Several theories suggest that actions are coded for imitation in terms of mentalistic goals, or inferences about the actor's intentions, and that these goals solve the "correspondence problem" by allowing sensory input to be translated into matching motor output. We tested this intention reading hypothesis against general process accounts of…

Learning to identify objects as members of categories is an essential cognitive skill and learning to deploy attention effectively is a core component of that process. The present study investigated an assumption imbedded in formal models of categorization: error is necessary for attentional learning. Eye-trackers were used to record participants'…

Participants (aged 5-6 yrs, 9-10 yrs and adults) rated (using a five-point scale) grammatical (intransitive) and overgeneralized (transitive causative) uses of a high frequency, low frequency and novel intransitive verb from each of three semantic classes [Pinker, S. (1989a). "Learnability and cognition: the acquisition of argument structure."…

Studies of autobiographical memory have shown that observed levels of incidental learning are often relatively low. Do low levels of retention result simply from a low learning rate, or is learning also asymptotic? To address this question, it is necessary to trace performance over a large number of learning opportunities, and this was carried out…

Narrow Window theory, suggested by Y. Kareev ten years ago, has so far focused on one central implication of the limited capacity of working memory on intuitive correlation estimation, namely, overestimation of the distal population correlation. This paper points to additional and perhaps more dramatic implications due to the large dispersion of…

In the past, the nature of the compositional units proposed for spoken language has largely diverged from the types of control units pursued in the domains of other skilled motor tasks. A classic source of evidence as to the units structuring speech has been patterns observed in speech errors--"slips of the tongue". The present study reports, for…

Five experiments demonstrated that 6.5-month-olds perseverated in a violation-of-expectation task to examine reasoning about width information in containment events. After watching a familiarization event in which a ball was lowered into a wide container, infants failed to detect the violation when the same ball was lowered into a container half…

According to a recent account of infants' acquisition of their physical knowledge, the incremental-knowledge account, infants form distinct event categories, such as occlusion, containment, support, and collision events. In each category, infants identify one or more vectors which correspond to distinct problems that must be solved. For each…

Undergraduates listened to a list of words and nonwords. They then listened to a list of items, some of which contained phonemic variations of items in the first list, and stated whether items had been presented previously. Subjects made more recognition errors to items that had phonemic variations occurring near the beginning rather than the end…

First graders listened to the pronunciation of single syllable nonsense words and were asked to spell the words. Results showed that, for nonsense words of the form consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant, in which the consonant following the vowel was a nasal or a liquid, children often omitted the second consonant in their spelling. (BC)

Sixty-four adults were tested on simple addition and multiplication problems presented in Arabic digit or English number-word format. Overall, response times and error rates were much higher with the word format, but more important, presentation format interacted with arithmetic operation and problem size. (DR)

Examined Korean and Chinese college-level ESL learners for relative reliance on phonological and orthographic processing in English word identification. Found that Korean, but not Chinese, students made more false positive errors in judging stimuli that were homophones to category exemplars than in judging spelling controls. Chinese students made…

This study investigated acquisition of music performance skills over 11 practice trials in novice and expert pianists differing in age, training, and sight-reading ability. The finding of a strong positive relationship between the mastery of temporal constraints and planning abilities within performance suggested that these two cognitive…

Groups of seven- to nine-year olds learning to read in English and German were given three types of reading tasks. Whereas reading time and error rates in numeral and number word reading were very similar across the two orthographies, the German children showed a big advantage in reading the nonsense words, suggesting adoption of different…

Three studies investigated the comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle "only" by children and adults. Contrary to previous findings, two of the studies found that young children made errors predominantly by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to…