We examined potentially selective offloading decisions when the external store has a limited capacity and how the surprising unavailability of offloaded information influences subsequent offloading decision-making and memory. In three experiments, learners were presented with to-be-remembered words paired with point values counting towards their…

Although cognitive offloading, or the use of physical action to reduce internal cognitive demands, is a commonly used strategy in everyday life, relatively little is known about the conditions that encourage offloading and the memorial consequences of different offloading strategies for performance. Much of the extant work in this domain has…

When we monitor our learning, often measured via judgments of learning (JOLs), this metacognitive process can change what is remembered. For example, prior work has demonstrated that making JOLs enhances memory for related, but not unrelated, word pairs in younger adults. In the current study, we examined potential age-related differences in…

People often need to update representations of information upon discovering them to be incorrect, a process that can be interrupted by competing cognitive demands. Because anxiety and stress can impair cognitive performance, we tested whether looming threat can similarly interfere with the process of updating representations of a statement's…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to complete a task at the appropriate moment in the future. Past research has found reminders can improve PM performance in both laboratory and naturalistic settings, but few projects have examined the circumstances when and what types of reminders are most beneficial. Three experiments in…

Learning environments are undergoing a dynamic alteration with the robust impact of technological transformation. Therefore, adapting to dynamic learning settings has now become a key criterion for academic performance. The factors that we know have a detrimental effect on learners' academic performance and cognitive capacity are related to…

This literature review explores the impact of music on tonal language learning, with a focus on Mandarin Chinese. Utilising searches across major databases such as ERIC (EBSCO), ProQuest Central, Google Scholar, and Web of Science from 2005 to 2024, we selected relevant peer-reviewed English-language articles examining music's role in aiding tone…

The relationship between working memory (WM) and language processing has been extensively investigated in cognitive research. Previous studies mostly obtain evidence from measuring the involvement of WM in complex syntactic structures reported with well-established processing asymmetry, e.g., relative clauses (RCs) in English. Rarely considered is…

Under cognitive load theory, time pressure/urgency-induced arousal is a major contributor to pupil dilation during cognition. However, pupillometric encoding studies have failed to consider the possible role of time pressure/urgency effects, instead often assuming that encoding dilations directly reflect encoding strength. To isolate possible…

Research on prospective memory has paid no attention to the way in which the intentions to be remembered are framed. In two studies on time-based prospective memory, participants had to remember multiple delayed intentions framed as time rules (i.e., respond every 7 min, every 10 min) or as a series of corresponding instances (i.e., respond at…

A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation-based and memory-based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence…

Reports on differences between remembering the past and imagining the future have led to the hypothesis that constructing future events is a more cognitively demanding process. However, factors that influence these increased demands, such as whether the event has been previously constructed and the types of details comprising the event, have…

Cognitive load theory provides instructional recommendations based on our knowledge of human cognition. Evolutionary psychology is used to assume that knowledge should be divided into biologically primary information that we have specifically evolved to acquire and biologically secondary information that we have not specifically evolved to…

The content, skills, and understandings students need to learn today are as diverse, complex, and multidimensional as the students in our classrooms. How can educators best create the learning experiences students need to truly learn? "How Learning Works: A Playbook" unpacks the science of how students learn and translates that knowledge…

Since the beginning of the development of massive open online courses (MOOCs), these and other online learning environments have been considered as potential partial solutions to some persistent problems in higher education. These learning environments, while they have great educational value, have not been as effective as they could be, because…