We investigated the relations between self-reported math anxiety, task difficulty, and pupil dilation in adults and very young children during math tasks of varying difficulty levels. While task difficulty significantly influenced pupillary responses in both groups, the association between self-reported math anxiety and pupil dilation differed…

Humans have the ability to learn surprisingly complicated statistical information in a variety of modalities and situations, often based on relatively little input. These statistical learning (SL) skills appear to underlie many kinds of learning, but despite their ubiquity, we still do not fully understand precisely what SL is and what individual…

Existing research demonstrates that pre-decisional information sampling strategies are often stable within a given person while varying greatly across people. However, it remains largely unknown what drives these individual differences, that is, why in some circumstances we collect information more idiosyncratically. In this brief report, we…

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief…

When a toddler knows a word, what does she actually know? Many categories have multiple relevant properties; for example, shape "and" color are relevant to membership in the category "banana." How do toddlers prioritize these properties when recognizing familiar words, and are there systematic differences among children? In…

Recent research has begun to explore individual differences in statistical learning, and how those differences may be related to other cognitive abilities, particularly their effects on language learning. In this research, we explored a different type of relationship between language learning and statistical learning: the possibility that learning…

Three experiments examined the effects of interactive visualizations and spatial abilities on a task requiring participants to infer and draw cross sections of a three-dimensional (3D) object. The experiments manipulated whether participants could interactively control a virtual 3D visualization of the object while performing the task, and…

We consider human performance on an optimal stopping problem where people are presented with a list of numbers independently chosen from a uniform distribution. People are told how many numbers are in the list, and how they were chosen. People are then shown the numbers one at a time, and are instructed to choose the maximum, subject to the…