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…

In the education sector, teachers are often faced with an influx of technology, and various factors affect how and when to use it (perceived usefulness). Various research showed that teachers with high self-efficacy perform better in the classroom, and their students achieve greater gain compared to teachers with low self-efficacy. Additionally,…

In sentence comprehension, negative sentences tend to elicit more processing cost than affirmative sentences. A growing body of work has shown that pragmatic context is an important factor that contributes to negation comprehension cost. The nature of this pragmatic effect, however, is yet to be determined. In 4 behavioral experiments, the current…

It has widely been accepted that aggregating group-level decisions is superior to individual decisions. As compared to individuals, groups tend to show a decision advantage in their response accuracy. However, there has been a lack of research exploring whether group decisions are more efficient than individual decisions with a faster…

How do people come up with humorous ideas? In creative cognition research, exposure to good examples sometimes causes fixation (people get "stuck" on the examples) but other times sparks inspiration (people's responses are more creative). The present research examined the effects of funny and unfunny examples on joke production. A sample…

The presented study examines the question of colour categorization in relation to the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. The study is based on research conducted by Gilbert et al. (2006) and their claim that linguistic colour categorization in a particular language helps colour recognition and speeds the process of colour discrimination for…

This electroencephalography (EEG) study tested the benefits of generative learning and the underlying neural mechanism of these benefits when learning from video lectures. Twenty-six Chinese young adults independently viewed two video lectures in a repeated measures design. Each video lecture was broken into 40 segments, and after each segment,…

When individuals read a narrative text, they construct a mental representation known as a situational model to comprehend the unfolding story. These models require updates at meaningful changes in the story to reflect current information accurately. Existing research highlights the attentional and working memory demands of these updating…

Older adults show a progressive cognitive decline, and although language processing appears to resist advancing age, studies in word retrieval report that elders show important difficulties. Previous research reports that such failures increase from age 70 years, which suggests that during the fourth age word retrieval would exhibit even stronger…

The effects of fluency-based instruction and accuracy-based instruction on contingency adduction were assessed using an alternating treatments design. Stimulus equivalence tasks were used to measure contingency adduction. Stimulus classes were composed of arbitrary visual forms. One treatment condition consisted of teaching fast, fluent responding…

Questioning individuals about future behavior influences the subsequent performance of that behavior. This question-behavior effect may be enhanced when questions include positive self-identity prompts. To evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention in a testing context, we randomly assigned examinees to one of three conditions prior to…