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Students are often placed in groups to facilitate learning. Understanding the cognitive processes involved when students learn from others is important for creating group situations that facilitate learning. Research from cognitive psychology predicts who will learn most from whom and in what situations. It also provides a set of methods that education researchers can use to further explore "Learning from Others." However, because the goals of cognitive psychologists and educators often differ, it is important to apply cognitive psychology research cautiously within an educational context.

Little is known about the reliability of eyewitness memory among adolescents as most memory research has focused primarily on adults and young children. A number of studies recently have emerged outlining conditions where memory suggestibility increases from early childhood to adulthood. These developmental reversals are found in semantic association tasks such as the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm and have not yet been thoroughly investigated among adolescents. In the current study, we examined DRM performance among 11-21 year olds ( N = 245). Extending the work comparing children and adults, false memory on the DRM task increased with age. False memory on the DRM task was not associated with false memory on a memory conformity task. The different memory processes involved with the tasks and the implications for legal psychology are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Own-race bias, where people are more accurate recognizing faces of people from their own race than other races, can lead to misidentification and, in some cases, innocent people being convicted. This bias was explored in South Africa and England, using Black and White participants. People were shown several photographs of Black and White faces and were later asked if they had seen these faces (and several fillers). In addition, participants were given a questionnaire about inter-racial contact. Cross-race identification accuracy for Black participants was positively correlated with self-reported inter-racial contact. The confidence–accuracy relationship was strongest when making own-race judgements. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postevent misleading information can distort people's memories by altering and adding scenes. But can you also inhibit the retrieval of information from memory? In two studies we show that postevent information can make memory for a scene less accessible. In both studies participants first saw an event (e.g. a restaurant scene displayed in slides, or a drunk-driving incident shown via a video clip). Later they were shown the same event without a critical scene and were told either to use this to generate a story (Experiment 1) or to imagine the event (Experiment 2). Finally they were tested. Relative to controls, this postevent omission led to fewer people reporting the critical scene in free recall and in recognition. Thus, we demonstrated that it may be possible to inhibit memories. This finding has important implications for eyewitness testimony and the recovered memory debate. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies are reported that demonstrate the stability of scales of the arousal strength of warning signal words. We demonstrate that these scales are not an artefact of the measurement technique employed, nor are they influenced by the effects of experimental context. In addition, we generalize previous findings on the arousal strength of signal words to the UK population. Separate studies revealed a high level of agreement in signal word arousal strengths derived from magnitude estimation, category estimation, and cross-modality matching. In addition, the relative arousal strengths of signal words were shown to be independent of the composition of the warning stimulus set. These findings suggest that arousal strength scales of signal words are robust and that signal words can be used with confidence to achieve hazard matching between the hazard inherent in a product/situation and the hazard implied by the associated warning. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much memory research involves recording several autobiographical memories for each of several people. These memories are not independent of each other, an assumption of the statistical procedures used in many cognitive psychology papers. In recent years there have been both statistical and computational advances for modelling these hierarchical data structures. This is often called multilevel modelling . Using data from recent memory research (Burt et al ., 1995), I describe this approach and show how it compares favourably with traditional approaches. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schraw compares two coefficients for the 2 x 2 contingency tables resulting from many feeling of knowing (FOK) studies: Hamann's coefficient and Goodman and Kruskal's y. He favors Hamann's coefficient and gives examples where Hamann's coefficient produces what might be considered the more intuitive result. Further scrutiny reveals that these examples are not as convincing as Schraw makes them out to be. Because Hamann's coefficient depends on the row and column marginals, it does not map onto FOK ability as well as Goodman and Kruskal's γ, which is a direct measure of the diagnostic worth of FOK ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many years psychologists have conducted carefully balanced and controlled experiments in order to understand the processes involved with line-up identifications. While the results are useful, several researchers have questioned whether these experiments are applicable to real line-ups. In this study we compare the results from two specialist line-up suites with the results from ordinary police stations. Witnesses at the suites chose foils more often than witnesses at the police stations. However, characteristics of the crimes, witnesses and suspects at the suites differed from those conducted at the stations. Many of these characteristics are also associated with increased proportions of foils being chosen. For example, the specialist suites tended to accommodate more non-white suspects, more crimes of violence and, at the tine of this research, their line-ups occurred longer after the event. Several of the methodological difficulties of using data from real line-ups are discussed and appropriate statistical techniques are introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reason why misleading post-event information affects later recollections is the subject of a heated debate within cognitive psychology. One series of studies that is often cited is when subjects are allowed a second guess. Loftus (1979) found that the second guesses of errant misled subjects were not above chance levels. This, she argued, suggests that the memory for the original information cannot be accessed at testing. Four studies are reported in which subjects were allowed second guesses. In these studies errant misled subjects' second guesses were better than chance. We discuss how these findings inform the debate about why misinformation affects memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way in which intensifiers affect the meaning of the phrases to which they are applied is investigated. Previous research demonstrates that they often have little impact in between-subject designs. Here we present research which demonstrates that their effects in within-subject designs do not conform to the multiplicative hypothesis. Both the psychological mechanisms employed and the implications for survey methodologists are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vague quantifiers, terms like 'quite a bit' and 'hardly ever', are often used in the response scales of psychology and social science questionnaires to measure the frequency of certain behaviours. However, responses to such questions are confounded because people differ in their interpretations of vague quantifiers. We propose that people interpret vague quantifiers by construction a notion of how most people behave. Examining a critical topic for media researchers—estimating the amount of television watched—we conducted two split-ballot experiments in national surveys. Our first study (n = 1028) demonstrates that the amount people think other people watch varies according to how much television they watch themselves and the behaviour of their social group. Our second experiment (n = 1106) extends this result to the interpretation of vague quantifiers. These findings shed light on the psychological processes involved when interpreting vague quantifiers, and bring into question the validity of many survey results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]