Influential theories have claimed that the ability for recursion forms the computational core of human language faculty distinguishing our communication system from that of other animals (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002). In the present study, we consider an alternative view on recursion by studying the contribution of associative and working…

A huge set of focused attention experiments show that when presented with color words printed in color, observers report the ink color faster if the carrier word is the name of the color rather than the name of an alternative color, the Stroop effect. There is also a large number (although not so numerous as the Stroop task) of so-called…

The ability to automatically and implicitly detect complex and noisy regularities in the environment is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. Despite considerable interest in implicit processes, few researchers have conceptualized implicit learning as an ability with meaningful individual differences. Instead, various researchers (e.g., Reber,…

While five-month-old infants show orientation-specific sensitivity to changes in the motion and occlusion patterns of human point-light displays, it is not known whether infants are capable of binding a human representation to these displays. Furthermore, it has been suggested that infants do not encode the same physical properties for humans and…