Measures of human efficiency under increases in mental workload or attentional limitations are vital in studying human perception, cognition, and action. Assays of efficiency as workload changes have typically been confined to either reaction times (RTs) or accuracy alone. Within the realm of RTs, a nonparametric measure called the "workload…

We describe a classroom exercise to allow students to explore foraging strategies in higher vertebrates. The exercise includes an initial interactive session in which students act as predators and are guided through foraging simulations, and a subsequent student-led session where classmates are employed as experimental subjects. Students rated the…

Research on the strategic regulation of memory accuracy has focused primarily on monitoring and control processes used to edit out incorrect information after it is retrieved (back-end control). Recent studies, however, suggest that rememberers also enhance accuracy by preventing the retrieval of incorrect information in the first place (front-end…

Research has shown that consistently right-handed individuals have poorer memory than do inconsistently right- or left-handed individuals under baseline conditions but more reliably exhibit enhanced memory retrieval after making a series of saccadic eye movements. From this it could be that consistent versus inconsistent handedness, regardless of…

In many theories, forgetting is closely linked to the passage of time. In the present experiments, recall in a short-term memory task was less accurate when the retention interval included a difficult arithmetic addition task, compared with an easy task. In a novel condition, the interfering task was switched from hard to easy partway through the…

The slope of the z-transformed receiver-operating characteristic (zROC) in recognition memory experiments is usually less than 1, which has long been interpreted to mean that the variance of the target distribution is greater than the variance of the lure distribution. The greater variance of the target distribution could arise because the…

Traditional practical classes in many countries are being rationalised to reduce costs. The challenge for university educators is to provide students with the opportunity to reinforce theoretical concepts by running something other than a traditional practical program. One alternative is to replace wet labs with comparable computer simulations.…

In daily life, students are allowed to use words such as "more," "some," or "increase-decrease" to describe the relationship between two events. In science, concise description is necessary, which requires the contribution of math. In the summer component of the Science Research Institute program, students integrated…

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…

When paying attention to a feature (e.g., red), no attentional advantage is gained in perceiving items with this feature in very brief displays. Therefore, feature-based attention seems to be slow. In previous feature-based attention studies, attention has often been measured as the difference in performance in a secondary task. In our recent work…

This experiment investigated whether individual differences in written language proficiency among university students predict the early stages of lexical retrieval tapped by the masked form priming lexical decision task. To separate the contributions of sublexical facilitation and lexical competition to masked form priming, the effects of prime…

Describing a face in words can either hinder or help subsequent face recognition. Here, the authors examined the relationship between the benefit from verbally describing a series of faces and the same-race advantage (SRA) whereby people are better at recognizing unfamiliar faces from their own race as compared with those from other races.…

The purpose of this article is to elaborate Cottrill et al.'s (1996) conceptual framework of limit, an explanatory model of how students might come to understand the limit concept. Drawing on a retrospective analysis of 2 teaching experiments, we propose 2 theoretical constructs to account for the students' success in formulating and understanding…

Socratic dialogue-inducing (SDI) labs are based on Arnold Arons' half-century of ethnographic research, listening carefully to students' responses to probing Socratic questions on physics, science, and ways of thinking, and culminating in his landmark "Teaching Introductory Physics." They utilize "interactive engagement" methods and are designed,…

Tests, as learning events, can enhance subsequent recall more than do additional study opportunities, even without feedback. Such advantages of testing tend to appear, however, only at long retention intervals and/or when criterion tests stress recall, rather than recognition, processes. We propose that the interaction of the benefits of testing…