A recent theory (Roese & Summerville, 2005) has suggested that regret is intensified by perceptions of future opportunity. In this work, however, it is proposed that feelings of regret are more likely elicited by perceptions of lost opportunity: People regret outcomes that could have been changed in the past but can no longer be changed and for which people experience low psychological closure. Consistent with the lost opportunity principle, Study 1 revealed that regretted experiences in the most commonly regretted life domains are perceived as offering the least opportunity for improvement in the future, Study 2 indicated that people experience the most regret for outcomes that are not repeatable, and Study 3 revealed that perceptions of higher past than future opportunities and low psychological closure predict regret intensity. Discussion focuses on the hope-inducing yet ephemeral nature of perceived future opportunity and on the relationship between dissonance reduction and closure.

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In this paper, we describe software modules that provide both visual and haptic feedback to the student, and evaluate their effectiveness. The system integrates software modules with a haptic interface that can augment teaching and learning in a required undergraduate engineering Dynamics course. Students can change parameters, predict answers, compare outcomes, interact with animations, and feel the results using a haptic interface. Three software modules were evaluated in two separate studies. The first study focused on subjective ratings based on student opinions. The second study assessed the effect of the modules on students' conceptual understanding for force and motion using a pretest/posttest design. The results revealed that the practice with the modules significantly improved the conceptual understanding of the targeted concepts. In addition, students showed a significant preference by stating that the modules would increase their interest in Dynamics as a subject and their engagement in the Dynamics course.

The familiarity difference cue has been regarded as a general cue for making inferential judgments (Honda, Abe, Matsuks, & Yamagishi in Memory and Cognition, 39(5), 851-863, 2011; Schwikert & Curran in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(6), 2341-2365, 2014). The current study tests a model of inference based on familiarity differences that encompasses the recognition heuristic (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 1999, Goldstein & Gigerenzer in Psychological Review, 109(1), 75-90, 2002). In two studies, using a large pool of stimuli, participants rated their familiarity of cities and made choices on a typical city-size task. The data were fitted with the r-s model (Hilbig, Erdfelder, & Pohl in, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 37(4), 827-839, 2011), which was adapted to include familiarity differences. The results indicated that people used the familiarity difference cue because the participants ignored further knowledge in a substantial number of cases when the familiarity difference cue was available. An analysis of reaction-time data further indicated that the response times were shorter for heuristic judgments than for knowledge-only-based judgments. Furthermore, when knowledge was available, the response times were shorter when knowledge was congruent with a heuristic cue than when it was in conflict with it. Differences between the familiarity difference cue and the fluency heuristic (Schooler & Hertwig, 2005, Psychological Review, 112, 610-628) are discussed.

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