Performance measures, including standardized test scores or cognitive tasks, are commonly conceptualized as stable measures, yet are often unreliable indices of skill. We examine two contextual factors, performance pressure and feedback, that may influence the extent to which individuals demonstrate their cognitive capacity by manipulating…

Despite the lasting interest towards the relationship between intelligence and creativity, comparably less attention is paid to its age-related changes. Our paper considers the organization of fluid intelligence and psychometric indicators of creativity and is based on the experimental data obtained for children aged 11 (n = 99) and for young…

The present research studied the role of the non-executive and executive components of working memory in the detection of phonological, orthographical, and grammatical spelling errors. Before performing error detection tasks, undergraduate participants completed a battery of tasks to evaluate their non-executive (verbal and visuospatial storage)…

The goal of this study was to investigate cognitive style (the visualizer-verbalizer dimension) and cognitive ability (spatial and verbal abilities) in terms of corresponding resource use behavior. The study further examined the potential link between cognitive style and cognitive ability based on observable behavior. A total of 67 university…

Differences exist between engineering and liberal arts students because of their educational backgrounds. Therefore, they solve problems differently. This study examined the brain activation of these two groups of students when they responded to 12 questions of verbal, numerical, or spatial intelligence. A total of 25 engineering and 25 liberal…

Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical…

In two studies we examined the extent to which skilled and less-skilled reasoners of arguments relied on relevance relations (semantic and logical relatedness) between claims and reasons when evaluating arguments. College students, selected as having high or low analytical reasoning skill, evaluated the quality of a set of two sentence arguments…

Lexical access is a core component of word processing. In order to produce or comprehend a word, language users must access word forms in their mental lexicon. However, despite its involvement in both tasks, previous research has often studied lexical access in either production or comprehension alone. Therefore, it is unknown to which extent…

Prior research suggesting that longer bilingual experience benefits inhibitory control and monitoring has been criticized for a lack of control over confounding variables. We addressed this issue by using a propensity-score matching procedure that enabled us to match early and late bilinguals on 18 confounding variables--for example, demographic…

This study investigated how task-based learning (TBL) developed the verbal competence of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) by employing qualitative and quantitative analyses. We compared the impromptu oral presentations on reading texts of 76 intermediate EFL learners given respectively in the beginning and the end of the…

Does solving subtraction problems with negative answers (e.g., 5-14) require different cognitive processes than solving problems with positive answers (e.g., 14-5)? In a dual-task experiment, young adults (N=39) combined subtraction with two working memory tasks, verbal memory and visual-spatial memory. All of the subtraction problems required…

Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were…

The assessment of verbal aggression in adolescent and young adult dating relationships has largely relied on self-report methodology. We investigated whether information on verbal aggression derived from an observational assessment would enhance the prediction of romantic relationship satisfaction and dissolution in a sample of young adult dating…

The current study examined the nature of the processes underlying working memory updating. In 4 experiments using the n-back paradigm, the authors demonstrate that continuous updating of items in working memory prevents strong binding of those items to their contexts in working memory, and hence leads to an increased susceptibility to proactive…

In this study we examine how native language, sex, and college major interact to influence accuracy and preferred strategy when performing mental rotation (MR). Native monolingual Chinese and English speakers rotated 3-D shapes while maintaining a concurrent verbal or spatial memory load. For English speakers, male physical science majors were…