An important question regards how we use environmental boundaries to anchor spatial representations during navigation. Behavioral and neurophysiological models appear to provide conflicting predictions, and this question has been difficult to answer because of technical challenges with testing navigation in novel, large-scale, realistic spatial…

Four experiments investigated the mnemonic effects of generating survival situations. People were given target words and asked to generate survival situations involving that stimulus (e.g., DOOR: "I'm in a house that's on fire, and I can escape through the door"). No constraints were placed on the generation process, other than that it…

This study investigated the effects of task relevance instructions and topic beliefs on reading processes and memory for belief-related text. Undergraduates received task instructions (focus on arguments for vs. against) before reading a dual-position text. In Experiment 1 (n = 88), a reading time methodology showed no differences in reading time…

Recent upgrades to cognitive load theory suggest that evolutionary processes have shaped the way that working memory processes cultural and social information. According to evolutionarily educational psychologists, some forms of information are processed with lower working memory loads than other forms. The former are evolutionarily salient and…

Since the last century, we have witnessed a steady evolution of advertising techniques in an effort to adapt to the new social context in the market. As a strategic resource, Neuroscience brings a new perspective by allowing you to explore those difficult or verbally unconscious motives behind consumer behaviours. The present work aims to discover…

Concerning the evolution of our mind, it is of core interest to understand how high-level cognitive functions are embedded within low-level cognitive functions. While the grounding of meaning units such as content words and sentence has been widely investigated, little is known about logical cognitive operations and their association with…

Rating the relevance of words for the imagined situation of being stranded in the grasslands without survival material leads to exceptionally good memory for these words. This survival processing effect has received much attention because it promises to elucidate the evolutionary foundations of memory. However, the proximate mechanisms of the…

"'To Make History the Living Force': The Professionalization of Public History, 1880- 2000" challenges how we often distinguish public history education from "traditional" history education and shows how debates about public history teaching reveal a larger and more dynamic story about all historians' professional identity,…

Adopting an evolutionary approach to substantiate major characteristics of human cognitive architecture has been one of the major recent developments in cognitive load theory. According to this approach, human cognitive architecture is a natural information processing system which can be described by five general principles. This paper attempts to…

Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience behavioural and learning problems at home and at school, as well as a lack of self-control in their lives. We can take advantage of the evolution of new technologies to develop applications with the aim of enhancing and stimulating the learning process of children with ADHD.…

The authors examined the evolution of cognitive and emotional responses to terror risks for a nationally representative sample of Americans between late 2001 and late 2002. Respondents' risk judgments changed in ways consistent with their reported personal experiences. However, they did not recognize these changes, producing hindsight bias in…

The acquisition of reading skills is known to rely on early phonological abilities, but only a few studies have investigated the independent contribution of the different steps involved in phonological processing. This 1-year longitudinal study, spanning the initial year of reading instruction, aimed at specifying the development of phonological…

The evolution of patient engagement in patient-centered care has led to the development of online personal health record (PHR) systems, which are accessed through use of a patient portal. Researchers have found that older adults are among those yet to adopt its use. The UTAUT2 factors are used to help understand an individual's intention to use…

This work proposes a new approach for measuring long-term conceptual knowledge based on the after-instruction evolution of students' answers to a research-based, multiple-choice, single-response test. The method allows for a quantitative determination of the fraction of students that, after instruction, attain long-lasting and temporary learnings,…

This volume presents feature articles and other information about institutional research and the North East Association for Institutional Research (NEAIR). The four feature articles are intended to provide a comprehensive guide to doing effective institutional research. These articles are: (1) "On the Nature of Institutional Research and the…