Descriptions of durational relations can be ambiguous, for example, the description "one meeting happened during another" could mean that one meeting started before the other ended, or it could mean that the meetings started and ended simultaneously. A recent theory posits that people mentally simulate descriptions of durational events…

Categorization is the foundation of many cognitive functions. Importantly, the categories we use to structure the world are informed by the language we speak. For example, whether we perceive dark blue, light blue, and green to be shades of one, two, or three different colors depends on whether we speak Berinmo, English, or Russian, respectively.…

The recognition memory receiver operating characteristic (ROC) is typically asymmetric with a characteristic elevation of the left-hand portion. Whereas the unequal variance signal detection model (uvsd) assumes the asymmetry results because old item evidence is noisier than new item evidence, the dual process signal detection model (dpsd) assumes…

This study investigated to what extent people can develop global spatial representations of a multiroom environment through one-shot physical walking between rooms. In Experiment 1, the participants learned objects' locations in one room of an immersive virtual environment. They were blindfolded and led to walk to a testing position either within…

The Chinese writing system is different from English in that individual words both comprise one to four characters and are not separated by clear word boundaries (e.g., interword spaces). These differences raise the question of how readers of Chinese know where to move their eyes to support efficient lexical processing? The widely accepted…

Theories of memory consolidation suggest that initially rich, vivid memories become more gist-like over time. However, it is unclear whether gist-like representations reflect a loss of detail through degradation or the blending of experiences into statistical averages, and whether the strength of these representations increases, decreases, or…

Relying on shared tasks and stimuli to conduct research can enhance the replicability of findings and allow a community of researchers to collect large data sets across multiple experiments. This approach is particularly relevant for experiments in spatial navigation, which often require the development of unfamiliar large-scale virtual…

The increased Simon effect with increasing the ratio of congruent trials may be interpreted by both attention modulation and irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations learning accounts, although the reversed Simon effect with increasing the ratio of incongruent trials provides evidence supporting the latter account. To investigate if…

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A…

Grounded or embodied cognition research has employed body-object interaction (BOI; e.g., Pexman et al., 2019) ratings to investigate sensorimotor effects during language processing. We investigated relationships between BOI ratings and nonarbitrary statistical mappings between words' phonological forms and their syntactic category in English;…