Recall of remembered locations reliably reflects a compromise between a target's true position and its region's prototypical position. The effect is quite robust, and a standard interpretation for these data is that the metric and categorical codings blend in a Bayesian combinatory fashion. However, there has been no direct experimental evidence…

The structure of natural languages give rise to many dependencies in the linear sequences of words, and within words themselves. Detecting these dependencies is arguably critical for young children in learning the underlying structure of their language. There is considerable evidence that human adults and infants are sensitive to the statistical…

The authors investigated how humans use multiple landmarks to locate a goal. Participants searched for a hidden goal location along a line between 2 distinct landmarks on a computer screen. On baseline trials, the location of the landmarks and goal varied, but the distance between each of the landmarks and the goal was held constant, with 1…

Although ownership is acknowledged to exert a potent influence on various aspects of information processing, the origin of these effects remains largely unknown. Based on the demonstration that self-relevance facilitates perceptual judgments (i.e., the self-prioritization effect), here we explored the possibility that ownership enhances object…

A key assumption of dual process theory is that reasoning is an explicit, effortful, deliberative process. The present study offers evidence for an implicit, possibly intuitive component of reasoning. Participants were shown sentences embedded in logically valid or invalid arguments. Participants were not asked to reason but instead rated the…

The current study used Bayesian hierarchical methods to challenge and extend previous work on subtask learning consistency. A general model of individual-level subtask learning was proposed focusing on power and exponential functions with constraints to test for inconsistency. To study subtask learning, we developed a novel computer-based booking…

One of the major debates concerning the nature of inferential reasoning is between counterexample-based theories such as mental model theory and probabilistic theories. This study looks at conclusion updating after the addition of statistical information to examine the hypothesis that deductive reasoning cannot be explained by probabilistic…

While researchers have often sought to understand the learning curve in terms of multiple component processes, few studies have measured and mathematically modeled these processes on a complex task. In particular, there remains a need to reconcile how abrupt changes in strategy use can co-occur with gradual changes in task completion time. Thus,…

Feedback is highly contingent on behavior if it eventually becomes easy to predict, and weakly contingent on behavior if it remains difficult or impossible to predict even after learning is complete. Many studies have demonstrated that humans and nonhuman animals are highly sensitive to feedback contingency, but no known studies have examined how…

Studies on "intertrial priming" have shown that in visual search experiments, the preceding trial automatically affects search performance: facilitating it when the target features repeat and giving rise to switch costs when they change--so-called (short-term) intertrial priming. These effects also occur at longer time scales: When 1 of…

We report an experiment designed to provide a qualitative contrast between knowledge-limited versions of mixed-state and variable-resources (VR) models of visual change detection. The key data pattern is that observers often respond "same" on big-change trials, while simultaneously being able to discriminate between same and small-change…

Our visual brain is remarkable in extracting invariant properties from the noisy environment, guiding selection of where to look and what to identify. However, how the brain achieves this is still poorly understood. Here we explore interactions of local context and global structure in the long-term learning and retrieval of invariant display…

Three experiments examined children's and adults' abilities to use statistical and temporal information to distinguish between common cause and causal chain structures. In Experiment 1, participants were provided with conditional probability information and/or temporal information and asked to infer the causal structure of a 3-variable mechanical…

We examined whether 2 types of interpolated tasks (i.e., retrieval-practice via free recall or guessing a missing critical item) improved final recognition for related and unrelated word lists relative to restudying or completing a filler task. Both retrieval-practice and guessing tasks improved correct recognition relative to restudy and filler…

Remembering the order of a sequence of events is a fundamental feature of episodic memory. Indeed, a number of formal models represent temporal context as part of the memory system, and memory for order has been researched extensively. Yet, the nature of the code(s) underlying sequence memory is still relatively unknown. Across 4 experiments that…