Toward the role of social agency in explaining the personalization effect.

Personalizing written learning materials has been shown to enhance learning compared to conventional text. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of social agency in explaining the personalization effect. For this purpose, a theory-based scale for measuring social agency was designed including four facets: conversational character, sympathy and emotional connection, explanatory effect, and task involvement.

Oscillatory Correlates of Intentional Forgetting: The Role of Theta and Alpha Power in Item-Method Directed Forgetting.

Results from item-method directed forgetting suggest that individuals are able to intentionally forget processed information. Most research suggests that either selective rehearsal of to-be-remembered or inhibitory control of to-be-forgotten information is accountable for the effects of intentional forgetting. Some research, however, hypothesized that the time to process information mediates the underlying mechanism.

Executing Learning Activities and Autonomy-Supportive Instructions Enhance Autonomous Motivation.

This study investigated situational changes in learners' degree of autonomous regulation during other-initiated learning activities and examined the influence of the instructional style on such changes. To this end, relative autonomous motivation of 172 fifth to seventh grade students was measured before, during and after execution of a musical learning activity. It was experimentally manipulated whether students were instructed in an autonomy-supportive or a controlling style.

Testing and metacognition: retrieval practise effects on metacognitive monitoring in learning from text.

Previous research on the testing effect has primarily focussed on the benefits of testing at the cognitive performance level but rather disregarded the potential effects of testing at the metacognitive performance level. In the present study, we examined the potential of retrieval practise during learning to improve the accuracy of confidence judgments in future retrieval. In a learning-from-text experiment with 98 secondary school students, we implemented an initial test as retrieval practise and a final test one week later.

Acute physical exercise improves shifting in adolescents at school: evidence for a dopaminergic contribution.

The executive function of shifting between mental sets demands cognitive flexibility. Based on evidence that physical exercise fostered cognition, we tested whether acute physical exercise can improve shifting in an unselected sample of adolescents. Genetic polymorphisms were analyzed to gain more insight into possibly contributing neurophysiological processes.

Acute physical exercise affected processing efficiency in an auditory attention task more than processing effectiveness.

Research on effects of acute physical exercise on performance in a concurrent cognitive task has generated equivocal evidence. Processing efficiency theory predicts that concurrent physical exercise can increase resource requirements for sustaining cognitive performance even when the level of performance is unaffected. This hypothesis was tested in a dual-task experiment.

Predictability of locomotion: effects on updating of spatial situation models during narrative comprehension.

We investigated how the updating of spatial situation models during narrative comprehension depends on the interaction of cognitive abilities and text characteristics. Participants with low verbal and visuospatial abilities and participants with high abilities read narratives in which the protagonist's motions in a fictitious building were either highly predictable or very hard to predict. In Experiment 1, high-ability readers updated spatial situation models only if the protagonist's motions were hard to predict, whereas low-ability readers did so only if the motions were highly predictable.

Remembered duration: working memory and the reproduction of intervals.

On the basis of attention allocation models of time estimation, the role of working memory in prospective duration reproduction is explored. In four experiments, adult participants performed a counting task (duration, 400 sec) that allowed coordinative and sequential demands on working memory to be varied. After completing the counting task, the participants reproduced the time that they had worked on this task It emerged that (1) increased coordinative demands on working memory (but not increased sequential demands) reduced the accuracy of prospective duration reproduction (Experiments 1 and 2), (2) presenting context information during the reproduction phase enhanced the accuracy of the reproduced duration (Experiment 3), and (3) individual differences in coordinative working memory capacity affected duration reproduction in the same direction as the experimental manipulation of coordinative task demands (Experiment 4).

Anaphor resolution as a function of spatial distance and priming: exploring the spatial distance effect in situation models.

Anaphor resolution has been found to depend on the spatial distance between the reader's focus of attention and the location of the anaphor referent in a spatially organized situation model (spatial distance effect; Rinck & Bower, 1995). This effect implies that a) the situation model is spatially organized and b) spatial distance has a stronger effect on the resolution of anaphoric reference than the text priming the anaphor referent. In three experiments, adult participants read 12 short narratives about protagonists moving around a building.