The perceptual fluency hypothesis claims that items that are easy to perceive at encoding induce an illusion that they will be easier to remember, despite the finding that perception does not generally affect recall. The current set of studies tested the predictions of the perceptual fluency hypothesis with a picture generation manipulation.…

The 8-coin insight problem requires the problem solver to move 2 coins so that each coin touches exactly 3 others. Ormerod, MacGregor, and Chronicle (2002) explained differences in task performance across different versions of the 8-coin problem using the availability of particular moves in a 2-dimensional search space. We explored 2 further…

The present study explored the perceptual span (i.e., the physical extent of an area from which useful visual information is extracted during a single fixation) during the reading of Chinese sentences in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, we tested whether the rightward span can go beyond 3 characters when visually similar masks were used. Results…

In this study the visual working memory (VWM) and perception speed of 60 children between the ages of three and six years were tested with an age-based, easy-to-handle Matrix Film Battery Test (reliability R?=?0.71). It was thereby affirmed that the VWM is age dependent (correlation coefficient r?=?0.66***) as expected. Furthermore, a significant…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the associations between elementary school children's mathematical achievement and their conservation abilities, visuospatial skills, and numerosity processing speed. We also assessed differences in these abilities between children with different types of learning problems. In Study 1 (N = 229), we…

Memory performance in linear order reasoning tasks (A > B, B > C, C > D, etc.) shows quicker, and more accurate responses to queries on wider (AD) than narrower (AB) pairs on a hypothetical linear mental model (A -- B -- C -- D). While indicative of an analogue representation, research so far did not provide positive evidence for spatial…

Speech-/language-impaired (SL)-children face problems in school and later life. The significance of "non-cognitive, social-emotional skills" (NCSES) in these children is often underestimated. Aim: Present study of affected SL-children was assessed to analyse the influence of NCSES for long-term school education. Methods: Nineteen…

Allocation of visual attention is crucial for encoding items into visual long-term memory. In free vision, attention is closely linked to the center of gaze, raising the question whether foveal vision loss entails suboptimal deployment of attention and subsequent impairment of object encoding. To investigate this question, we examined visual…

Infants' language exposure largely involves face-to-face interactions providing acoustic and visual speech cues but also social cues that might foster language learning. Yet, both audiovisual speech information and social information have so far received little attention in research on infants' early language development. Using a preferential…

Research on the topic of distractor inhibition has used different empirical approaches to study how the human mind selects relevant information from the environment, and the results are controversially discussed. One key question that typically arises is how selection deals with the irrelevant information. We used a new selection task, in which…

External number representations are commonly used throughout the first years of instruction. The twenty-frame is a grid that contains two rows of 10 dots each, and within each row, dots are organized in two groups of five. The assumption is that children can make use of these structures for enumerating the dots, rather than relying on one-by-one…

In a variety of conflict paradigms, target and distractor stimuli are defined in terms of perceptual features. Interference evoked by distractor stimuli tends to be reduced when the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials is decreased, suggesting conflict-induced perceptual filtering (i.e., adjusting the processing weights assigned to stimuli…

In transparent orthographies like German, isolated learning disabilities in either reading or spelling are common and occur as often as a combined reading and spelling disability. However, most issues surrounding the cognitive causes of these isolated or combined literacy difficulties are yet unresolved. Recently, working memory dysfunctions have…

The present eye-tracking study aimed to investigate the impact of auditory speech information on 12-month-olds' gaze behavior to silently-talking faces. We examined German infants' face-scanning behavior to side-by-side presentation of a bilingual speaker's face silently speaking German utterances on one side and French on the other side, before…

During reading information is acquired from word(s) beyond the word that is currently looked at. It is still an open question whether such parafoveal information can influence the current viewing of a word, and if so, whether such parafoveal-on-foveal effects are attributable to distributed processing or to mislocated fixations which occur when…