Christopher A Was

• PhD
• Kent State University

Two individual differences studies tested relationships between listening comprehension and two conceptualizations of working memory (WM) capacity. Recently, some theorists have stressed that the empirically indicated limits of rehearsal-based WM storage components are inconsistent with the amounts of information needed to accomplish complex cognit...

The goal of the current study was to replicate resent findings that suggest mind wandering is associated with impaired explicit learning but not implicit learning, and to extend those finding by investigating whether explicit learning is impaired under attentional load, but implicit learning is not. We used a sequential learning task, specifically...

Background High rates of psychological distress are present in veterinary healthcare professionals and elevated mental health stigma in the field may underlie psychological treatment reluctance. A psychoeducational programme designed to reduce distress associated with difficult veterinary client behaviours (i.e., ‘burden transfer’) showed reduced s...

p style="text-align:justify">Recently, a large-scale study of college students’ motivation orientations when they transitioned to online learning because of the global COVID-19 pandemic found that unlike prior studies, in the 3 x 2 goal orientation framework the standard for competence (self, other, task) was of greater importance than valence (app...

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that individual differences in declarative memory may be an important predictor of second language (L2) abilities. However, the evidence comes from studies using different declarative memory tasks that vary in their reliance on verbal abilities and task demands, which preclude estimating the size of the relat...

Objectives: Although caregiver burden is common in the context of dementia caregiving, the caregiving role is linked to beneficial outcomes too. Individuals reporting higher positive aspects of caregiving tend to exhibit lower burden relative to those reporting few. The goal of this retrospective review of outpatient memory clinic medical records...

This study investigated the relationship between executive functions and metacognition. Both constructs have been well-studied, but little research has focused on their connections. The goal of the current investigation was to increase the understanding of the relationship between metacognition and executive functions by assessing the relationships...

Given that risk beliefs predict engagement in behaviors to prevent disease, it is important to understand the factors associated with risk beliefs. In the present paper, we conducted path analyses to investigate the associations of belief systems (political orientation and cultural worldviews of individualism and hierarchy) with COVID‐19 risk belie...

Mathematical problem solving is a process involving metacognitive (e.g., judging progress), cognitive (e.g., working memory), and affective (e.g., math anxiety) factors. Recent research encourages researchers who study math cognition to consider the role that the interaction between metacognition and math anxiety plays in mathematical problem solvi...

Objective: An acceptance and commitment training (ACT) educational program targeting reaction to difficult client interactions recently demonstrated efficacy in reducing burden transfer, stress, and burnout in veterinary healthcare teams. The current noninferiority trial compared effectiveness of the original program with a self-paced version. Sa...

Growing evidence suggests that pitch influences musical processing, with melodic processing being enhanced in higher pitch ranges (e.g., Fujioka et al., 2005) and rhythmic processing being enhanced in lower pitches, and these effects may have a basis in elementary properties of the auditory system (e.g., Hove et al., 2014). As such, pitch may const...

Young children frequently exhibit persistent overconfidence when evaluating their own physical and cognitive abilities. Although task persistence due to overconfidence may be beneficial in some instances, it may also have adverse effects on academic performance. For example, children may reduce cognitive effort because they mistakenly believe that...

Mind wandering is a topic of great interest in many areas, but as with all psychological constructs, the interpretation of experimental results might depend on the way it is measured. A common way of measuring mind wandering in experiments is with self-report thought probes. An important question with this methodology is if the probe itself may be...

The statistical properties of data are not present in any individual value, but rather, emerge only by perceiving the set as a whole. Summarizing the statistical properties of sets (e.g., creating ensembles) is ubiquitous in cognition, yet one unanswered question is how this process changes over development. The properties of number sets (e.g., mea...

Objective: To determine whether an acceptance and commitment training (ACT) program targeting reactions to difficult client interactions would reduce burden transfer, stress, and burnout among veterinary healthcare teams. Sample: Small animal veterinary hospital employees randomly assigned to participate in an ACT program (intervention group; n...

The experience of dementia caregiver burden is multidimensional. Little is known about how different aspects of burden contribute to the consideration of moving a loved one to a structured living facility. In the present study, caregiver burden (Zarit Burden Interview; ZBI) and consideration of structured living arrangements (Desire to Institutiona...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of memory for prior cognitive operations and availability of declarative memory elements in long-term semantic priming. The impetus for this investigation was the role of working memory (WM) in complex cognitive processing. Empirical estimates of WM are too limited to explain complex cognitive p...

It is well-documented that mathematics achievement is an important predictor of many positive life outcomes like college graduation, career opportunities, salary, and even citizenship. As such, it is important for researchers and educators to help students succeed in mathematics. Although there are undoubtedly many factors that contribute to studen...

In the Spring of 2020, many universities moved all of the courses online due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The current study was designed to determine if student goal orientations would influence how they responded to the shutdown of their university. Specifically, we were interested in whether the types of academic goals students set might influence t...

Learning a second language for Arabic speakers: Can word pair directionality make a difference?. Abstract: Text structure (e.g., left-to-right orientation) can bias later task performance by supporting scanning strategies on related tasks (e.g., scanning left-to-right when learning word pairs). The current study was designed to investigate how the...

Knowledge monitoring is an important metacognitive process, which can help students improve study habits and thereby increase academic performance. Which is more useful in predicting test performance: knowing what you know, or knowing what you do not know? Two distinct constructs of knowledge monitoring calibration, sensitivity and specificity, wer...

Mindfulness meditation involves focusing one's attention on the present moment in a non-judgmental way. Several recently published investigations have demonstrated that a brief session of mindfulness meditation, practiced before a higher-education course lecture, can improve performance on a quiz over lecture content given immediately following the...

Interleaved practice involves studying exemplars from different categories in a non-systematic, pseudorandom order under the constraint that no two exemplars from the same category are presented consecutively. Interleaved practice of materials has been shown to enhance test performance compared to blocked practice in which exemplars from the same c...

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Yjm61HucdHyEB Do students understand the potentially detrimental effects of mind wandering as they are watching a lecture online? To answer this question, we combined methods used to assess mind wandering and metacognitive methods used to assess student's judgments of learning. In two studies, college students watch...

This study investigated the efficacy of the Fluency Development Lesson (FDL) in improving reading achievement in primary grade struggling readers. 30 readers, enrolled in a summer reading clinic, participated in daily 40-min mini-reading lessons across 5 weeks. During the fluency lessons, readers practiced and developed their literacy skills throug...

Two decades of research in semantic priming has provided substantial evidence for a distinction between short- and long-term semantic priming effects. Early models of cognition suggested a single mechanism to explain priming at short and long lags. Later models refuted this explanation and proposed that different mechanisms are necessary to account...

Working memory is a core cognitive system that is thought to support many forms of complex cognition. Mindfulness meditationhas shown promise in improving the functioning of the working memory system, but no study has thoroughly tested its benefitsby using a well-controlled study design (i.e., using multiple, valid outcome measures and an active, a...

Complex span and content-embedded tasks are two kinds of tasks that are designed to measure maintenance and processing in the working memory system. However, a key functional difference between these task types is that complex span tasks require the maintenance of information that is not relevant to the processing task, whereas content-embedded tas...

t A recent study demonstrated that a single session of mindfulness meditation increased false memories using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. This purportedly resulted from mindfulness meditation inducing nonjudgmental observation of experience that contributed to failure to distinguish internally generated from externally presented inf...

Introducción. La meta de logro y el rol de identidad han sido dos constructos que han recibido una gran atención en la investigación de la Psicología Educativa. Sin embargo, la relación entre ambos no ha recibido la atención necesaria. La razón del presente estudio es la escasez de estudios en esta área.Método. La presente investigación se basa en...

In this paper, we systematically reviewed twenty-one factors that have been shown to either vary with or influence performance on working memory (WM) tasks. Specifically, this paper reviews previous work on the influence of intelligence, gender, age, personality, mental illnesses/medical conditions, dieting, craving, stress/anxiety, emotion/motivat...

Understanding the roles of general cognitive processes in language learning is one of the central goals of research in second language acquisition (SLA). Of these cognitive processes, the role of attention in second language (L2) learning are central to numerous theoretical frameworks (e.g., Ellis, 2006; Gass, 1997; Leow, 2015; Schmidt, 1990; Tomli...

Students often are overconfident when they predict their performance on classroom examinations, and their accuracy often does not improve across exams. One contributor to overconfidence may be that students did not have enough experience, and another is that students may under-use their knowledge of prior exam performance to predict performance on...

Young children are typically overconfident regarding both cognitive abilities. This overconfidence may be due to development underpinnings. Previous research has demonstrated that children exhibit robust and persistent overconfidence in a simple memory-recall task. Two experiments investigated this overconfidence in 1st–4th and 4th–6th grade studen...

Since its inception, eye-tracking technology has evolved into a critical device in psychological and sociological settings. By tracking eye movement, one can conduct lie detection, learn about neuropsychology, and measure reading response. Recently, these technologies have been implemented in Educational and School Psychology as a way to assess how...

Cognitive psychologists have been interested in individual differences in complex cognitive processes and intelligence since the cognitive revolution. A good deal of the research in this area has focused on individual differences in reasoning ability, but even more has focused on differences in working memory. Individual differences in working memo...

The initial years in higher education can be daunting for any junior faculty member and the pressure of "publish or perish" is well-known. The best time to develop a plan for those years is while still in graduate school. This article will outline suggestions based on the authors' expertise and research that can provide guidance to graduate student...

One way to improve students' academic performance is to improve their reading comprehension. Previous investigations demonstrated that testing students on the material as well as having them use metacognitive strategies have independently improved reading comprehension. The tests used in the learning phase in previous investigations have typically...

It has been demonstrated that low-performing students are often inaccurate (overconfident) when predicting their exam scores. However, these low performers are also less confident than high performers in their predictions, indicating they may be aware of their inaccuracy. The current study had two main objectives: 1) to replicate the findings of pr...

Young children are typically overconfident regarding both the physical and cognitive abilities. This overconfidence may be due to development underpinnings. Two experiments investigate overconfidence in 1 st – 6 th grade students. It was found that not until 4 th grade did students overconfidence begin to wane. We discuss these findings in the cont...

Trying to remember something now typically improves your ability to remember it later. However, after watching a video of a simulated bank robbery, participants who verbally described the robber were 25% worse at identifying the robber in a lineup than were participants who instead listed U.S. states and capitals—this has been termed the “verbal ov...

Trying to remember something now typically improves your ability to remember it later. However, after watching a video of a simulated bank robbery, participants who verbally described the robber were 25% worse at identifying the robber in a lineup than were participants who instead listed U.S. states and capitals—this has been termed the “verbal ov...

Knowledge monitoring predicts academic outcomes in many contexts. However, measures of knowledge monitoring accuracy are often incomplete. In the current study, a measure of students’ ability to discriminate known from unknown information as a component of knowledge monitoring was considered. Undergraduate students’ knowledge monitoring accuracy wa...

Trying to remember something now typically improves your ability to remember it later. However, after watching a video of a simulated bank robbery, participants who verbally described the robber were 25% worse at identifying the robber in a lineup than were participants who instead listed U.S. states and capitals—this has been termed the “verbal ov...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between knowledge monitoring and motivation as defined by self-efficacy and goal orientations. A path model was proposed to hypothesize the causal relations among predictors of the students total score in the Educational Psychology course. The sample consisted of undergraduate students enrol...

Metacognition is often described as knowledge and control over one’s cognitive processes. Models of metacognition often include knowledge monitoring as the foundation of metacognitive skills. The current study was designed to determine whether the ability to accurately assess one’s knowledge can increase throughout a semester long course, when stud...

Current theories of self-regulated learning predict a positive link between student monitoring accuracy and performance: students who more accurately monitor their knowledge of a particular set of materials are expected to more effectively regulate their subsequent study of those materials, which in turn should lead to higher test performance. The...

Semantic priming is a short-lived phenomena regardless of the theoretical description of the source of priming (e.g, spread of activation accounts). Even the duration of long-term semantic priming effects, that require an episodic component or deeper semantic processing, is typically described in minutes. Recent investigations demonstrate an increa...

A relationship exists between ego-identity development and academic achievement. Adolescent and young adult students are faced with the need to choose the values, goals and beliefs that will define their adult lives. One set of important choices in this period of life is centered on academics. Undergraduates (N=318) completed self-reports of selfha...

Reviews the book, The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 54) edited by Brian H. Ross (see record 2011-04906-000 ). The reviewers begin by stating that in this book, the contributors and editor demonstrate that research in cognitive psychology can, and does, have real-world application. In this volume, the r...

There is clear evidence that aging has an effect on memory. However, not all memory processes suffer as one ages. In the current chapter, the authors review the distinctions between explicit memory (i.e., effortful storage and retrieval of information) and implicit memory (i.e., learning and memory that do not require conscious effort). They then r...

This study investigated whether a motor skill learning intervention could provide better memory for personal identification numbers (PINs) as compared to a control group. Younger (ages 18 to 40) and older (ages 61 to 92) participants were randomly assigned to conditions. All participants received three days of training consisting of 12 blocks of 12...

Item order can bias learners' study decisions and undermine the use of more effective allocation strategies, such as allocating study time to items in one's region of proximal learning. In two experiments, we evaluated whether the influence of item order on study decisions reflects habitual responding based on a reading bias. We manipulated the ord...

Discourse comprehension requires one to process information that is actively maintained in working memory (WM). Therefore, we hypothesized that individual differences in comprehension would be predicted better by working memory tasks that capture the concurrent demands of processing and maintenance of the same memory elements (i.e., content-embedde...

Working memory, as defined by Baddeley's multiple component models (Baddeley, 2001, Baddeley and Hitch, 1974) has often been touted as an important, if not the most important, source of individual differences in reading comprehension. Recent investigations have made the argument that the increased availability of long-term memory plays an important...

The duration of long-term semantic priming is typically described in minutes. Woltz and Was (2007) found that priming effects following processing in working memory were relatively long-lasting, reporting there was no decrease in priming effects following 32 intervening Stroop-like trials. These findings were interpreted as an increased availabilit...

The purpose of this study was to illustrate the relationship between self-efficacy, task value, goal orientations, metacognitive self-regulation, self-regulation and learning strategies and to investigate the unique contribution of each on the variability in students' total scores of 12 exams. Our study revealed that students' self-efficacy, task-v...

Woltz and Was (2006, 2007) demonstrated persistent and sizable priming effects following simple processing of information in working memory. The results of these previous studies were interpreted as the demonstration of the strengthening of prior memory operations. In the current study, these priming effects were found to be present following minim...

Reviews the book, Correcting fallacies about educational and psychological testing edited by Richard P. Phelps (see record 2008-17662-000). In this edited book, Phelps has brought together scholars with expertise in their respective fields of education and psychology, as well as in assessment and measurement. The text addresses the criticisms lev...

Introduction. Two constructs that have received a great deal of attention in Educational Psychology research are Achievement Orientation and Identity Status. However, the relationship between these two constructs has not received the attention that the current researcher feel is warranted. The impetus for the current study is the paucity of researc...

Reviews the book, Hypothetical thinking: Dual processes in reasoning and judgement by Jonathan St. B. T. Evans (see record 2007-02337-000 ). The reviewer commends Evans for writing a well-researched, expertly written and highly informative book that presents a thorough review of empirical evidence that supports the dual-process view of reasoning. T...

Previous researchers have argued that objects associated with a protagonist may be foregrounded, or held active, in memory. This study expanded on previous work by using an inconsistency paradigm to investigate the effects of protagonist association on object accessibility. Readers experienced more processing difficulty when a target sentence contr...

The current study presents a comparison of 2 structural equation models describing the relationship between the executive functions of updating and inhibiting. Although it has been argued that working memory capacity is defined by one’s ability to control the focus of attention, the findings of the current study support a view of the executive cont...

In 2 experiments, the authors investigated available but unattended information following working memory task demands. The experimental task presented a memory set containing exemplars from 2 conceptual categories. Following instructions to focus attention on only 1 category, priming of both categories was assessed with category comparisons of exem...

The need for character education is apparent in the statistics regarding school violence, absenteeism, drop out rates, and achievement. The directive has been sent out by the government to get the job done. This manuscript examines a number of studies that claim to provide evidence that character education programs work, and others that provide evi...

Despite the influence of Baddeley’s (see Baddeley, 2001) multiple components model of working memory (WM), criticism has arisen that the estimated capacities of the storage systems are too small to explain complex learning and comprehension activities. Ericsson and Kintsch (1995) argued that highly practiced complex skills, including language compr...

In a series of four experiments, we investigated the magnitude and pattern of indirect, semantically mediated priming that emanates from various working memory (WM) processes. When such priming effects are taken to reflect temporary increases in the availability of long-term memory (ALTM), results suggest a close link between the amount and type of...

The current study demonstrated an increase in the availability of simple arithmetic facts following minimal working memory processing. Previous studies by Woltz and Was (2006, 2007) demonstrated faster response times and greater accuracy in processing semantically related but unattended category exemplars following a simple memory load and category...

The current study examines the question of whether or not all meanings of an ambiguous word are activated in the context of a working memory task, regardless of context as predicted by the exhaustive access hypothesis or if only context relevant meanings are activated. Three experiments investigated the effects of disambiguating information on the...