The ability to infer the emotional states of others is central to our everyday interactions. These inferences can be drawn from several different sources of information occurring simultaneously in the communication situation. Based on previous studies revealing that children pay more heed to situational context than to emotional prosody when…

Recent policy suggestions from the European Community underlined the importance of "efficiency" and "equity" in the provision of education while, at the same time, the European countries are required to provide their educational services by minimizing the amount of public money devoted to them. In this article, an empirical…

We examined processing of written irony by recording readers' eye movements while they read target phrases embedded either in ironic or non-ironic story context. After reading each story, participants responded to a text memory question and an inference question tapping into the understanding of the meaning of the target phrase. The results of…

Developing critical thinking skills is a common goal of an undergraduate physics curriculum. How do students make sense of evidence and what do they do with it? In this study, we evaluated students' critical thinking behaviors through their written notebooks in an introductory physics laboratory course. We compared student behaviors in the…

This study compared models of assessment structure for achieving differentiation across the range of examinee attainment in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examination taken by 16-year-olds in England. The focus was on the "adjacent levels" model, where papers are targeted at three specific non-overlapping ranges of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the needs and aspirations of international students studying at a comprehensive university campus in the USA in comparison to domestic students represented by factors that drive students' college choice. Design/methodology/approach: The study opted for a survey design through questionnaire and…

People frequently continue to use inaccurate information in their reasoning even after a credible retraction has been presented. This phenomenon is often referred to as the continued influence effect of misinformation. The repetition of the original misconception within a retraction could contribute to this phenomenon, as it could inadvertently…

Over the past 45 years, the construct of syntactic sophistication has been assessed in L2 writing using what Bulté and Housen (2012) refer to as absolute complexity (Lu, 2011; Ortega, 2003; Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, & Kim, 1998). However, it has been argued that making inferences about learners based on absolute complexity indices (e.g., mean…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to examine the degree to which changes had occurred in the ethnic/racial diversity of first-time in college students who were enrolled full-time in Texas community colleges. Specifically, the ethnic/racial diversity changes (i.e., Asian, White, Hispanic, and Black) of first-time in…

How can humans acquire relational representations that enable analogical inference and other forms of high-level reasoning? Using comparative relations as a model domain, we explore the possibility that bottom-up learning mechanisms applied to objects coded as feature vectors can yield representations of relations sufficient to solve analogy…

Statistical inference is problematic in the common situation in meta-analysis where the random effects model is fitted to just a handful of studies. In particular, the asymptotic theory of maximum likelihood provides a poor approximation, and Bayesian methods are sensitive to the prior specification. Hence, less efficient, but easily computed and…

Introduction: This paper explains the development and testing of a novel paper-and-pencil measure designed to support inferences of five epistemological belief dimensions based on three forms of evidence. The three evidence types are anticipated to converge at a single theoretical level, permitting better-supported inferences than existing survey…

Judea Pearl won the 2010 Rumelhart Prize in computational cognitive science due to his seminal contributions to the development of Bayes nets and causal Bayes nets, frameworks that are central to multiple domains of the computational study of mind. At the heart of the causal Bayes nets formalism is the notion of a counterfactual, a representation…

Goal contagion occurs when a perceiver interacts with a partner whose behavior implies he/she is pursuing a particular goal and the perceiver accurately infers and subsequently pursues the partner's goal. Goal contagion was assessed in conversations between unacquainted individuals. In 2 experiments, the ways in which goal specificity, inference…

This study investigates the ERP components associated with the processing of words that are critical to generating and rejecting deductive conditional Modus Ponens arguments ("If P then Q; P//"Therefore, "Q"). The generation of a logical inference is investigated by placing a verb in the minor premise that matches the one used in the antecedent of…