It is now well-established that intrinsic variations in human neural and behavioral activity tend to exhibit scaling laws in their fluctuations and distributions. The meaning of these scaling laws is an ongoing matter of debate between isolable causes versus pervasive causes. A spiking neural network model is presented that self-tunes to critical…

Naming a picture of a dog primes the subsequent naming of a picture of a dog (repetition priming) and interferes with the subsequent naming of a picture of a cat (semantic interference). Behavioral studies suggest that these effects derive from persistent changes in the way that words are activated and selected for production, and some have…

In everyday life, one can link anticipated specific cues (e.g. visiting a restaurant) with desired actions (e.g., ordering a healthy meal). Alternatively, intentions such as "I intend to eat more healthily" present the option to act when one encounters the same cue. In the first case, a specific cue triggers a specific action; in the second, one…

It has been repeatedly shown that in decisions under time constraints, individuals predominantly use noncompensatory strategies rather than complex compensatory ones. The authors argue that these findings might be due not to limitations of cognitive capacity but instead to limitations of information search imposed by the commonly used experimental…

Retrieval practice with particular items from memory can impair the recall of related items on a later memory test. This retrieval-induced forgetting effect has been ascribed to inhibitory processes (M. C. Anderson & B. A. Spellman, 1995). A critical finding that distinguishes inhibitory from interference explanations is that forgetting is found…

To date, little is known about how social context cues influence the processing of information about relations between people, as opposed to information about individual persons. This research addresses the construction of mental clique representations from pairwise sympathy relations. Forty-one participants learned 4 patterns of mutual liking or…

Through associative learning, cues for biologically significant reinforcers such as food may gain access to mental representations of those reinforcers. Here, we used devaluation procedures, behavioral assessment of hedonic taste-reactivity responses, and measurement of immediate-early gene (IEG) expression to show that a cue for food engages…

This paper discusses guidelines for devising a hierarchy when fading response prompts in training individuals with developmental disabilities. Existing guidelines are seen as poorly defined, inconsistent, and lacking both theoretical and experimental support. An alternative theoretical account is proposed which suggests that prompts in a hierarchy…

The relationship between the encoder and the decoder in the communication of nonverbal behavior provides the basis for the two studies described in this report. The first study investigated the ability of parents to decode the nonverbal behavior of their own and other children. Parents were asked to identify children's mode of encoding (natural or…