Patricia J. Brooks

City University of New York - College of Staten Island | CSI CUNY · Department of Psychology

This study investigated children's narrative evaluations about jealousy in relation to performance on a higher-order perspective-taking task and assessments of receptive vocabulary and nonverbal intelligence. Eighty children (5;0–11;11) narrated a wordless picture book about a jealous frog, answered probe questions about the plot, and generated a p...

Second language (L2) learning outcomes may depend on the structure of the input and learners’ cognitive abilities. This study tested whether less predictable input might facilitate learning and generalization of L2 morphology while evaluating contributions of statistical learning ability, nonverbal intelligence, phonological short-term memory, and...

Purpose: The cross-modal picture-word interference task is used to examine contextual effects on spoken-word production. Previous work documents lexical-phonological interference in children with SLI when a related distractor (e.g., bell) occurs prior to a picture-to-be-named (e.g., a bed). Here we examine whether interference also arises with nonw...

Canadian middle and high school students (N = 2,278) completed a “CTRL-F” curriculum teaching them how to evaluate online information by reading laterally to investigate sources, check claims, and trace information to original contexts. A subset of CTRL-F students (N = 316) were in classes with teacher-matched control groups (N = 287). Some CTRL-F...

The chapter describes the utilization of Linguistic Landscapes (LL) as a pedagogical tool in an undergraduate research methods course in psychology and demonstrates how studying urban multilingualism can be harnessed in the service of five comprehensive learning goals of the American Psychological Association Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psycho...

This study examined putative benefits of testing and production for learning new languages. Undergraduates ( N = 156) were exposed to Turkish spoken dialogues under varying learning conditions (retrieval practice, comprehension, verbal repetition) in a computer‐assisted language learning session. Participants completed pre‐ and posttests of number‐...

INTRODUCTION: Despite legal efforts to reduce societal barriers, people with disabilities still face anti-disability bias, stereotyping, and stigma. According to the social movement hypothesis, people’s participation in and identification with activist movements may reduce bias towards social outgroups. Alternatively, people’s intergroup attitudes...

Concerns about student persistence in online college courses increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. We assessed course withdrawal rates and learning outcomes of undergraduates (N = 563, Mean age = 20.3 years) enrolled in Introductory Psychology at a nonselective college in Spring 2021. All sections followed the same curriculum. Half were fully asy...

We surveyed graduate students teaching undergraduate courses online during the COVID-19 pandemic about their teaching practices and curricular emphasis on teaching employable skills. Graduate students (N=151, 67.5% psychology) reported emphasis on teaching analytic inquiry and communication skills, which aligned with introducing research methodolog...

Purpose Individuals with developmental language disorder (DLD) often exhibit slower processing on time-based tasks in comparison with age-matched peers. Processing speed has been linked to various linguistic skills and might serve as a global indicator of individual differences in language abilities. Despite an extensive literature on processing sp...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition affecting information processing across domains. The current meta-analysis investigated whether slower processing speed is associated with the ASD neurocognitive profile and whether findings hold across different time-based tasks and stimuli (social vs. nonsocial; linguistic v...

Motor skills have been linked to language and social development with implications for theory of mind. This study examined theory of mind (attribution of intentions task) in school-age children ( N = 62, mean age 8 years; 2 months, standard deviation [ SD] = 1;3) in relation to fine motor skills (grooved pegboard), receptive vocabulary (Peabody Pic...

Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We assessed...

We explored how a constellation of factors affected vocabulary development of infants (N = 556; 49.6% male) from families comprising the control group of the Early Head Start Research Evaluation project. Predictors assessed at age 14 months accounted for 23.5%, 25.8%, and 30.6% of variance in receptive vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) a...

Introduction Graduate students engage in college teaching with varied attitudes and approaches. Their teaching practices may be influenced by professional development experiences related to pedagogy, and their personality traits. Methods Through an online survey of graduate students teaching undergraduate courses ( N = 109, 69.7% women, M age = 30...

We explored factors predicting student learning outcomes (N=1303) in online Introductory Psychology sections at an open-enrollment college in the Northeastern United States in Fall 2020. Students from historically underserved groups were more likely to struggle on course outcomes, perhaps reflecting the disproportionate impact of COVID-19. Use of d...

College students, and adults in general, may find it hard to identify trustworthy information amid the proliferation of false news and misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. In Fall 2020, college students (N = 221) in an online general education civics course were taught through asynchronous assignments how to use lateral reading strategies to...

People's mental models of the Internet tend to focus on the functional affordances of Internet‐enabled devices. Given that today's adolescents and young adults (Generation Z) have grown up surrounded by the Internet, we examined the extent to which the Internet's ubiquity was salient in their mental models of it. Middle‐school students (Study 1, N...

Vygotskian theory suggests that sociodramatic play, private speech, and motivation are deeply intertwined in development. This study used fishing and puzzle tasks to explore how preschoolers (N = 47) used private speech to verbally mediate their engagement and motivation in activities with differing demands. We experimentally manipulated pedagogica...

We used structural equation models to explore how a constellation of factors affected vocabulary development trajectories of infants (N = 556; 49.6% male) from low-income families who comprised the control group of the Early Head Start Research Evaluation project. Predictors assessed at age 14 months accounted for 23.5%, 25.8%, and 30.6% of varianc...

Background Introductory Psychology students rarely learn about unethical biomedical research outside the Tuskegee syphilis study, but these practices were widespread in U.S. public health research (e.g., at the Willowbrook State School researchers infected children with disabilities with hepatitis). Objectives Replicate and extend Grose-Fifer’s re...

College students lack fact-checking skills, which may lead them to accept information at face value. We report findings from an institution participating in the Digital Polarization Initiative (DPI), a national effort to teach students lateral reading strategies used by expert fact-checkers to verify online information. Lateral reading requires use...

This study examined play interactions of 15 to 48-month-old children (n = 59) and their caregivers in Lazuri, a UNESCO-rated endangered South-Caucasian ancestral language, and Turkish, a dominant language supplanting Lazuri usage in the community. Child–caregiver dyads played with two toy sets (animal farm and tea set) that provided different conte...

This study examined play interactions of 15 to 48-month-old children ( n = 59) and their caregivers in Lazuri, a UNESCO-rated endangered South-Caucasian ancestral language, and Turkish, a dominant language supplanting Lazuri usage in the community. Child–caregiver dyads played with two toy sets (animal farm and tea set) that provided different cont...

Children's enthusiasm for video games has fueled interest in identifying the impact of game play on cognitive skills and knowledge acquisition. Video games are highly engaging, encourage distributed practice of skills, calibrate challenges to match player's skills, and provide feedback. Research has demonstrated benefits of playing commercial video...

Previous meta-analyses highlight the role of executive functions (EF), encompassing working memory updating, task-switching, and inhibitory control, in reading comprehension, but have not established their role in decoding. Decoding is defined as the use of orthographic patterns to access oral pronunciations. According to the dual route model, deco...

Online surveys examined college instructors’ and students’ attitudes about in-class use of personal mobile devices (e.g., phones, laptops). Instructors (Study 1: N = 125, 64.2% graduate students) who were more sensitive to traditional disruptions (e.g., arriving late) were more sensitive to technology-related disruptions (e.g., texting). Attitudes...

Successful college teaching has the potential to change students’ lives for the better. Each of us remembers teachers who saw the potential in their students, set up appropriate challenges, and provided encouragement and support for students to push boundaries. But how can graduate students new to teaching achieve this while also juggling research,...

Via computer-assisted language learning, college students learned Turkish number and case marking under conditions requiring speaking or just listening. After training, only a subset were above chance in comprehending Turkish sentences. Nonverbal ability, but not declarative or working memory, predicted accuracy in comprehending novel sentences aft...

This study examined a constellation of factors impacting developmental trajectories of toddlers (N=672; 49.7% male) from low-income families. We used structural equation models to distinguish direct and indirect influences of contextual (home environment), maternal (educational attainment, maternal distress), interactional (joint attention, negativ...

The radical exemplar model resonates with work on perceptual classification and categorization highlighting the role of exemplars in memory representations. Further development of the model requires acknowledgment of both the fleeting and fragile nature of perceptual representations and the gist-based, good-enough quality of long-term memory repres...

Given evidence that fewer than half of undergraduates who obtain bachelor’s degrees in psychology pursue advanced degrees, there has been a call for stronger curricular emphasis on the development of transferable skills and workforce readiness (Appleby 2014; APA 2016). Our study asked novice college instructors whether they taught workforce-relevan...

Introductory Psychology students often learn about the Tuskegee syphilis study in discussions of research ethics, yet fail to grasp that human-rights violations in US medical research were widespread prior to the mid-1970s (Jones, Grady, & Lederer, 2016). We describe a role-play activity, where PSY100 students (N = 203) took on roles of researchers...

This study examined media literacy knowledge and fact-checking skills of college students (N = 127), with knowledge defined as awareness that media is targeted, biased, and unrealistic, and skills defined as "lateral reading" or use of independent, external sources to evaluate the credibility of online information. Observed fact-checking was verifi...

This commentary relates Hoerl & McCormack's dual systems perspective to models of cognitive development emphasizing representational redescription and the role of culturally constructed tools, including language, in providing flexible formats for thinking. We describe developmental processes that enable children to construct a mental time line, sit...

Conceptual-change, student-centered (CCSF) approaches to teaching emphasize deep learning, exploration, and active problem-solving, whereas information-transmission, teacher-centered (ITTF) approaches emphasize lecturing and other explicit forms of instruction (Gow & Kember, 1993). This study explored personality characteristics and other attitudes...

Humans manifest an acute awareness of the passage of time and capacity for mental time travel, i.e., the ability to mentally place oneself in the past or future, as well as in counterfactual or hypothetical situations. The ability to perceive, estimate, and keep track of time involves multiple forms of representation (temporal concepts and frames o...

We argue that understanding of autism can be strengthened by increasing involvement of autistic individuals as researchers and by exploring cascading impacts of early sensory, perceptual, attentional, and motor atypicalities on social and communicative developmental trajectories. Participatory action research that includes diverse participants or r...

This study investigated direct and indirect effects of executive functions on reading comprehension in adolescents (N = 87, M = 14.0 years, SD = 1.5) by testing for parallel mediation of effects of working memory, task-switching, and inhibitory control via decoding and text recall/inference. Working memory showed direct and indirect effects on pass...

Teaching Psychology offers an evidence-based, student-centered approach that is filled with suggestions, ideas, and practices for teaching college-level courses in ways that contribute to student success. The authors draw on current scientific studies of learning, memory, and development, with specific emphasis on classroom studies. The authors off...

Participants completed an online survey via Qualtrics. • To develop and validate a Likert scale that would measure self-reported teaching behaviors and activities from the six areas of model teaching competencies identified by the STP taskforce. • To assess the extant to which novice instructors self-report engaging in the model teaching behaviors....

Introduction: Autistic youth are less likely to enroll in college or obtain employment than people with other disabilities (Shattuck et al., 2012). However, those who enter college are more likely to enroll in STEM majors than students without disabilities (Wei et al., 2013). Growing recognition that many autistic people are drawn to STEM has spark...

Digital media literacy requires students to develop fact-checking and information-sourcing skills. Prior work suggests that editing Wikipedia is an effective means of teaching students how to identify reputable sources and verify information, yet undergraduates are typically discouraged from using Wikipedia due to negative perceptions of its conten...

A contentious issue in contemporary psycholinguistics is whether bilingualism enhances executive functions. Here, we report a meta-analysis of 80 studies (253 effect sizes) comparing performance of monolinguals and bilinguals on non-verbal interference-control tasks, while examining potential moderators of effects on two dependent variables (DVs):...

We document the need to examine digital game play and app use as a context for cognitive development, particularly during middle childhood. We highlight this developmental period as 6‐ through 12‐year olds comprise a large swath of the preadult population that plays and uses these media forms. Surprisingly, this age range remains understudied with...

Although stigma negatively impacts autistic people globally, the degree of stigma varies across cultures. Prior research suggests that stigma may be higher in cultures with more collectivistic orientations. This study aimed to identify cultural values and other individual differences that contribute to cross-cultural differences in autism stigma (a...

This handbook is the first to explore the growing field of experimental semantics and pragmatics. In the past twenty years, experimental data has become a major source of evidence for building theories of language meaning and use, encompassing a wide range of topics and methods. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters in this volum...

Purpose: We aimed to determine whether individual differences in manual dexterity are associated with specific language skills (nonword repetition, receptive vocabulary, and receptive grammar) after controlling for nonverbal abilities (visual-spatial working memory and intelligence). Method: We assessed manual dexterity using the pegboard task a...

The Less‐Is‐More hypothesis was proposed to explain age‐of‐acquisition effects in first language (L1) and second language (L2) learning. We scrutinize different renditions of the hypothesis by examining how learning outcomes are affected by (a) limited cognitive capacity, (b) reduced interference resulting from less prior knowledge, and (c) simplif...

The Less-is-More hypothesis was proposed to explain age-of-acquisition effects in first language (L1) acquisition and second language (L2) attainment. We scrutinize different renditions of the hypothesis by examining how learning outcomes are affected by (1) limited cognitive capacity, (2) reduced interference resulting from less prior knowledge, a...

Aims: We employed a discrimination-choice procedure, embedded in a custom-made videogame, to evaluate whether youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), including nonverbal individuals, distinguish sentences on the basis of emotional tone-of-voice and generalize linguistic information across speaker gender. Methods and procedures: Thirteen youth...

The Serial Reaction Time (SRT) and the Alternating Serial Reaction Time (ASRT) tasks are widely used assessments of sequence learning (SL) wherein repetitive patterning of visual-spatial elements leads participants to anticipate locations of subsequent elements in the series. In the SRT task, the predictive dependencies involve adjacent elements wh...

Children make quantifier-spreading errors in contexts involving sets in partial one-to-one correspondence; e.g., Every bunny is in a box is rejected as a description of three bunnies, each in a box, along with two extra boxes. To determine whether a signature pattern of visual attention is associated with the classic q-spreading error as it occurs...

An online survey explored attitudes and behaviors of graduate-student instructors of undergraduate courses. Participants (N=119) completed the Approaches to Teaching Inventory (ATI: Trigwell & Prosser, 2004) comprising "conceptual change/student-focused" (CCSF) and "information transmission/teacher-focused" (ITTF) scales, the Model Teaching Criteri...

The ability to recognize temporal patterns and position events in time emerges during the preschool years and is refined in middle childhood. This study explores individual differences in temporal cognition in relation to verbal and nonverbal abilities. Children (30 boys, 32 girls; M = 8 years; 2 months, 6;0 − 10;8) completed three temporal-cogniti...

PSY100 students created new biographies for Wikipedia’s PSYCH+Feminism initiative. They reported that Wikipedia editing improved their skills in identifying sources (only 24% reported using databases for research prior to the assignment). Students reported that writing content was their greatest difficulty and indicated the need for practice to ove...

Children growing up in low-income families tend to have smaller vocabularies than more affluent children—a phenomenon attributed to differences in the quantity and quality of child-directed speech (the so-called 30 million word gap, Hart & Risley, 2003). Although research has emphasized how caregivers stimulate language growth, e.g., by responding...

The current generation of children and adolescents has yet to know a time when digital networks and social media were unavailable. However, it remains unclear how youth develop the skills necessary to critically evaluate the content they find via these media forms. These skills are thought to underlie what has been referred to as media literacy. To...

Reduced cognitive empathy may put autistic people at risk for bullying. We compared interpretations of bullying provided by 22 autistic and 15 non-autistic college students (mentors). Autistic (and non-autistic) students reported less severe bullying in college relative to earlier in development. Chronic bullying was associated with improvements in...

Misconceptions and stigma associated with autism vary across cultures and may be influenced by various factors. Undergraduates in Japan (N=212) and the United States (US) (N=365) completed an online autism training, with pre- and posttest surveys assessing autism stigma (i.e., social distance) and knowledge. Aims were to examine differences in auti...

Despite support for active learning, little research has directly compared active techniques to determine which are most beneficial for student learning and motivation. The current study compared the active-learning techniques of cooperative learning (CL) and writing-to-learn (WTL) while also varying the modality of presentation (textual or multime...

The chapter describes the utilization of Linguistic Landscapes (LL) as a pedagogical tool in an undergraduate research methods course in psychology. Fourteen students in their second year of college took a seminar titled Science and Technology in New York City with the theme of urban multilingualism, where they investigated how and why languages ot...

Using an online survey, we examined Model Teaching Criteria (MTC: Boysen, Richmond, & Gurung, 2015) among graduate-student instructors (N=118) using a subset of items from the original scale. Our 7-item scale showed acceptable internal consistency (α =.76); a principal components analysis generated two components, the first of which loaded positive...

Cognitive Development in Digital Contexts investigates the impact of screen media on key aspects of children and adolescents' cognitive development. Highlighting how screen media impact cognitive development, the book addresses a topic often neglected amid societal concerns about pathological media use and vulnerability to media effects, such as ag...

To learn more about the constellation of values, attitudes and beliefs about teaching held by college instructors, a new six-item scale was developed to measure "teacher awareness of goals of students" (TAGS). TAGS was used in conjunction with adaptations of previously validated scales to assess relationships with positive teacher attitudes exempli...

Many ancestral languages (AL) are at imminent risk of extinction due to societal changes that pressure minority communities to assimilate with dominant cultures and forgo usage of their AL. This study aimed to encourage caregiver-child dyads to converse in Lazuri, an endangered AL in Rize, Turkey. Dyads (N=59; child age M=30.7 months, range 15-48)...

When engaged in conversation, both parents and children tend to re-use words that their partner has just said. This study explored whether proportions of maternal and/or child utterances that overlapped in content with what their partner had just said contributed to growth in mean length of utterance (MLU), developmental sentence score, and vocabul...

Global changes have brought about conditions that make it difficult for indigenous communities to sustain traditional cultural practices, including their ancestral languages (AL) (Baker, 2011; Gorenflo, Romaine, Mittermeier, & Walker-Painemilla, 2012; Greenfield, 2009). Maintaining an AL at home has been long regarded as an important aspect of ethn...

How We Teach Now provides an accessible introduction to student-centered teaching methods that aim to create varied learning opportunities for students to develop liberal arts and professional skills (such as critical thinking, oral and written communication, collaboration and teamwork) in addition to discipline-specific content knowledge. Chapters...

How We Teach Now provides an accessible introduction to student-centered teaching methods that aim to create varied learning opportunities for students to develop liberal arts and professional skills (such as critical thinking, oral and written communication, collaboration and teamwork) in addition to discipline-specific content knowledge. Chapters...

Although the challenges that autistic students face adapting to college are often pronounced, they are similar to the challenges that students with other disabilities face (e.g., difficulties with social interaction, self-advocacy, and executive functioning). However, extant evaluations of services for autistic college students are very limited des...

Autistic and non-autistic adults’ agreement with scientific knowledge about autism, how they define autism, and their endorsement of stigmatizing conceptions of autism has not previously been examined. Using an online survey, we assessed autism knowledge and stigma among 636 adults with varied relationships to autism, including autistic people and...