Can a brief exposure to nature at the end of a workday enhance sustained attention and long-term memory? Student advisors viewed a video of either a natural environment or a busy city street after work. Then they performed a tone-detection task that was intended to mimic a key feature of their job (being on the telephone). After the nature video, systolic blood pressure increased and response latencies remained stable across time. After the city video, systolic blood pressure remained unchanged from baseline, whereas response latencies increased over time. Self-reports of arousal and emotional state did not differ significantly between videos, whereas memory of the experimental setting was better after viewing the nature video. In sum, a brief contact with nature at the end of a workday may give an individual vigor to complete additional tasks but not improve his or her affect.

In this experiment, we examined the degree to which four implicit tests and two explicit tests, all involving auditory presentation, were sensitive to the perceptual characteristics of the stimuli presented during study. Presenting stimuli visually decreased priming in all the implicit memory tests, relative to auditory presentation. However, changing voice between study and test decreased priming only in the implicit memory tests requiring identification of words degraded by noise or by low-pass filtering, but not in those tests requiring generation from word portions (stems and fragments). Modality effects without voice effects were observed in cued recall, but the opposite pattern of results (voice effects without modality effects) was obtained in recognition. The primary new finding is the demonstration that auditory memory tests, both explicit and implicit, differ in their sensitivity to the perceptual information encoded during study.

In many societies across the globe, females are still underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM fields), although they are reported to have higher grades in high school and college than males. The present study was guided by the assumption that the sustainability of higher education critically rests on the academic success of both male and female students under conditions of equitable educational options, practices, and contents. It first assessed the persistence of familiar patterns of gender bias (e.g., do competencies at enrollment, serving as academic precursors, and academic performance favor females?) in college students of a society in transition from a gender-segregated workforce with marked gender inequalities to one whose aims at integrating into the global economy demand that women pursue once forbidden careers thought to be the exclusive domain of men. It then examined how simple indices of academic readiness, as well as preferences for fields fitting traditional gender roles, could predict attainment of key competencies and motivation to graduate (as measured by the average number of credits completed per year) in college. As expected, females had a higher high school GPA. Once in college, they were underrepresented in a major that fitted traditional gender roles (interior design) and over-represented in one that did not fit (business). Female students’ performance and motivation to graduate did not differ between the male-suited major of business and the female-suited major of interior design. Male students’ performance and motivation to graduate were higher in engineering than in business, albeit both majors were gender-role consistent. Although high school GPA and English proficiency scores predicted performance and motivation for all, preference for engineering over business also predicted males’ performance and motivation. These findings offered a more complex picture of patterns of gender bias, thereby inspiring the implementation of targeted educational interventions to improve females’ motivation for and enrollment in STEM fields, nowadays increasingly available to them, as well as to enhance males’ academic success in non-STEM fields such as business.

Existing research has identified gender as a driving variable of student success in higher education: women attend college at a higher rate and are also more successful than their male peers. We build on the extant literature by asking whether specific cognitive variables (i.e., self-efficacy and causal attribution habits) distinguish male and female students with differing academic performance levels. Using a case study, we collected data from students enrolled in a general education course (sample size N = 400) at a large public university in the United States. Our findings indicate that while students’ course grades and cumulative college grades did not vary by gender, female and male students reported different self-efficacy and causal attribution habits for good grades and poor grades. To illustrate, self-efficacy for female students is broad and stretches across all their courses; in contrast, for male students, it is more limited to specific courses. These gender differences in cognition, particularly in accounting for undesirable events, may assist faculty members and advisors in understanding how students respond to difficulties and challenges.

In this study, we examined how implicit and explicit memory for perceptual information (modality and voice) and lexical information varied across three subject groups: healthy young adults, healthy older adults, and age-matched older adults with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). These groups exhibited cross-modality (abstract) priming of the same magnitude. However, young adults produced greater modality- and voice-specific priming than the other two groups, whose performance was equivalent, suggesting that aging, but not DAT, reduced form-specific priming. Young adults demonstrated better recognition memory than healthy older adults, who in turn exhibited better recognition memory than older adults with DAT. In young adults, recognition memory was also sensitive to perceptual information. These findings indicate that aging can affect implicit memory for perceptual information, whereas DAT magnifies the effect of aging on explicit memory.