Current understanding of the development of quantity representations is based primarily on performance in the number-line task. We posit that the data from number-line tasks reflect the observer's underlying representation of quantity, together with the cognitive strategies and skills required to equate line length and quantity. Here, we specify a…

Speech planning is a sophisticated process. In dialog, it regularly starts in overlap with an incoming turn by a conversation partner. We show that planning spoken responses in overlap with incoming turns is associated with higher processing load than planning in silence. In a dialogic experiment, participants took turns with a confederate…

A basic function of cognition is to detect regularities in sensory input to facilitate the prediction and recognition of future events. It has been proposed that these implicit expectations arise from an internal predictive coding model, based on knowledge acquired through processes such as statistical learning, but it is unclear how different…

Visual representations are prevalent in STEM instruction. To benefit from visuals, students need representational competencies that enable them to see meaningful information. Most research has focused on explicit conceptual representational competencies, but implicit perceptual competencies might also allow students to efficiently see meaningful…

Relational reasoning is a hallmark of human higher cognition and creativity, yet it is notoriously difficult to encourage in abstract tasks, even in adults. Generally, young children initially focus more on objects, but with age become more focused on relations. While prerequisite knowledge and cognitive resource maturation partially explains this…

Investigating instances where lexical selection fails can lead to deeper insights into the cognitive machinery and architecture supporting successful word retrieval and speech production. In this paper, we used a multiplex lexical network approach that combines semantic and phonological similarities among words to model the structure of the mental…

In a behavioral study we analyzed the influence of visual action primes on abstract action sentence processing. We thereby aimed at investigating mental motor involvement during processes of meaning constitution of action verbs in abstract contexts. In the first experiment, participants executed either congruous or incongruous movements parallel…

Cross-situational word learning (XSWL) tasks present multiple words and candidate referents within a learning trial such that word-referent pairings can be inferred only across trials. Adults encode fine phonological detail when two words and candidate referents are presented in each learning trial (2 × 2 scenario; Escudero, Mulak, & Vlach,…

Social learning has been shown to be an evolutionarily adaptive strategy, but it can be implemented via many different cognitive mechanisms. The adaptive advantage of social learning depends crucially on the ability of each learner to obtain relevant and accurate information from informants. The source of informants' knowledge is a particularly…

Propositional attitude verbs, such as "think" and "want," have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the…

Six experiments investigated variables predicted to influence subjects' tendency to classify items by a single property ("rule-based" responding) instead of overall similarity, following the paradigm of Norenzayan et al. (2002, "Cognitive Science"), who found that European Americans tended to give more "logical"…

Stocks and flows (SF) are building blocks of dynamic systems: Stocks change through inflows and outflows, such as our bank balance changing with withdrawals and deposits, or atmospheric CO[subscript 2] with absorptions and emissions. However, people make systematic errors when trying to infer the behavior of dynamic systems, termed SF failure,…

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is widely used to study decision-making within healthy and psychiatric populations. However, the complexity of the IGT makes it difficult to attribute variation in performance to specific cognitive processes. Several cognitive models have been proposed for the IGT in an effort to address this problem, but currently no…

The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated…

In this study, we examined whether the lexical competition process embraced by most models of spoken word recognition is sensitive to talker-specific information. We used a lexical decision task and a long lag priming experiment in which primes and targets sharing all phonemes except the last one (e.g., /bagaR/"fight" vs.…