Multitasking impedes learning and performance in the short-term and may affect long-term memory and retention. The implications of these findings make it critical that educators and parents impress upon students the need to focus and reduce extraneous stimuli while studying or reading. Course-based quizzes and tests can be used for more than…

In the field of diagnostic reasoning, it has been argued that memory activation can provide the reasoner with a subset of possible explanations from memory that are highly adaptive for the task at hand. However, few studies have experimentally tested this assumption. Even less empirical and theoretical work has investigated how newly incoming…

We report two experiments that investigated the regulation of memory accuracy with a new regulatory mechanism: the plurality option. This mechanism is closely related to the grain-size option but involves control over the number of alternatives contained in an answer rather than the quantitative boundaries of a single answer. Participants were…

Event-based prospective memory (PM) is a multi-component process that requires remembering the delayed execution of an intended action in response to a pre-specified PM cue, while being actively engaged in an ongoing task. Some neuroimaging studies have suggested that both prefrontal and parietal areas are involved in the maintenance and…

This study investigated the effect of isoflavone aglycone (IA) on the learning and memory performance of senescence-accelerated mice, and explored its neural protective mechanism. Results showed that SAM-P/8 senescence-accelerated mice treated with IA performed significantly better in the Y-maze cognitive test than the no treatment control (P less…

Long-term potentiation (LTP) is an important process underlying learning and memory in the brain. At CA3-CA1 synapses in the hippocampus, three discrete forms of LTP (LTP1, 2, and 3) can be differentiated on the basis of maintenance and induction mechanisms. However, the relative roles of pre- and post-synaptic expression mechanisms in LTP1, 2,…

In the present study, items pre-exposed in a familiarization series were included in a list discrimination task to manipulate memory strength. At test, participants were required to discriminate strong targets and strong lures from weak targets and new lures. This resulted in a concordant pattern of increased "old" responses to strong targets and…

Money's ability to enhance memory has received increased attention in recent research. However, previous studies have not directly addressed the time-dependent nature of monetary effects on memory, which are suggested to exist by research in cognitive neuroscience, and the possible detrimental effects of monetary rewards on learning interesting…

Cognitive and linguistic components related to spelling and writing in English as a second language (ESL) and native-English speaking (EL1) third graders were examined. ESL and EL1 children performed similarly on rapid naming, phonological awareness (PA), verbal short-term and working memory, reading fluency, single-word spelling, text spelling,…

The current study employed a meta-analytic approach to investigate the relative importance of component reading skills to reading comprehension in struggling adult readers. A total of 10 component skills were consistently identified across 16 independent studies and 2,707 participants. Random effects models generated 76 predictor-reading…

The main purpose of this study was to examine possible gender differences in how junior high school students integrate printed texts and diagrams while solving science problems. We proposed the response style hypothesis and the spatial working memory hypothesis to explain possible gender differences in the integration process. Eye-tracking…

Cross-cultural research on children's theory of mind (ToM) understanding has raised questions about its developmental sequence and relationship with executive function (EF). The current study examined how ToM develops (using the tasks from Wellman & Liu, 2004) in relation to 2 EF skills (conflict inhibition, working memory) in 997 Chinese…

This study extends the evidence for implicit second language (L2) learning, which comes largely from (semi-)artificial language research, to German. Upper-intermediate L2 German learners were flooded with spoken exemplars of a difficult morphological structure, namely strong, vowel-changing verbs. Toward the end of exposure, the mandatory vowel…

In five experiments, we consistently found that items included in summaries were better remembered than items omitted from summaries. We did not, however, find evidence that summary writing was better than merely restudying the text. These patterns held with shorter and longer texts, when the text was present or absent during the summary writing,…

Mind wandering--mentation unrelated to one's current activity and surroundings--is a ubiquitous phenomenon, but seemingly competing ideas have been proposed regarding its relation to executive cognitive processes. The control-failure hypothesis postulates that executive processes prevent mind wandering, whereas the global availability hypothesis…