Purpose: A broad area of interest to our group is to understand the consequences of the "cue profile" (a measure of how well a listener can utilize audible temporal and/or spectral cues for listening scenarios in which a subset of cues is distorted). The study goal was to determine if listeners whose cue profile indicated that they…

Using field experiments, I investigate if provision of (social) information can increase incoming university students' attendance in a voluntary remedial math course. In Intervention 1, treated students receive an invitation letter with or without information about a past sign-up rate for the course. In Intervention 2, among those who signed up…

Sequence learning is fundamental to a wide range of cognitive functions. Explaining how sequences--and the relations between the elements they comprise--are learned is a fundamental challenge to cognitive science. However, although hundreds of articles addressing this question are published each year, the actual learning mechanisms involved in the…

Online learning and teaching, accelerated by the global pandemic and rapid advancement of digital technology, require novel conceptual and analytical tools to understand better the evolving nature of online teaching. Drawing on the classical model of the instructional triangle and previous attempts to extend it, we propose the "Instructional…

Speech is a complex, redundant and variable signal happening in a noisy and ever changing world. How do listeners navigate these complex auditory scenes and continuously and effortlessly understand most of the speakers around them? Studies show that listeners can quickly adapt to new situations, accents and even to distorted speech. Although prior…

Visual access has long been considered crucial for interpreters, providing essential kinesic cues such as gaze and facial expressions that enhance understanding and emphasis. Despite its acknowledged importance, empirical studies examining the impact of visual access on interpreters' performance remain limited. To date, conclusive evidence…

Linguistic phenomena (e.g., words and syntactic structure) co-occur with a wide variety of meanings. These systematic correlations can help readers to interpret a text and create predictions about upcoming material. However, to what extent these correlations influence discourse processing is still unknown. We address this question by examining…

Multilingual speakers can find speech recognition in everyday environments like restaurants and open-plan offices particularly challenging. In a world where speaking multiple languages is increasingly common, effective clinical and educational interventions will require a better understanding of how factors like multilingual contexts and…

Purpose: We studied the role of gender in metacognition of voice emotion recognition ability (ERA), reflected by self-rated confidence (SRC). To this end, we guided our study in two approaches: first, by examining the role of gender in voice ERA and SRC independently and second, by looking for gender effects on the ERA association with SRC.…

The use of face coverings can make communication more difficult by removing access to visual cues as well as affecting the physical transmission of speech sounds. This study aimed to assess the independent and combined contributions of visual and auditory cues to impaired communication when using face coverings. In an online task, 150 participants…

Metacognitive strategies play a crucial role in Computer-Based Learning Environments (CBLEs). However, students often struggle to apply these strategies spontaneously during learning. Research demonstrates that metacognitive prompts can effectively guide students' awareness and help them monitor their learning progress, leading to improved…

What happens to public opinion when prominent partisan officials intervene in education policy debates? We analyzed the results of 18 survey experiments conducted between 2009 and 2021 with nationally representative samples of U.S. adults. Each experiment explored the effect of an endorsement of a specific education policy by a high-profile…

While some researchers place negative numbers on a so-called extended mental number line to the left of positive numbers, others claim that negative numbers do not have mental representations but are processed through positive numbers combined with transformation rules. We measured spatial associations of negative numbers with a modified implicit…

In a typical probabilistic cuing experiment, participants are asked to find a visual target among a series of distractors. Although participants are not informed about this, the target appears more frequently in one region of the display, resulting in faster search times for targets located in this region. This bias is thought to depend on a…

List-method directed forgetting usually involves asking people to study a list, followed by a cue to forget it, and then studying a second list. Prior work suggests that List 2 encoding is necessary for directed forgetting to occur, but recent studies have found that moving the forget cue from List 1 to List 2 allows people to selectively forget…