In educational settings, students read for multiple purposes, such as preparing for an exam, practicing a new reading strategy, writing an essay, and more. Because reading is a goal-directed activity, providing students with task instructions can help them create goals for reading and develop a plan to meet these goals. In the current experiment,…

Procedural learning and automatization have widely been studied in behavioral psychology and typically involves a rapid improvement, followed by a plateau in performance throughout repeated training. More recently, brain imaging studies have implicated frontal-striatal brain circuits in skill learning. However, it is largely unknown whether…

The effect of instructor clarity on student learning has been explained using cognitive load theory, which stipulates that students have limited mental resources to devote to activities pertaining to learning. To date, the effect of teacher clarity on students' cognitive burden has been studied in reference to students' extraneous cognitive load…

Spatial memory is important for supporting the successful completion of everyday activities and is a particularly vulnerable domain in late life. Grouping items together in memory, or chunking, can improve spatial memory performance. In memory for desktop scale spaces and well-learned large-scale environments, error patterns suggest that…

Statistical learning enables humans to involuntarily process and utilize different kinds of patterns from the environment. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying the simultaneous acquisition of multiple regularities from different perceptual modalities remain unclear. A novel multidimensional serial reaction time task was developed to test…

Self-regulated learning depends on task difficulty and on learners' resources and cognitive load, as described by an inverted U-shaped relationship in Seufert's (2018) model: for easy tasks, resources are high and load is low, so there is no need to regulate, whereas for difficult tasks, load is too high and resources are too low to regulate. Only…

Many gifted students fail to be diagnosed, preventing them from receiving an education that is adapted to their characteristics, with activities that challenge their minds. Mathematics is one of the subjects in which they can demonstrate talent, where they often exhibit high skills in solving problems, handling numbers and performing spatial…

To date, extensive work has been devoted to incorporating computational thinking in K-12 education. Recognizing students' computational thinking stages in game-based learning environments is essential to capture unproductive learning and provide appropriate scaffolding. However, few reliable and valid computational thinking measures have been…

Audio description (AD) plays a crucial role in making audiovisual media accessible to people with a visual impairment, enhancing their experience and understanding. This study employs an event segmentation task to examine how people without sight perceive and segment narrative events in films with AD, compared to sighted viewers without AD. Two AD…

The effects of acute stress on memory encoding are complex. Recent work has suggested that both the delay between stress and encoding and the relevance of the information learned to the stressor may modulate the effects of stress on memory encoding, but the relative contribution of each of these two factors is unclear. Therefore, in the present…

Cognitive control operates via two distinct mechanisms, proactive and reactive control. These control states are engaged differentially, depending on a number of within-subject factors, but also between-group variables. While research has begun to explore if shifts in control can be experimentally modulated, little is known about whether context…

Episodic retrieval plays a functional-adaptive role in supporting divergent creative thinking, the ability to creatively combine different pieces of information. However, the same constructive memory process that provides this benefit can also lead to memory errors. Prior behavioral work has shown that there is a positive correlation between the…

There are plentiful online programming resources that enable learners to develop an understanding of conceptual knowledge and practical implementation. However, learners, especially novices, often experience difficulties locating the required information to solve the programming problems. Differ from natural language in syntax and convention,…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with cognitive dysfunctions, including mental time travel (MTT). However, findings on diminished MTT ability may be confounded by a number of factors, including the individuals' language ability, factors related to the MTT task and the demographic factors of participants. The present study provided a…

Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (VST) has been increasingly utilised as an effective framework to account for the role of emotions in learning and development. Yet, within VST, emotion has neither been systemically theorised nor investigated. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a theoretical discussion of Vygotsky's perspective on…