Context-based learning (CBL) environments are widely used in science education to create authentic learning opportunities. Contexts can be authentic through their relation to everyday life, to uncommon scientific phenomena, or to the chemical laboratory. Previous research revealed that students choose contexts that are authentic in different ways…

Eye-tracking (ET) method provides a promising channel for educational researchers to connect learning outcomes to cognitive processes. The main principle of ET is that our gaze and our focus of attention are connected. Due to the advent of digital technologies, eye tracking studies are increasingly growing in different fields and in mathematics…

Several working memory (WM) theories assume a resource sharing between the maintenance of information and its processing, whereas other theories suppose that these 2 functions of WM rely on different pools of resources. Studies that addressed this question by examining whether dual-task costs occur in tasks combining processing and storage have…

Inconsistent data are available on mental rotation performance in neurotypicals with high autistic-like traits. Here, we tested whether global-local visual processing abilities mediate the influence of specific autistic-like trait domains (social skill, attention switching, attention-to-detail, communication, and imagination) on mental rotation.…

Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we used a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer's memory for a search…

Background: Collaborative learning is a widely used approach where students gather in small groups to solve problems and develop skills. However, grouping students is not always effective, and it may be necessary to provide task-specific collaborative experiences to optimize their interactions for subsequent learning tasks. Aims: To test this…

Curiosity states benefit memory for target information, but also incidental information presented during curiosity states. However, it is not known whether incidental curiosity-enhanced memory depends on when incidental information during curiosity states is encountered. Here, participants incidentally encoded unrelated face images at different…

Human operators often experience large fluctuations in cognitive workload over seconds timescales that can lead to sub-optimal performance, ranging from overload to neglect. Adaptive automation could potentially address this issue, but to do so it needs to be aware of real-time changes in operators' spare cognitive capacity, so it can provide help…

We investigated whether the developmental emergence of episodic future thinking (EFT) is associated with performance on a type of delay of gratification task: a delay choice task that involved choosing between a small reward now or a larger reward the next day. In Study 1, 4- to 5-year-olds' (N = 99) EFT as measured by a tool saving task was…

This study is aimed to identify the effects of task complexity on first language (L1) use and the functions it may serve when two groups of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) work on collaborative tasks. Twenty-four pairs of Chinese EFL learners from two universities were assigned to a lower-proficiency and a higher-proficiency group,…

The Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a word association retrieval task that consists of a series of problems, each with three seemingly unrelated prompt words. The subject is asked to produce a single word that is related to all three prompt words. In this paper, we provide support for a theory in which the RAT assesses a person's ability to…

Recent findings have shown that language plays an important role in the acquisition of novel cognitive tasks (van 't Wout & Jarrold, 2020). The current study sought to elucidate the factors that influence the contribution of language to novel task learning, focusing specifically on the role of task complexity (defined by the number of…

Working memory and recognition memory develop across adolescence, but the relationship between them is not fully understood. We investigated associations between n-back task performance and subsequent recognition memory in a community sample (8-30 yr, n = 150) using tasks from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD Study) to…

This study investigated the relationship between the level of cognitive-linguistic difficulty of task input and the size of the cross-linguistic relationship for academic listening comprehension in emergent bilinguals. It was theoretically motivated by task-dependent cross-linguistic interaction frameworks. We hypothesized that task item sets that…

Enrichment in rodents affects brain structure, improves behavioral performance, and is neuroprotective. Similarly, in humans, according to the cognitive reserve concept, enriched experience is functionally protective against neuropathology. Despite this parallel, the ability to translate rodent studies to human clinical situations is limited. This…