Teachers use remote labs and simulations to augment or even replace hands-on science learning. We compared undergraduate students' experiences with a remote lab and a simulation to investigate beliefs about and learning from the interactions. Although learning occurred in both groups, students were more deeply engaged while performing the remote…

In 2008, nearly 31% of vehicle fatalities were related to failure to adhere to safe vehicle speeds (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [NHTSA], 2009). The current study evaluated the effect of a rectangular rapid-flashing beacon (RRFB) triggered by excessive speed on vehicle speed using a combined alternating treatments and reversal…

Categories underlie a variety of functions beyond just classification, including inference and explanation. To classify, people need to distinguish between categories, but other functions rely on within-category information (things true of a particular category, independent of others). Despite the need for both types of knowledge, recent work…

Many communicative situations present interlocutors with the opportunity to use multiple modalities to establish shared perspectives on conversational referents, a process known as grounding. In the current study, we use a card-matching task to examine how conversational grounding in younger and older adults is influenced both by direct visual…

Three self-paced reading experiments examined the effect of context on interpreting subsequent sentences and in the difficulty of revising initial misinterpretations of subsequent temporarily ambiguous sentences. Target sentences containing noun phrase/sentence (NP/S) coordination ambiguities were preceded by contexts that either did or did not…

The authors explore the role of comparison in improving graph fluency. The ability to use graphs fluently is crucial for STEM achievement, but graphs are challenging to interpret and produce because they often involve integration of multiple variables, continuous change in variables over time, and omission of certain details in order to highlight…

An individual over age 18 can purchase a hearing aid online or through mail order if they sign a waiver declining a medical evaluation, while those under 18 are required to be seen by a physician to obtain medical consent. However, in many states there is nothing to prevent a parent or caregiver from purchasing hearing aids for their child from a…

Color and intensity coding provide perceptual cues to segregate categories of objects within a visual display, allowing operators to search more efficiently for needed information. Even within a perceptually distinct subset of display elements, however, it may often be useful to prioritize items representing urgent or task-critical information.…

Automated diagnostic aids prone to false alarms often produce poorer human performance in signal detection tasks than equally reliable miss-prone aids. However, it is not yet clear whether this is attributable to differences in the perceptual salience of the automated aids' misses and false alarms or is the result of inherent differences in…

Many theories predict the presence of interactive effects involving information represented by distinct cognitive processes in speech production. There is considerably less agreement regarding the precise cognitive mechanisms that underlie these interactive effects. For example, are they driven by purely production-internal mechanisms (e.g., Dell,…

The expression of expert motor skills typically involves learning to perform a precisely timed sequence of movements. Research examining incidental sequence learning has relied on a perceptually cued task that gives participants exposure to repeating motor sequences but does not require timing of responses for accuracy. In the 1st experiment, a…

In 2 experiments, we examined whether the stimulus equivalence instructional paradigm could be used to teach relations among names, definitions, causes, and common treatments for disabilities using a selection-based intraverbal training format. Participants were pre- and posttested on vocal intraverbal relations and were trained using…

Research on retrieval-induced forgetting has shown that retrieval can cause the forgetting of related or competing items in memory (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). In the present research, we examined whether an analogous phenomenon occurs in the context of creative problem solving. Using the Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick, 1962), we…

Recent laboratory and field experiments have shown the inability of existing oscillatory flow ripple predictors to accurately predict both ripple size and planform geometry. However, at this time, only partial adaptations of these predictors have been proposed in the literature to account for the observed discrepancies with experimental data…

This study assessed whether and how self-explanation reading training, provided by iSTART (Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking), improves the effectiveness of comprehension processes. iSTART teaches students how to self-explain and which strategies will most effectively aid comprehension from moment-to-moment. We used…