Achievement tests are commonly used in education to evaluate students' academic performance and proficiency in specific subject areas. However, there is a major problem that threatens the validity of achievement test scores which is test-taking disengagement. Respondents provide answers that are inconsistent with their true ability level and can…

Starting in April 2025, ACT will introduce enhanced forms of the ACT® test for national online testing, with a full rollout to all paper and online test takers in national, state and district, and international test administrations by Spring 2026. ACT introduced major updates by changing the test lengths and testing times, providing more time per…

Under cognitive load theory, time pressure/urgency-induced arousal is a major contributor to pupil dilation during cognition. However, pupillometric encoding studies have failed to consider the possible role of time pressure/urgency effects, instead often assuming that encoding dilations directly reflect encoding strength. To isolate possible…

The study of socio-cognitive abilities emerged from intelligence research, and their specificity remains controversial until today. In recent years, the psychometric structure of face cognition (FC)--a basic facet of socio-cognitive abilities--was extensively studied. In this review, we summarize and discuss the divergent psychometric structures…

Domain-specific expertise changes the way people perceive, process, and remember information from that domain. This is often observed in visual domains involving skilled searches, such as athletics referees, or professional visual searchers (e.g., security and medical screeners). Although existing research has compared expert to novice performance…

In this article, it is shown how item text can be represented by (a) 113 features quantifying the text's linguistic characteristics, (b) 16 measures of the extent to which an information-retrieval-based automatic question-answering system finds an item challenging, and (c) through dense word representations (word embeddings). Using a random…

Focusing on request sequences, this article explores dynamics of projection and anticipation, enabling participants to produce early responses to requests. In particular, the analyses highlight the importance of multimodal formatting and the specific temporalities of multiple multimodal resources for the emergence of projections and the…

The paper addresses the capabilities and limitations of extrafoveal processing during a categorical visual search. Previous research has established that a target could be identified from the very first or without any saccade, suggesting that extrafoveal perception is necessarily involved. However, the limits in complexity defining the processed…

The present study reported an experiment examining whether both native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) give formulaic sequences (FSs) priority over novel phrases in processing, as the dual route model has postulated. In this experiment, NSs and NNSs were asked to read Japanese versions of semi-transparent restricted collocations…

People tend to underestimate subtraction and overestimate addition outcomes and to associate subtraction with the left side and addition with the right side. These two phenomena are collectively labeled 'operational momentum' (OM) and thought to have their origins in the same mechanism of 'moving attention along the mental number line'. OM in…

Response time data from educational and psychological assessments have become more widely available in recent years. Although much research has been done on response time models, there is large variability between assessments and the factors that may affect response times. On the person's side, familiarity with online environments may largely…

Children's development and education take place in educational buildings with highly complex acoustic scenes, including spatially distributed target speakers, many surrounding distracting sounds, and general background noises. Auditory selective attention, therefore, is a valuable tool to orient oneself, to focus on specific sound sources, and to…

The effects of rewards on executive function (EF) reflect bidirectional interactions among motivational and executive systems that vary with age and temperament. However, methodological limitations hinder understanding of the precise influences of incentives on early EF, including the role of reward sensitivity. In this within-subjects study,…

The picture-word interference paradigm (participants name target pictures while ignoring distractor words) is often used to model the planning processes involved in word production. The participants' naming times are delayed in the presence of a distractor (general interference). The size of this effect depends on the relationship between the…

Considering the mixed nature of reports of flexibility difficulties in autism, we hypothesized that a task that more closely resembles the challenges faced in real life would help to assess these difficulties. Autistic and typically developing adults performed an online Emotional Shifting Task, involving non-explicit unpredictable shifts of…