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The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and that the degree of memory accessibility conventionally associated with different types of NPs does not have a strong effect on sentence processing.

Child physical activity, sugar-free beverage consumption, and screen time improved in both groups over the course of the trial. Only the theory-based intervention was efficacious in increasing child FV consumption. The EMPOWER program was robust for inducing change in the home environment leading to an increase in child FV intake (Cohen's f = 0.160).

In this study, 166 undergraduates from an Educational Psychology subject pool were randomly assigned to different task value instructional inductions (utility, attainment, and control) to determine whether inducing students with differing task values would be effective and result in different degrees of engagement for a learning task, as well as result in different degrees of conceptual change on the topic of the causes of the common cold. It was hypothesized participants would adopt characteristics that were consistent with the task value with which they were induced, that the participants in the utility, attainment, and control conditions would differ in their engagement, and that participants in the utility, attainment, and control conditions would experience differing degrees of conceptual change. A pretest-posttest control group experimental design was utilized for the study, in which a pretest and posttest measure of participants' conceptual understandings of the causes of the common cold was employed to determine the degree of conceptual change each participant experienced over time. Results from the analyses of participants' responses to measures of their approaches to the reading task on the causes of the common cold, as well as measures of perceived task value, revealed that participants tended to adopt approaches to the reading v