefore investigated whether sleep in autism correlates with daytime cognitive performance. A battery of non-verbal tasks was administered, in the…

People often use what they know as a basis to estimate what others know. This egocentrism can bias their estimates of others' knowledge. In 2 experiments, we examined whether people can diminish egocentrism when predicting for others. Participants answered general knowledge questions and then estimated how many of their peers would know the…

In their examination of the effectiveness of affect regulation strategies, Webb, Miles, and Sheeran (2012) offered the results of a broad meta-analysis of studies on regulatory interventions. Their analysis provides an alternative to our earlier, more focused meta-analysis of the affect regulation literature (Augustine & Hemenover, 2009).…

The impact of particular types of context effects on actual scores is less understood although there has been some research carried out regarding certain types of context effects under the nonequivalent anchor test (NEAT) design. In addition, the issue of the impact of item context effects on scores has not been investigated extensively when item…

In two experiments, I tested for the presence of conditioned seeing as a measureable behavior, which was measured by participants' accuracy in drawing a stimulus, and how this behavior was related to the demonstration of the naming capability. In Experiment 1, participants demonstrated a correlation between drawing responses and speaker…