This article explores the effects of undergraduate students’ mental models of the Web on their online searching behavior. Forty-four undergraduate students, mainly freshmen and sophomores, participated in the study. Subjects’ mental models of the Web were treated as equally good styles and operationalized as drawings of their perceptions about the Web. Four types of mental models of the Web wer...

*Correspondence: Ferran Argelaguet Sanz, Hybrid Team, Inria Rennes, Campus de Beaulieu, Rennes 35042, France e-mail: fernando.argelaguet_sanz@ inria.fr Athletes’ performances are influenced by internal and external factors, including their psychological state and environmental factors, especially during competition. As a consequence, current training programs include stress management. In this ...

Symmetry is usually computationally expensive to encode reliably, and yet it is relatively effortless to perceive. Here, we extend F. J. A. M. Poirier and H. R. Wilson's (2006) model for shape perception to account for H. R. Wilson and F. Wilkinson's (2002) data on shape symmetry. Because the model already accounts for shape perception, only minimal neural circuitry is required to enable it to ...

This paper focuses on the impact of users’ mental model for the performance when interacting with mobile devices. Investigating the interrelation between the quality of the mental model and the performance, users had to accomplish standard applications with cell phones (study 1) and a PDA (study 2). Navigation routes were individually analyzed and the respective effectiveness and efficiency of ...

The current research examined the influence of loud music on driving performance, and whether mental effort mediated this effect. Participants (N = 69) drove in a driving simulator either with or without listening to music. In order to test whether music would have similar effects on driving performance in different situations, we manipulated the simulated traffic environment such that the driv...

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of mental abacus training for children on their working memory. Suppression tasks were manipulated to investigate the roles played by visuo-spatial sketchpad and phonological loop for working memory of the primary task in tree experiments. The results showed that children who had received mental abacus training exhibited better performance on d...

It is well established that performance on standard mental rotation tasks improves with training (Peters et al., 1995), but thus far there is little consensus regarding the degree of transfer to other tasks which also involve mental rotation. In Experiment 1, we assessed the effect of mental rotation training on participants' Mental Rotation Test (MRT) scores. Twenty-eight participants were ran...

Endurance performance involves the prolonged maintenance of constant or self-regulated power/velocity or torque/force. While the impact of numerous determinants of endurance performance has been previously reviewed, the impact of fatigue on subsequent endurance performance still needs to be documented. This review aims to present the impact of fatigue induced by physical or mental exertion on s...

The current research examined the influence of loud music on driving performance, and whether mental effort mediated this effect. Participants (N=69) drove in a driving simulator either with or without listening to music. In order to test whether music would have similar effects on driving performance in different situations, we manipulated the simulated traffic environment such that the drivin...

Previous studies have suggested that decision aid support can positively affect performance on dynamic decision making tasks. However, few studies have examined the effects of decision aid support on the cognitive mechanisms underpinning performance. This study tested the relationships between decision aid support (in the form of causal loop diagrams), task complexity, cognitive load, mental mo...