Recent research has uncovered significant concerns about the validity of some types of college student self-reports. This study examines the extent to which student reports about a critical type of college experience--good teaching practices--may be biased as a function of students' intellectual orientations and cognitive reasoning abilities.…

Adopting an ecological perspective on student learning in blended course designs, this study investigates the quality of 335 undergraduates' experience in a first-year compulsory engineering course. Interrelations amongst cognitive, social, and material aspects of the student learning experience are examined. The cognitive elements include…

Recent research has shown a great interest in supporting self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies in online learning. However, there is hardly any study that has investigated how students' self-regulation of behavior could be promoted in online environments for programming learning and assessment, despite the proliferation of automated programming…

Recalling what was eaten at a meal today, relative to yesterday, reduces subsequent food intake. We explored one cause of this effect by examining how this memory manipulation affects food specific (desire/how much you would eat) and general (hunger) motivation to eat. Participants rated hunger before random assignment to either recall their last…

Studies examining the effect of social isolation on cognitive function typically involve older adults and/or specialist groups (e.g., expeditions). We considered the effects of COVID-19-induced social isolation on cognitive function within a representative sample of the general population. We additionally considered how participants 'shielding'…

This study examined verbal mediation during planning in school-age children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) relative to age- and nonverbal IQ- matched typically developing peers using a dual-task paradigm. Analyses showed no group differences in performance. However, in the condition intended to disrupt verbal mediation, language skills were…

Purpose: Auditory sensory gating is a neural measure of inhibition and is typically measured with a click or tonal stimulus. This electrophysiological study examined if stimulus characteristics and the use of speech stimuli affected auditory sensory gating indices. Method: Auditory event-related potentials were elicited using natural speech,…

Politically oriented "fake news"--false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person--is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by adding a warning label to articles identified as false, but past research has shown mixed evidence…

Post-error cognitive control processes are evident in post-error slowing (PES) and post-error increased accuracy (PIA). A recent theory (Wessel, 2018) proposes that post-error control disrupts not only ongoing motor activity but also current task-set representations, suggesting an interdependence of post-error control and memory. In 2 experiments,…

Several working memory (WM) theories assume a resource sharing between the maintenance of information and its processing, whereas other theories suppose that these 2 functions of WM rely on different pools of resources. Studies that addressed this question by examining whether dual-task costs occur in tasks combining processing and storage have…

Understanding how pre-literate children's language abilities and neural function relate to future reading ability is important for identifying children who may be at-risk for reading problems. Pre-literate children are already proficient users of spoken language and their developing brain networks for language become highly overlapping with brain…

Past work investigating spatial cognition suggests better mental rotation abilities for those who are fluent in a signed language. However, no prior work has assessed whether fluency is needed to achieve this performance benefit or what it may look like on the neurobiological level. We conducted an electroencephalography experiment and assessed…

School psychologists' training, knowledge, and skillsets in school-based consultation can play a key role in supporting beginning teachers, but the consultation research base provides limited information about how beginning teachers' concerns and characteristics relate to consultative practice (Babinski & Rogers 1998; DeForest & Hughes,…

Registers are culturally recognized varieties of language that are associated with situations of use (Biber, Egbert, & Keller, 2020). Variation in frequencies of linguistic forms across registers is thought to be functional for the situations they are associated with; that is, certain language features are more common in one register than…

This dissertation develops a cognitive model describing when children learn to group distinct sound segments (allophones) into abstract equivalence classes (phonemes). The allophones an individual acquires are arbitrary and determined by their particular input, yet are intricately involved in language cognition once learned. The proposed…