Memory plays a critical role in time estimation, yet detailed mechanisms underlying temporal memory have not been fully understood. The current fMRI study investigated memory phenomena in absolute identification of time durations and lengths. In both time and length identification, participants responded faster to end-of-range stimuli (e.g. the shortest or longest items of the stimulus set) than to middle stimuli. Participants performed worse in the incongruent condition (mismatch between time and length in the stimulus position) than in the congruent condition indicating cross-dimensional interference between time and length. Both phenomena reflect increased difficulty of retrieving information relevant to the current context in the presence of context-irrelevant information. A region in the lateral inferior prefrontal cortex (LIPFC) showed a greater response to the middle stimuli and in the incongruent condition suggesting greater demands for controlled memory retrieval. A cognitive model based on the ACT-R declarative memory mechanisms accounted for the major behavioral and imaging results. The results suggest that contextual effects in temporal memory can be understood in terms of domain-general memory principles established outside the time estimation domain.
The current study investigated how item formats and their inherent affordances influence test‐takers’ cognition under uncertainty. Adult participants solved content‐equivalent math items in multiple‐selection multiple‐choice and four alternative grid formats. The results indicated that participants’ affirmative response tendency (i.e., judge the given information as True) was affected by the presence of a grid, type of grid options, and their visual layouts. The item formats further affected the test scores obtained from the alternatives keyed True and the alternatives keyed False, and their psychometric properties. The current results suggest that the affordances rendered by item design can lead to markedly different test‐taker behaviors and can potentially influence test outcomes. They emphasize that a better understanding of the cognitive implications of item formats could potentially facilitate item design decisions for large‐scale educational assessments.
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