Corinne Zimmerman

Illinois State University | ISU · Department of Psychology

Lay abstract: There is currently disagreement among professionals (such as teachers, therapists, researchers, and clinicians) about the most appropriate and respectful way to refer to individuals with disabilities in general, and those with autism, in particular. Supporters of person-first language feel that it is important to emphasize the person...

Sexual and romantic orientations are often considered one and the same, and attitudes about engaging in sexual behavior are assumed to be predominantly positive. The current study explored the concordance between sexual and romantic orientations among allosexual and asexual adults as well as the frequency with which they identify as having a sex-po...

Prior experience with physical behaviors - both sexual and affectionate - is common among adults in romantic relationships. However, less is known about differences in physical behaviors for asexual and allosexual adults, and these differences may explain how asexual adults navigate sexuality in romantic relationships. In this study we used sexual...

Objective: To examine how specific aspects of a hookup are related to feelings of regret among college students, and how these patterns vary by gender and college context. Participants: Freshmen and sophomore men (n = 92) and women (n = 283) from a Midwestern university and community college. Methods: Participants answered questions about their mo...

Cambridge Core - Cognition - The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky

The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019

(Updated draft added 8/9/22) We examined the degree of similarity of word emotion ratings, in English and Spanish, of behavior analysis terms and general clinical terms. Bilinguals' within-subject ratings corresponded more closely than monolinguals between-subject ratings, and a control study suggested this is not due simply to the higher error var...

Improving scientific literacy requires examining both what people believe about scientific issues and why they hold those beliefs. We examined how people justified their agreement with statements regarding evolution, climate change, genetically modified foods, and vaccinations. Participants rated their level of agreement with statements reflecting...

The Balance of Nature (BoN) metaphor leads to various naïve conceptions about ecosystem dynamics that do not address current scientific theories adequately. An appropriate alternative is the Flux of Nature (FoN) metaphor. Approaches to conceptual development in science education aim for learners to develop scientifically adequate conceptions rather...

Many science curricula and standards emphasise that students should learn both scientific knowledge and the skills associated with the construction of this knowledge. One way to achieve this goal is to use inquiry-learning activities that embed the use of science process skills. We investigated the influence of scientific reasoning skills (i.e. con...

For almost a century, psychologists interested in cognitive development have devised empirical investigations to uncover the trajectory of scientific thinking, and they have explored a variety of methods for enriching children's understanding of scientific procedures and concepts. Topics have ranged from the origins of early childhood curiosity, th...

We review findings from the psychology of science that are relevant to understanding or explaining peoples’ tendencies to believe both scientific and pseudoscientific claims. We discuss relevant theoretical frameworks and empirical findings to support the proposal that pseudoscientific beliefs arise in much the same way as other scientific and non-...

The ability to design and interpret controlled experiments is an important scientific process skill and a common objective of science standards. Numerous intervention studies have investigated how the control-of-variables-strategy (CVS) can be introduced to students. However, a meta-analysis of 72 intervention studies found that the opportunity to...

A core component of scientific inquiry is the ability to evaluate evidence generated from controlled experiments and then to relate that evidence to a hypothesis or theory. The control-of-variables strategy (CVS) is foundational for school science and scientific literacy, but it does not routinely develop without practice or instruction. This meta-...

The developmental trajectory of learning to do science is long. Though some mechanisms of science learning like curiosity, asking questions, and exploration seem to develop spontaneously in children, all science process skills require support, scaffolding, and instruction to mature into the sophisticated process skills seen in scientifically litera...

Past research has identified several communication strategies that are used to end relationships (e.g., Baxter, 1982). The present study extends this research by considering how young adults’ propensity to experience compassionate love for a romantic partner is associated with their reported use of breakup strategies. A sample of US university stud...

With increased focus on the importance of teaching and learning in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, both educational researchers and cognitive psychologists have been tackling the issues of how best to teach science concepts and scientific thinking skills. As a cultural activity, the practice of science by professi...

Our ability to detect patterns and observe regularities is a fundamental part of reasoning and learning. Various theoretical accounts conceptualize induction in different ways. In the current study, we used the balance-scale task and mouse-tracking techniques as a means to explore the cognitive dynamics that underlie inductive pattern recognition....

Stereotype threat has been identified as a possible factor in the underperformance of African American students. We focus on two factors that may moderate stereotype threat vulnerability: racial identity and awareness of stereotypes. We examined African American children's (N=186, aged 10-12) racial identity using profiles derived from a cluster an...

Science is critically important for advancing economics, health, and social well-being in the twenty-first century. A scientifically literate workforce is one that is well-suited to meet the challenges of an information economy. However, scientific thinking skills do not routinely develop and must be scaffolded via educational and cultural tools. I...

Science is critically important for advancing economics, health, and social well-being in the twenty-first century. A scientifically literate workforce is one that is well-suited to meet the challenges of an information economy. However, scientific thinking skills do not routinely develop and must be scaffolded via educational and cultural tools. I...

The present study was designed to investigate the survival processing effect (Nairne, Thompson, & Pandeirada, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 263-273, 2007) in cued implicit and explicit memory tests. The survival effect has been well established in explicit free recall and recognition tests, but has not bee...

We investigated the temporal dynamics of response choice in a decision-making task by examining the evolving implicit responses indicated by hand movements made before an explicit response is selected. Participants (N=31) judged which of two cars would go faster when the underlying rule was plausible or implausible and when two response choices dif...

We investigated the effects of strategy use and rule complexity on multivariable inductive judgments. Participants (N=274) made judgments about which of two cars presented on a computer screen was faster. Participants were randomly assigned to a complex rule or a simple rule. For the complex rule, three of five variables affected speed; for the sim...

The present study examined implicit and explicit approaches to problem solving with a simulated scientific discovery task that involved induction of a rule involving the balance of forces. Strategy (implicit or explicit) and problem difficulty were manipulated, and their interaction was observed in three experiments. The explicit, rule-seeking stra...

The goal of science education interventions is to nurture, enrich, and sustain children’s natural and spontaneous interest in scientific knowledge and procedures. We present taxonomy for classifying different types of research on scientific thinking from the perspective of cognitive development and associated attempts to teach science. We summarize...

Past research has established that people choose from a variety of different strategies to end relationships. In Study 1, 47 disengagement strategies were rated on degree of compassion toward the partner. In Study 2, we examined people’s choice of breakup strategies (in a hypothetical breakup) at varying levels of compassion as a function of compas...

In three experiments we tested hypotheses derived from the goal specificity literature using a real-world physics task. In the balance-scale paradigm participants predict the state of the apparatus based on a configuration of weights at various distances from the fulcrum. Non-specific goals (NSG) have been shown to encourage hypothesis testing, whi...

The “balance of nature” metaphor has been used to explain the functioning of natural systems from ancient times and continues to be invoked in popular culture, in spite of controversy regarding its use in the scientific community. We demonstrate that undergraduate students in the United States believe this term is descriptive of real ecological sys...

The goal of this article is to provide an integrative review of research that has been conducted on the development of children’s scientific reasoning. Broadly defined, scientific thinking includes the skills involved in inquiry, experimentation, evidence evaluation, and inference that are done in the service of conceptual change or scientific unde...

Several theoretical perspectives in the social psychology literature on helping suggest that people forecast the benefit that they will receive as a result of helping others, and help only if they determine that it is rewarding to do so. One type of self-benefit that can be received from helping is an enhancement of positive mood. The major hypothe...

"Which weighs more--a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?" The seemingly naive answer to the familiar riddle is the pound of lead. The correct answer, of course, is that they weigh the same amount. We investigated whether the naive answer to the riddle might have a basis in perception. When blindfolded participants hefted a pound of lead and a po...

The Model-Assisted Reasoning in Science (MARS) project seeks to promote model-centered instruction as a means of improving middle-school science education. As part of the evaluation of the sixth-grade curriculum, performance of MARS and non-MARS students was compared on a curriculum-neutral task. Fourteen students participated in structured intervi...

One new tradition that has emerged from early research on autonomous robots is embodied cognitive science. This paper describes the relationship between embodied cognitive science and a related tradition, synthetic psychology. It is argued that while both are synthetic, embodied cognitive science is antirepresentational while synthetic psychology s...

The popular print media constitute a major source of new information about scientific research for the public and for members of the scientific community outside their areas of expertise. Despite the potential importance of media reports to scientific literacy and public awareness of science, little is known about the content of these articles. We...

The popular print media constitute a major source of new information about scientific research for the public and for members of the scientific community outside their areas of expertise. Despite the potential importance of media reports to scientific literacy and public awareness of science, little is known about the content of these articles. We...

The purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to the growing body of research on the development of scientific reasoning skills. The focus is on the reasoning and problem-solving strategies involved in experimentation and evidence evaluation. Research on strategy use in science has undergone considerable development in the last decade....

Skill in evaluating media reports about science is an important aspect of scientific literacy for citizens in the 21st century. To identify the kinds of information individuals used to evaluate media reports about science, university students were asked to judge the credibility of specially constructed news briefs and to justify their judgments. Cr...

The role of prior knowledge in learning complex procedures was investigated in a transfer task in which subjects learned two related procedures in sequence. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the conceptual and structural similarity between the two procedures; in Experiment 2, we manipulated whether the order of the steps within subprocedures was the...

Reviews the book, Descartes' error: Emotion, reason and the human brain by A. Damasio (1994). This book proposes that emotion and reason are inextricably linked, an idea that runs counter to common folk wisdom but with potentially profound implications for neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy. In the first section, the author tells the t...

The goal of this article is to provide an integrative review of research that has been conducted on the development of children's scientific reasoning. Scientific reasoning (SR), broadly defined, includes the thinking skills involved in inquiry, experimentation, evidence evaluation, inference and argumentation that are done in the service of concep...