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…

Situations in which the name of a person is perceived as familiar but does not trigger recall of pertinent semantic knowledge are common in daily life. In current connectionist models of person recognition, such "familiar-only" experiences reflect supra-threshold activation at person-identity nodes but subthreshold activation at nodes…

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is a widely studied phenomenon of human memory, but RIF of arithmetic facts remains relatively unexplored. In 2 experiments, we investigated RIF of simple addition facts (2 + 3 = 5) from practice of their multiplication counterparts (2 x 3 = 6). In both experiments, robust RIF expressed in response times occurred…

Although dual-task interference is ubiquitous in a variety of task domains, stop-signal studies suggest that response inhibition is not subject to such interference. Nevertheless, no study has directly examined stop-signal performance in a dual-task setting. In two experiments, stop-signal performance was examined in a psychological refractory…

We investigate short and long-term effects of early childhood education using variation created by a unique policy experiment in British Columbia, Canada. Our findings imply starting Kindergarten one year late substantially reduces the probability of repeating the third grade, and meaningfully increases in tenth grade math and reading scores.…