High phonological neighborhood density has been associated with both advantages and disadvantages in early word learning. High density may support the formation and fine-tuning of new word sound memories--a process termed lexical configuration (e.g., Storkel, 2004). However, new high-density words are also more likely to be misunderstood as…

In learning, errors are ubiquitous and inevitable. As these errors may signal otherwise latent cognitive processes, tutors--and students alike--can greatly benefit from the information they provide. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate the Systematic Error Tracing (SET) model that identifies the possible causes of systematically observed…

Feedback on student answers and even during intermediate steps in their solutions to open-ended questions is an important element in math education. Such feedback can help students correct their errors and ultimately lead to improved learning outcomes. Most existing approaches for automated student solution analysis and feedback require manually…

Young children sometimes attempt an action on an object, which is inappropriate because of the object size--they make scale errors. Existing theories suggest that scale errors may result from immaturities in children's action planning system, which might be overpowered by increased complexity of object representations or developing teleofunctional…

Conceptual modeling of databases is a complex cognitive activity, particularly for novice database designers. The current research empirically tests a new pedagogy for this activity. It examines an instructional approach that stresses visualizing gradual transitions between levels of abstraction in different hierarchic levels of a relational…

To confirm the role of social factors in mediating cognitive processes, this systematic replication study seeks to extend the generalizability of an exploratory study (McDonough, Crowther, Kielstra & Trofimovich 2015) that reported a positive association between eye gaze and second language (L2) speakers' responses to recasts. For this…

Stimuli encoded shortly before an aversive event are typically well remembered. Traditionally, this emotional memory enhancement has been attributed to beneficial effects of physiological arousal on memory formation. Here, we proposed an additional mechanism and tested whether memory formation is driven by the unpredictable nature of aversive…

The present study set out to explore the locus of the poorly understood but frequently reported and comparatively large practice effect in sustained attention tests. Drawing on a recently proposed process model of sustained attention tests, several cognitive tasks were administered twice in order to examine which specific component of test…

Research indicates that learning from erroneous examples (EE) is superior to correct examples because errors may provide students with a stimulus to spontaneously produce more self-explanations, leading to better learning outcomes. However, because most studies were conducted in individual settings, it remains an open question whether the…

One influential model of recognition posits two underlying memory processes: recollection, which is detailed but relatively slow, and familiarity, which is quick but lacks detail. Most of the evidence for this dual-process model in nonhumans has come from analyses of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves in rats, but whether ROC analyses…

Experiments were conducted to test a modern exemplar-familiarity model on its ability to account for both short-term and long-term probe recognition within the same memory-search paradigm. Also, making connections to the literature on attention and visual search, the model was used to interpret differences in probe-recognition performance across…

The present study investigated how children learn that some verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground-locative construction (e.g., "Lisa poured water into the cup"; "*Lisa poured the cup with water"), with some showing the opposite pattern (e.g., "*Bart filled water into the cup"; "Bart filled the cup with water"), and others…

The present research demonstrates that very brief variations in affect, being around 1 s in length and changing from trial to trial independently from semantic relatedness of primes and targets, modulate the amount of semantic priming. Implementing consonant and dissonant chords (Experiments 1 and 5), naturalistic sounds (Experiment 2), and visual…

The order of problems presented to students is an important variable that affects learning effectiveness. Previous studies have shown that solving problems in a blocked order, in which all problems of one type are completed before the student is switched to the next problem type, results in less effective performance than does solving the problems…

A quantum probability model is introduced and used to explain human probability judgment errors including the conjunction and disjunction fallacies, averaging effects, unpacking effects, and order effects on inference. On the one hand, quantum theory is similar to other categorization and memory models of cognition in that it relies on vector…