Despite extensive research on motivational factors in academic performance, little is known about the role of ongoing conscious thought. Mind-wandering has been linked with poor educational outcomes, yet can also benefit goal-directed behaviour. We reasoned that mind-wandering should benefit exam performance under certain motivational conditions,…

Children articulate their emotions and experiences through drawings and the colours they incorporate into them. This study investigated the relationship between preschool children's colour preferences, the emotions those colours elicit, and how they convey their emotions and thoughts through drawings. The participants, comprising 30 children (19…

This critical literature review examines how classroom design influences attention, regulation, and learning in early childhood education (ECE). Combining Montessori pedagogy with Bronfenbrenner's theories as a conceptual framework, this review considers biopsychosocial impacts of physical classroom spaces. Experimental classroom research…

This article borrows from Ahmed's 'queer phenomenology' together with postqualitative inquiry to reflect on how the agency of things frustrated and changed the researcher's positionality in researching early childhood educators (ECEs). Making use of subversive feminist ideas arising from women's textile work it is constructed as a piece of Honiton…

The Inventory of Student Evolution Acceptance (I-SEA) was developed to provide fine-grained measures of evolution acceptance in populations with moderate-to-high levels of biological sciences understanding. Although the I-SEA has been used extensively since its inception, understanding of how its 24 items function to produce subscales is still…

Research on embodied cognition acknowledges that cognitive processing is tightly coupled with bodily activities and the environment. An important implication for education is that learning can be enhanced when the brain, body, and environment mutually influence each other, such as when making or observing human actions, especially those involving…

Background: We evaluated cognitive accessibility of the VIA Inventory of Strengths Youth short form with adults with intellectual disability for use in strengths-based practice. Methods: We conducted cognitive testing with adults with intellectual disability (n = 33; M age = 36.2; range: 20.4-64.2). Data were coded for the extent to which (1)…

Children with gifted intellects often earn lower scores on measures of processing speed than their nongifted counterparts. However, neuropsychological research indicates such a profile of scores is likely not due to a true innate neurocognitive processing speed deficit but is rather a statistical artifact resulting from the interference of common…

Autistic youth display difficulties in emotion recognition, yet little research has examined behavioral and neural indices of vocal emotion recognition (VER). The current study examines behavioral and event-related potential (N100, P200, Late Positive Potential [LPP]) indices of VER in autistic and non-autistic youth. Participants (N = 164)…

Prefrontal synthesis (PFS) is a component of constructive imagination. It is defined as the process of mentally juxtaposing objects into novel combinations. For example, to comprehend the instruction "put the cat under the dog and above the monkey," it is necessary to use PFS in order to correctly determine the spatial arrangement of the…

The usability of items is connected to cognition, or how the brain processes information. Many of the related processes occur subconsciously and are guided by the mental models individuals have created based on their experiences. The better communication professional and communication students understand such dynamics, the more effectively they…

Humans excel at detecting patterns in information, abstracting rules, and making inferences. Underlying these skills is relational reasoning: the cognitive ability to identify and map abstract, generalizable relations between pieces of information. Though this powerful ability supports higher-order cognition, it can also be a processing bottleneck…

Impaired numerosity perception in developmental dyscalculia (low "number acuity") has been interpreted as evidence of reduced representational precision in the neurocognitive system supporting non-symbolic number sense. However, recent studies suggest that poor numerosity judgments might stem from stronger interference from non-numerical…

In terms of instructional sequencing and cognitive load research, it remains unclear what effect different instructional sequences have on cognitive load and how to use problem-solving support within instructional sequences to reduce cognitive load. The current study examines how instructional sequencing and problem-solving support interact with…

In educational settings, students read for multiple purposes, such as preparing for an exam, practicing a new reading strategy, writing an essay, and more. Because reading is a goal-directed activity, providing students with task instructions can help them create goals for reading and develop a plan to meet these goals. In the current experiment,…