"Narrative transportation" is a state of total immersion that arises when one becomes engaged in a story. In Cohen et al. (2015), participants viewed a suspenseful film either with order of scenes intact or scrambled (out of chronological order). Participants had to remember to raise their hand every time they heard a film character say…

Developing attention skills allow children to parse their complex world by orienting to a subset of especially salient or meaningful inputs. Infants and children are biased to orient to faces and have difficulty ignoring faces when they appear as distractors. Although these past findings suggest that faces are more salient than nonsocial stimuli,…

The objective of this study is to determine whether attention toward fear messages is affected by variation in the controllability of the associated danger. There is no consensus regarding the effectiveness of fear appeals in driving adaptive behaviour, and it may be the case that threat messages fail to capture attention if the associated danger…

Previous studies on value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) have demonstrated that the uncertainty of reward value modulates attentional allocation via associative learning. However, it is unclear whether such attentional exploration is executed based on the amount of potential reward information available for refining value prediction or the…

Background: Instructor enthusiasm has been shown to enhance a range of positive student outcomes including recall, but the underlying mechanisms for the favourable effects of teacher enthusiasm are still largely unknown. Aims: We hypothesized that attention paid to the instructor is one mechanism and that the positive effects of enthusiasm will…

Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are increasingly being implemented in school settings for children and adolescents. Although positive outcomes have been documented for youth, less is known about the constructs of mindfulness (e.g., intention, attention, awareness, nonjudgement) that contribute to positive outcomes or how they are measured.…

In the cocktail party phenomenon, participants cannot attend to more than 1 stream of information, but sometimes detect their own name being presented in the irrelevant message during a selective listening task. Here we present a preregistered replication of the phenomenon, in which we also tested whether semantically unexpected words have a…

Measurement of the building blocks of everyday thought must capture the range of different ways that humans may train, develop, and use their cognitive resources in real world tasks. Executive Function as a construct has been enthusiastically adopted by cognitive and education sciences due to its theorized role as an underpinning of, and…

The occurrence of an unexpected, infrequent sound in an otherwise homogeneous auditory background tends to disrupt the ongoing cognitive task. This "deviation effect" is typically explained in terms of attentional capture whereby the deviant sound draws attention away from the focal activity, regardless of the nature of this activity.…

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) served as a test case for determining the role of extant vocabulary knowledge, endogenous attention, and phonological working memory abilities in cross-situational word learning. First-graders (M[subscript age] = 7 years; 3 months), 44 with typical development (TD) and 28 with DLD, completed a…

Research comparing continuous assessment (e.g. coursework) with examinations generally reveals a student preference for the former. The perceived increased use of continuous assessment periodically captures media attention, with claims of greater numbers of higher degree classifications being awarded. This paper takes a case-study approach to…

This communication sought to redress the loss of the skill of making marks while reading by reporting a consolidated and reflective summation that drew on over four decades' worth of experience with approximately 500 undergraduate and 200 graduate students of Production Engineering at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. It identified the…

Text reading fluency refers to the ability to read connected texts with accuracy, speed, and expression (prosody), and has garnered substantial attention as an important skill for reading comprehension. However, two fundamental questions remain--the dimensionality of text reading fluency including text reading efficiency (accuracy and speed) and…

Arts and cultural practice are gaining attention in numerous disciplines and sectors as a vehicle for community building, and to promote wellbeing and social change. In this article we overview the links between community and liberation psychologies, community arts, and public pedagogy. We put forward the notion of community pedagogies to capture…

The use of neurophysiological measurements to advance the design, development, use, acceptance, influence and adaptivity of information systems is receiving increasing attention. Within the field of education, neurophysiological measurements have commonly been used to capture a learner's psychological constructs such as cognitive load, attention…