
Tobias RichterUniversity of Wuerzburg | JMU
Tobias Richter
Dr. phil.
About
206
Publications
127,924
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (206)
In social cognition, knowledge-based validation of information is usually regarded as relying on strategic and resource-demanding processes. Research on language comprehension, in contrast, suggests that validation processes are involved in the construction of a referential representation of the communicated information. This view implies that indi...
In this article, we examine the cognitive processes that are involved when readers comprehend conflicting information in multiple texts. Starting from the notion of routine validation during comprehension, we argue that readers' prior beliefs may lead to a biased processing of conflicting information and a one-sided mental model of controversial is...
Inductive learning, that is, abstracting conceptual knowledge, rules, or principles from exemplars, plays a major role in educational settings, from literacy acquisition to mathematics and science learning. Interleaving exemplars of different categories rather than presenting blocks might be a simple but powerful way to improve inductive learning b...
Reading is a popular leisure activity for children, teenagers, and adults. Several theories agree that reading might improve social cognition, but the empirical evidence remains tentative, with research on adolescents especially lacking. We employed a very large, and nationally representative, longitudinal dataset from the National Educational Pane...
The life-long acquisition of knowledge is a major research topic in educational psychology. Many approaches based on the idea of learning as information processing treat learning primarily as the expansion of knowledge and the enrichment of existing knowledge structures with new information. In this article, we argue for a slightly different concep...
Being able to comprehend informal arguments in scientific texts is important for scientific literacy in higher education. Successful intervention studies demonstrating that these skills can be trained in university students have not yet provided evidence that gains of explicit training can be maintained beyond immediate post-training assessment. In...
Zusammenfassung
Lernen begleitet uns unser Leben lang, von der frühkindlichen Bildung über Schule, Ausbildung und Universität bis hin zum Lernen im Beruf. Vieles von dem, was wir lernen, wird aber rasch wieder vergessen. Die Nutzung von Übungstests ist eine Lernstrategie, die zum Erwerb nachhaltigen Wissens beiträgt, also Wissen, das dauerhaft zur...
Many current theories propose that engaging in stories in which human interaction and interpersonal relationships are addressed might train social-cognitive skills (theory of mind, empathy), but research has rarely focused on TV series as a prevalent audiovisual form of stories and on narrative processes (i.e., transportation and identification) th...
Generated information is better recognized and recalled than information that is read. This generation effect has been replicated several times for different types of material, including texts. Perhaps the most influential demonstration is by McDaniel, Einstein, Dunay, and Cobb ( Journal of Memory and Language , 1986, 25(6), 645–656; henceforth MED...
Die Ursachen für schwache Leseleistungen können vielfältig sein und umfassen (neben allgemeinkognitiven und physiologischen Ursachen) mögliche Defizite in allen am Leseverstehen beteiligten kognitiven Teilprozessen auf der Wort-, Satz- und Textebene. Um zielgerichtete Interventionsmaßnahmen entwickeln zu können, muss zunächst das spezifische Defizi...
Mind-wandering during reading is often associated with worse comprehension performance. Research suggests that metacognitive competences (i.e., the knowledge about as well as monitoring and regulation of one’s own cognitive processes) are positively related to reading performance and may play a role in the prevalence of mind-wandering. However, whe...
Background
Children with low reading skills are less frequently engaged in reading activities and therefore the likelihood of improving their reading skills decreases. Digital game‐based interventions have emerged as a promising tool for promoting reading development in children, particularly those with reading difficulties. As syllable‐based readi...
When researching socioscientific topics, particularly on the Internet, readers face multiple texts that they must integrate into a coherent mental model. Previous research in monolingual settings has found that comprehension is biased toward readers’ prior beliefs (text-belief consistency effect). Considering that the Internet is multilingual, this...
Inhibitory control develops rapidly and nonlinearly, making its accurate assessment challenging. This research investigated the developmental dynamics of accuracy and response latency in inhi-bitory control assessment of 3-to 6-year-old children in a longitudinal study (N = 431; 212 girls; M age = 4.86 years, SD = 0.99) and a cross-sectional study...
Rational thinking describes the ability to suppress heuristic thinking processes and to override them with systematic ones. In view of the high degree of required self-organization and decision-making skills that learning at the university demands, this ability seems relevant. In this study, 299 subjects completed four subtests on cognitive biases...
Exposure to narratives may have beneficial effects on children's social‐cognitive development because narratives provide information about the social world and often require social understanding for story comprehension. In the current study, we examined the influence of narratives presented via different media (books, audiobooks, TV/films) on theor...
Computerbasierte Screeningverfahren von Lernschwierigkeiten ermöglichen eine besonders ökonomische Erfassung von Leistungsrückständen. Mit dem LONDI-Screening liegt nun ein entsprechendes Verfahren für die Grundschule vor, das neben den schulischen Basisfertigkeiten Rechtschreiben und Rechnen auch das Lesen abdeckt. In drei unabhängigen Studien mit...
Leseprozesse basieren im digitalen Kontext auf denselben kognitiven Grundlagen wie beim Lesen gedruckter Materialien, einschließlich der Verarbeitung von Informationen auf Wort-, Satz- und Textebene. Zudem hat die Bedeutung des Lesens durch die Digitalisierung keineswegs ab-, sondern eher zugenommen. Allerdings ergeben sich Unterschiede zwischen de...
Lesen ist eine Kulturtechnik, die bedingt durch den schnellen technologischen Wandel selbst fortlaufender Veränderung unterworfen ist. Die inzwischen vorwiegend in der digitalen Welt stattfindende Lesetätigkeit unterscheidet sich zum Teil von der traditionellen Rezeption gedruckter Texte. Beispielsweise birgt das Lesen auf dem Bildschirm die Gefahr...
Reading words accurately and fast is an important step in the process of learning to read that is not mastered by all children. They are stuck in letter-by-letter, slow and error-prone reading. Because of stable reading development trajectories, early interventions are needed. To address the heterogeneous reading difficulties, individualized suppor...
Eine vegane Ernährung liegt im Trend, sodass immer mehr Eltern nicht nur sich selbst, sondern auch ihre Kinder vegan ernähren möchten und dafür Rat und Empfehlungen im Internet suchen. Eine schnelle Recherche zu diesem Thema ergibt dabei eine ganze Bandbreite an Suchergebnissen – Internetauftritte renommierter Zeitschriften und zentraler Einrichtun...
Background
Practice tests have been shown to be an effective means to foster long-term retention in higher education, at least compared to restudying (i.e., the testing effect).
Objective
The present study replicated and extended prior research by examining whether and to what extent the positive effects of testing on long-term retention in a typi...
The vocabulary of bilingual children is determined by various linguistic factors that develop depending on the language input and individual factors of these children. To understand vocabulary development and to be able to support these children accordingly, the assessment instruments essentially need to be adapted to this individual process. The c...
Children with mathematical difficulties need to spend more time than typically achieving children on solving even simple equations. Since these tasks already require a larger share of their cognitive resources, additional demands imposed by the need to switch between tasks may lead to a greater decline of performance in children with mathematical d...
Assessing inhibitory control in young children poses a challenge because of its rapid and nonlinear development. This study examined the validity of integrating response accuracy and latency through a two-factor model, based on the data of 271 children who completed a computerized inhibitory control task. Although integrating response accuracy and...
Purpose: To understand complex expository text, readers often engage in metacognitive comprehension monitoring. Metacognitive monitoring is assumed to rely on basic cognitive abilities (working memory updating, short-term memory, verbal intelligence). These abilities decrease in later adulthood. We thus compared younger and older adults in their co...
Emotional shifts in stories are assumed to contribute to narrative persuasion by enhancing engagement with the story. This effect might depend on the congruency of audiences’ emotional experience to the emotions implied by the story. In two experiments with wellcontrolled story manipulations, we compared the persuasive effect of stories with shifts...
Varying emotional content guides audiences’ attention during story reception. This study explored audiences’ emotional responses to stories to examine how emotional flow is related to the narrative material in valence and structure. We investigated the match between textual and emotional valence trajectories and examined accompanying further immedi...
Learning can be made more efficient when learners generate the to-be-learned text contents instead of passively receiving them. A multi-level meta-analysis was conducted to provide an overall estimate of the text generation effect’s magnitude and to identify theoretically and practically relevant moderators. Overall, generation interventions improv...
The ability to comprehend and evaluate informal arguments is important for making sense of scientific texts and scientific reasoning. However, university students often lack the skills necessary to comprehend the functional structure and evaluate the structural plausibility of informal arguments. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiven...
The purpose of this study was to examine if prosodic patterns in oral reading derived from Recurrence Quan-tification Analysis (RQA) could distinguish between struggling and skilled German readers in Grades 2 (n = 67) and 4 (n = 69). Furthermore, we investigated whether models estimated with RQA measures outperformed models estimated with prosodic...
Readers’ prior beliefs can slant their mental models of conflicting information in favor of perspectives and standpoints that support them. Previous research suggests that reader’s (meta-)cognitive resources might protect them from belief biases in the mental representation of controversial textual information. Since critical thinking dispositions...
Research suggests that children suffering from different types of disorders (learning disorders, behavioral disorders, or intellectual disabilities) are sometimes evaluated differently simply due to the presence of a diagnostic label. We conducted a multilevel meta-analysis of experimental studies (based on data from 8,295 participants and on 284 e...
The general knowledge questions introduced by Nelson and Narens (Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(3), 338–368, 1980) have been a valuable research tool in various areas of cognitive research. We translated, updated, and expanded the set of questions for German. We present a total set of 356 general knowledge questions with their r...
Readers often prioritize processing and comprehension of information perceived as relevant to a particular intention. Using a repeated-measurement study, we investigated how readers’ prior beliefs and external reading perspectives influence processing and comprehension of belief-relevant texts on two socioscientific controversies. University studen...
Background
Commercial speed‐reading training programs are typically marketed with the promise to dramatically increase reading speed without impairing comprehension. From the perspective of reading psychology, it seems quite unlikely that speed‐reading training can indeed have such effects. However, research on the effectiveness of modern speed‐rea...
Zahlreiche Hochschulen in Deutschland bieten ein Frühstudium an, um motivierte
Jugendliche als zukünftige Leistungsträgerinnen und -träger frühzeitig an die eigene Institution zu binden. Bisher wurde jedoch noch kaum untersucht, ob sich die Bildungsverläufe der Frühstudierenden auch über das Ende ihrer Schulzeit hinaus erfolgreich gestalten. Wir fü...
Reading stories is a popular leisure activity in Western societies. Several current theories agree that reading might improve social cognition. Priming, in terms of an activation of content stored in long-term memory and facilitation of subsequent cognitive processing, has been proposed as a mechanism that leads to a temporary increase in social–co...
We examined the interplay of message plausibility and trustworthiness in the validation of tweet-like messages. Reading times served as implicit indicator for validation and participants rated the tweets’ plausibility and source credibility. In Experiment 1, plausibility was varied via text-belief consistency and trustworthiness via the message’s f...
The benefits of practice testing for long-term learning are well established in many contexts. However, little is known about learner characteristics that might moderate its effectiveness. The effects of practice tests might depend on individual prerequisites for learning, especially in real-world educational settings. We explored whether the effec...
Creating lasting knowledge is an important goal of education. But how much do students retain what they have learned in school beyond the next class assignment? Is school instruction suitable for creating lasting knowledge and skills? And what can teachers do to foster the learning of lasting knowledge? We present a selective overview of research o...
Spacing repeated study phases across multiple sessions instead of studying and restudying the learning material in one session only is an effective strategy to promote lasting learning. However, most studies demonstrating the spacing effect were conducted in the laboratory, using simple verbal material. Learning in educational contexts differs rega...
Inhibitory control is a core executive function that develops during childhood and is measured with tasks that require the inhibition of a dominant response. The current study examined the diagnostic value of using response accuracy and latency in a simple inhibitory control test, the computerized Pointing-Stroop Task (cPST), for kindergarten child...
Recent theory on narrative processes suggests that changes in recipients’ emotional responses (emotional shifts) are characteristic of immersed story processing and precursors of narrative impact. In two experiments and a pilot study, a novel self-probed emotional retrospection task was used to measure emotional shifts. We examined the link between...
In this chapter, major trends in the development of metacognitive competences and its relationship to various aspects of cognitive/academic performance are described, with a focus on metamemory and reading comprehension. In a first step, classic and more recent theoretical models of metacognitive competences are presented that elaborate on the deve...
Proponents of the testing effect claim that answering questions about the learning content benefits retention more than does additional restudying—even without corrective feedback. In educational contexts, evidence for this claim is scarce and points toward differential effects for different question formats: Benefits emerged for short-answer quest...
The inconsistency task is used to measure metacognitive monitoring in text comprehension via online (reading time) and offline measures (number of detected inconsistencies). Few studies have examined stability in task performance and interindividual differences. We addressed these issues with adolescents (N = 341) in Grades 6/7 (Mage = 12.02 years)...
The use of masculine generics (i.e., grammatically masculine forms that refer to both men and women) is prevalent in many languages but has been criticized for potentially triggering male bias. Empirical evidence for this claim exists but is often based on small and selective samples. This study is a high-powered and pre-registered replication and...
Reading is an essential ability and a cornerstone of education. However, learning to read can be challenging for children. To scaffold young learners, a number of reading interventions were developed, including a syllable-based approach in German, which has proven to be successful, but resource and time consuming through individual interaction by e...
Background
Retrieval practice promotes retention of learned information more than restudying the information. However, benefits of multiple-choice testing over restudying in real-world educational contexts and the role of practically relevant moderators such as feedback and learners’ ability to retrieve tested content from memory (i.e., retrievabil...
Die Frage, wie sich die Schulzeitverkürzung auf Programme der außerschulischen Begabtenförderung auswirkt, ist bislang wenig beachtet worden. Wir untersuchten, ob sich die Würzburger Frühstudierenden des achtjährigen Gymnasiums (G8) von denen des neunjährigen Gymnasiums (G9) unterscheiden. Hierzu wurden Teilnehmende der G8-Kohorte (N = 377) mit den...
Readers use prior knowledge to evaluate the validity of statements and detect false information without effort and strategic control. The present study expands this research by exploring whether people also non-strategically detect information that threatens their social identity. Participants (N = 77) completed a task in which they had to respond...
Einige Hochschulen stellen Studieninteressierten Online-Self-Assessments zur Verfügung, um sie bei der Entscheidung für ein Studienfach durch valide Informationen zu unterstützen und einem Studierendenschwund vorzubeugen. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt die Entwicklung fachspezifischer Online-Self-Assessments für die Studienfächer Biologie, Chemie, Infor...
Zusammenfassung. Über die Struktur des Arbeitsmarkts für Psychologinnen und Psychologen, insbesondere über die quantitative Verteilung von Stellen auf verschiedene Beschäftigungsbereiche, berufliche Tätigkeiten, geforderte Kompetenzen und Abschlüsse, liegen keine zuverlässigen und aktuellen Informationen vor. Wir berichten die Ergebnisse einer syst...
Fiction-when it is listened to, or when it appears in print, film, and video games-introduces people not only to storyworlds, but also to characters, their relationships, and complex social interactions. A growing body of research suggests that people who listen to, read, or watch fiction may learn social skills from stories through various mechani...
This chapter explores the effects of literariness on readers’ psychological
and social understandings within and beyond literary texts. Literariness is
introduced as (a) a function of specific textual features that create linguistic foregrounding
and (b) the positioning of a text as literary through para-textual signifiers
(such as non-fiction and...
Distributed learning is often recommended as a general learning strategy, but previous research has established its benefits mainly for learning with repeated materials. In two experiments, we investigated distributed learning with complementary text materials. 77 (Experiment 1) and 130 (Experiment 2) seventh graders read two texts, massed vs. dist...
When pursuing a controversial socio-scientific issue, readers are expected to construct balanced representations that include overlapping and opposing information. However, readers’ mental representations are often biased towards their prior beliefs. Previous research on such text-belief consistency effects have been conducted mostly in monolingual...
Teacher’s evaluation of students is sometimes negatively affected by diagnostic labels. We explored such negative effects caused by the labels “dyscalculia”, “dyslexia”, and “ADHD” in teacher students. In Experiment 1, we varied the presence of the dyscalculia and dyslexia label in vignettes between participants. The dyslexia but not the dyscalculi...
Gifted underachievers perform worse in school than would be expected based on their high intelligence. Possible causes for underachievement are low motivational dispositions (need for cognition) and metacognitive competences. This study tested the interplay of these variables longitudinally with gifted and non‐gifted students from Germany (N = 341,...
Pre-existing beliefs bias mental representations of socio-scientific controversies in favour of the perspective(s) that endorse(s) them. Several conditions have been proposed to moderate such belief-biased mental representations of controversial information. The present study examined the effects of readers’ prior beliefs on their mental models of...
This study examined the role of source credibility in the validation of factual information embedded in short narratives. In a self-paced reading experiment, we tested the assumption that the degree of (im-)plausibility determines the extent that source credibility affects validation during comprehension. We used reading times of target and spillov...
Readers are expected to construct balanced mental representations of socioscientific issues discussed across controversial documents. However, readers tend to be biased toward documents that present belief-consistent perspectives and tend to refute documents that argue against their stance (text-belief consistency effect). Published studies on text...
Training of Word Recognition with Willy Wordbear: A Syllable-Based Reading Promotion Program for Elementary School Being able to read words fluently and accurately is an important milestone in learning to read but not all children reach it. For weak readers, it is often difficult to make the transition from letter-by-letter reading to visual word r...
The ability to spell words correctly is a key competence for educational and professional achievement. Economical procedures are essential to identify children with spelling problems as early as possible. Given the strong evidence showing that reading and spelling are based on the same orthographic knowledge, error detection tasks (EDT) could be co...
Prior beliefs often bias the comprehension of multiple science-related texts such that belief-consistent texts are better comprehended compared to belief-inconsistent texts (text-belief consistency effect). Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether a metacognitive strategy training focusing on belief-biasing validation processes can red...
Der Erwerb von Prozessen der visuellen Worterkennung steht am Anfang des Prozesses des Lesenlernens und ist gleichzeitig eine Hürde im Zusammenhang mit dem Leseverstehen, die nicht alle Kinder problemlos meistern. So gelingt es einigen Kindern nicht, Wörter flüssig zu lesen. Besonders bei langen Wörtern geraten sie immer wieder ins Stocken, selbst...
Readers confronted with unfamiliar and controversial scientific debates tend to rely on simple heuristics such as the perceived plausibility to focus their cognitive resources on specific information during comprehension. In the present experiment, we tested the assumption that plausibility judgments as an integral part of comprehension are used as...
Generated information is better recognized and recalled than information that is read. This so‐called generation effect has been replicated several times for different types of material, including texts. Perhaps the most influential demonstration was by McDaniel, Einstein, Dunay, and Cobb (1986; henceforth MEDC). This group tested whether the gener...
Einleitung
In der vorliegenden Arbeit wurde das Potenzial von tabletbasierten Fehleridentifikationstests zur Erfassung der Rechtschreibleistung in der Grundschule untersucht. Studien aus dem englischen Sprachraum belegen hohe Zusammenhänge zwischen Leistungen in klassischen Diktaten und Leistungen in Aufgaben, in denen Rechtschreibfehler in präsent...
Recent studies suggest that readers need to reach a certain word-recognition accuracy threshold first before word-recognition speed starts to improve. In a longitudinal study, 1095 German primary school children were followed from Grades 1–4. Word-recognition accuracy and speed were assessed at the end of Grades 1–4 and reading comprehension at the...
Reading narrative literature is discussed as an influencing factor on the development of social-cognitive skills. Transportability, which is the tendency to immerse into narrative worlds, has been proposed as a moderator within this relationship, with high-transportable individuals being assumed to profit more from narratives. The current study exa...
Validation of text information as a general mechanism for detecting inconsistent or false information is an integral part of text comprehension. This study examined how the credibility of the information source affects validation processes. Two experiments investigated combined effects of source credibility and plausibility of information during va...
Lay Description
What is already known about this topic
Testing is a commonly used technique to assess progress in computer‐assisted learning environments
Students often benefit from the testing effect, that is practicing retrieval of information (testing) from memory benefits long‐term retention compared to restudying
Currently, empirical evidence...