Articles

Applying math onto mechanisms: mechanistic knowledge is associated with the use of formal mathematical strategies

It is notoriously difficult for people to adaptively apply formal mathematical strategies learned in school to real-world contexts, even when they possess the required mathematical skills. The current study ex...

Authors: Allison S. Liu and Christian D. Schunn

Individual differences predict low prevalence visual search performance

Critical real-world visual search tasks such as radiology and baggage screening rely on the detection of rare targets. When targets are rare, observers search for a relatively short amount of time and have a h...

Authors: Chad Peltier and Mark W. Becker

Making sense of movement in embodied design for mathematics learning

Embodiment perspectives from the cognitive sciences offer a rethinking of the role of sensorimotor activity in human learning, knowing, and reasoning. Educational researchers have been evaluating whether and h...

Authors: Dor Abrahamson and Arthur Bakker

Supporting dynamic change detection: using the right tool for the task

Detecting task-relevant changes in a visual scene is necessary for successfully monitoring and managing dynamic command and control situations. Change blindness—the failure to notice visual changes—is an impor...

Authors: Benoît R. Vallières, Helen M. Hodgetts, François Vachon and Sébastien Tremblay

The perceptual processing of fused multi-spectral imagery

Multi-spectral imagery can enhance decision-making by supplying multiple complementary sources of information. However, overloading an observer with information can deter decision-making. Hence, it is critical...

Authors: Elizabeth L. Fox and Joseph W. Houpt

The evolution of pace in popular movies

Movies have changed dramatically over the last 100 years. Several of these changes in popular English-language filmmaking practice are reflected in patterns of film style as distributed over the length of movi...

Authors: James E. Cutting

“Special needs” is an ineffective euphemism

Although euphemisms are intended to put a more positive spin on the words they replace, some euphemisms are ineffective. Our study examined the effectiveness of a popular euphemism for persons with disabilities,

Authors: Morton Ann Gernsbacher, Adam R. Raimond, M. Theresa Balinghasay and Jilana S. Boston

Age-related differences in the legibility of degraded text

Aging-related changes in the visual system diminish the capacity to perceive the world with the ease and fidelity younger adults are accustomed to. Among many consequences of this, older adults find that text ...

Authors: Benjamin Wolfe, Jonathan Dobres, Anna Kosovicheva, Ruth Rosenholtz and Bryan Reimer

Multiple event monitoring

Suppose you were monitoring a group of people in order to determine if anyone of them did something suspicious (e.g., putting down a bag) or if any two interacted in a suspicious manner (e.g., trading bags). H...

Authors: Chia-Chien Wu and Jeremy M. Wolfe

Comparison versus reminding

Comparison and reminding have both been shown to support learning and transfer. Comparison is thought to support transfer because it allows learners to disregard non-matching features of superficially differen...

Authors: Jonathan G. Tullis and Robert L. Goldstone

Iconic faces are not real faces: enhanced emotion detection and altered neural processing as faces become more iconic

Iconic representations are ubiquitous; they fill children’s cartoons, add humor to newspapers, and bring emotional tone to online communication. Yet, the communicative function they serve remains unaddressed b...

Authors: L. N. Kendall, Quentin Raffaelli, Alan Kingstone and Rebecca M. Todd

Spatial analogies pervade complex relational reasoning: Evidence from spontaneous gestures

How do people think about complex phenomena like the behavior of ecosystems? Here we hypothesize that people reason about such relational systems in part by creating spatial analogies, and we explore this poss...

Authors: Kensy Cooperrider, Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow

Creating visual explanations improves learning

Many topics in science are notoriously difficult for students to learn. Mechanisms and processes outside student experience present particular challenges. While instruction typically involves visualizations, s...

Authors: Eliza Bobek and Barbara Tversky

Interactivity mitigates the impact of working memory depletion on mental arithmetic performance

Doing long sums in the absence of complementary actions or artefacts is a multistep procedure that quickly taxes working memory; congesting the phonological loop further handicaps performance. In the experimen...

Authors: Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, Miroslav Sirota and Gaëlle Vallée-Tourangeau

Mastering algebra retrains the visual system to perceive hierarchical structure in equations

Formal mathematics is a paragon of abstractness. It thus seems natural to assume that the mathematical expert should rely more on symbolic or conceptual processes, and less on perception and action. We argue i...

Authors: Tyler Marghetis, David Landy and Robert L. Goldstone

Design of embodied interfaces for engaging spatial cognition

Aspects of spatial cognition, specifically spatial skills, are strongly correlated with interest and success in STEM courses and STEM-related professions. Because growth in STEM-related industries is expected ...

Authors: Paul G. Clifton, Jack Shen-Kuen Chang, Georgina Yeboah, Alison Doucette, Sanjay Chandrasekharan, Michael Nitsche, Timothy Welsh and Ali Mazalek

Leveling the playing field: Grounding learning with embedded simulations in geoscience

Although desktop simulations can be useful in representing scientific phenomena during inquiry activities, they do not allow students to embody or contextualize the spatial aspects of those phenomena. One lear...

Authors: Allison J. Jaeger, Jennifer Wiley and Thomas Moher

Understanding visual attention in childhood: Insights from a new visual foraging task

A recently developed visual foraging task, involving multiple targets of different types, can provide a rich and dynamic picture of visual attention performance. We measured the foraging performance of 66 chil...

Authors: Inga María Ólafsdóttir, Tómas Kristjánsson, Steinunn Gestsdóttir, Ómar I. Jóhannesson and Árni Kristjánsson

Use-inspired basic research in medical image perception

This journal is dedicated to “use-inspired basic research” where a problem in the world shapes the hypotheses for a study in the laboratory. This brief review presents several examples of “use-inspired basic r...

Authors: Jeremy M. Wolfe

Talking to your car can drive you to distraction

This research examined the impact of in-vehicle information system (IVIS) interactions on the driver’s cognitive workload; 257 subjects participated in a weeklong evaluation of the IVIS interaction in one of t...

Authors: David L. Strayer, Joel M. Cooper, Jonna Turrill, James R. Coleman and Rachel J. Hopman

Looming sounds are perceived as faster than receding sounds

Each year thousands of people are killed by looming motor vehicles. Throughout our evolutionary history looming objects have posed a threat to survival and perceptual systems have evolved unique solutions to c...

Authors: John G. Neuhoff

That’s not what you said the first time: A theoretical account of the relationship between consistency and accuracy of recall

Over multiple response opportunities, recall may be inconsistent. For example, an eyewitness may report information at trial that was not reported during initial questioning—a phenomenon called reminiscence. Such...

Authors: Sarah E. Stanley and Aaron S. Benjamin

Through the Google Glass: The impact of heads-up displays on visual attention

In five experiments, we evaluated how secondary information presented on a heads-up display (HUD) impacts performance of a concurrent visual attention task. To do so, we had participants complete a primary vis...

Authors: Joanna E. Lewis and Mark B. Neider

Relative judgment theory and the mediation of facial recognition: Implications for theories of eyewitness identification

Many in the eyewitness identification community believe that sequential lineups are superior to simultaneous lineups because simultaneous lineups encourage inappropriate choosing due to promoting comparisons a...

Authors: Ryan M. McAdoo and Scott D. Gronlund

Visual search behaviors of association football referees during assessment of foul play situations

It is well reported that expert athletes have refined perceptual-cognitive skills and fixate on more informative areas during representative tasks. These perceptual-cognitive skills are also crucial to perform...

Authors: Jochim Spitz, Koen Put, Johan Wagemans, A. Mark Williams and Werner F. Helsen

ROC curve analyses of eyewitness identification decisions: An analysis of the recent debate

How should the accuracy of eyewitness identification decisions be measured, so that best practices for identification can be determined? This fundamental question is under intense debate. One side advocates fo...

Authors: Caren M. Rotello and Tina Chen

Visual completion from 2D cross-sections: Implications for visual theory and STEM education and practice

Accurately inferring three-dimensional (3D) structure from only a cross-section through that structure is not possible. However, many observers seem to be unaware of this fact. We present evidence for a 3D amo...

Authors: Kristin Michod Gagnier and Thomas F. Shipley

Men’s perceptions of women’s sexual interest: Effects of environmental context, sexual attitudes, and women’s characteristics

Men’s perceptions of women’s sexual interest were studied in a sample of 250 male undergraduates, who rated 173 full-body photos of women differing in expressed cues of sexual interest, attractiveness, provoca...

Authors: Teresa A. Treat, Hannah Hinkel, Jodi R. Smith and Richard J. Viken

Seeing the unseen? Illusory causal filling in FIFA referees, players, and novices

Humans often falsely report having seen a causal link between two dynamic scenes if the second scene depicts a valid logical consequence of the initial scene. As an example, a video clip shows someone kicking ...

Authors: Alisa Brockhoff, Markus Huff, Annika Maurer and Frank Papenmeier

How to optimize switch virtual keyboards to trade off speed and accuracy

In some circumstances, people interact with a virtual keyboard by triggering a binary switch to guide a moving cursor to target characters or items. Such switch keyboards are commonly used by patients with sev...

Authors: Xiao Zhang, Kan Fang and Gregory Francis

Bayesian reasoning in residents’ preliminary diagnoses

Whether and when humans in general, and physicians in particular, use their beliefs about base rates in Bayesian reasoning tasks is a long-standing question. Unfortunately, previous research on whether doctors...

Authors: Benjamin Margolin Rottman, Micah T. Prochaska and Roderick Corro Deaño

From hands to minds: Gestures promote understanding

Gestures serve many roles in communication, learning and understanding both for those who view them and those who create them. Gestures are especially effective when they bear resemblance to the thought they r...

Authors: Seokmin Kang and Barbara Tversky

On the learning benefits of confidence-weighted testing

Taking multiple-choice practice tests with competitive incorrect alternatives can enhance performance on related but different questions appearing on a later cued-recall test (Little et al., Psychol Sci 23:133...

Authors: Erin M. Sparck, Elizabeth Ligon Bjork and Robert A. Bjork

Learning to interpret topographic maps: Understanding layered spatial information

Novices struggle to interpret maps that show information about continuous dimensions (typically latitude and longitude) layered with information that is inherently continuous but segmented categorically. An ex...

Authors: Kinnari Atit, Steven M. Weisberg, Nora S. Newcombe and Thomas F. Shipley

Rethinking the basic-applied dichotomy

Authors: Jeremy M. Wolfe