Age-related increases of speaking rate are not fully understood, but have been attributed to gains in biologic factors and learned skills that support speech production. This study investigated developmental changes in speaking rate and articulatory kinematics of participants aged 4 ("N" = 7), 7 ("N" = 10), 10…

Recent research suggests that attempting to avoid unwanted psychological events is maladaptive. Contrastingly, cognitive defusion, which is an acceptance-based method for managing unwanted thoughts, may provide a plausible alternative. The current study was designed to compare defusion and experiential avoidance as strategies for coping with…

Three experiments assessed the development of children's part and configural (part-relational) processing in object recognition during adolescence. In total, 312 school children aged 7-16 years and 80 adults were tested in 3-alternative forced choice (3-AFC) tasks. They judged the correct appearance of upright and inverted presented familiar…

Three studies compared bilinguals to monolinguals on 15 indicators of executive processing (EP). Most of the indicators compare a neutral or congruent baseline to a condition that should require EP. For each of the measures there was no main effect of group and a highly significant main effect of condition. The critical marker for a bilingual…

Growing evidence indicates a suite of generalized differences in the attentional and cognitive processing of adults from Eastern and Western cultures. Cognition in Eastern adults is often more relational and in Western adults is more object focused. Three experiments examined whether these differences characterize the cognition of preschool…

Time Factors (Learning);When the mind wanders, attention turns away from the external environment and cognitive processing is decoupled from perceptual information. Mind wandering is usually treated as a dichotomy (dichotomy-hypothesis), and is often measured using self-reports. Here, we propose the levels of inattention hypothesis, which…

Despite accumulating evidence that cortical motor areas, particularly the lateral premotor cortex, are activated during language comprehension, the question of whether motor processes help mediate the semantic encoding of language remains controversial. To address this issue, we examined whether low frequency (1 Hz) repetitive transcranial…

Witnessing emotional events such as arousal or pain may impair ongoing cognitive processes such as inhibitory control. We found that this may be true only half of the time. Erotic images and painful video clips were shown to men and women shortly before a stop signal task, which measures cognitive inhibitory control. These stimuli impaired…

When students learn scientific theories that conflict with their earlier, naive theories, what happens to the earlier theories? Are they overwritten or merely suppressed? We investigated this question by devising and implementing a novel speeded-reasoning task. Adults with many years of science education verified two types of statements as quickly…

Flashbacks are involuntary, emotion-laden images experienced by individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The qualities of flashbacks could under certain circumstances lead to source memory errors. Participants with PTSD wrote a trauma narrative and reported the experience of flashbacks. They were later presented with stimuli from…

Fluency, the subjective experience of ease associated with information processing, has been shown to affect a host of judgments. Previous research has typically focused on specific factors that affect the use of a single, specific fluency source. In the present study we examine how cognitive mindsets, or processing modes, moderate fluency…

Complex actions can be regarded as a concatenation of simple motor acts, arranged according to specific rules. Because the caudal part of the Broca's region (left Brodmann's area 44, BA 44) is involved in processing hierarchically organized behaviors, we aimed to test the hypothesis that this area may also play a role in learning structured motor…

Beaconing is a process in which the distance between a visual landmark and current position is reduced in order to return to a location. In contrast, dead reckoning is a process in which vestibular, kinesthetic and/or optic flow cues are utilized to update speed of movement, elapsed time of movement, and direction of movement to return to a…

Visual processing is highly sensitive to stimulus orientation; for example, face perception is drastically worse when faces are oriented inverted vs. upright. However, stimulus orientation must be established in relation to a particular reference frame, and in most studies, several reference frames are conflated. Which reference frame(s) matter in…

The elicited-response false belief task has traditionally been considered as reliably indicating that children acquire an understanding of false belief around 4 years of age. However, recent investigations using spontaneous-response tasks suggest that false belief understanding emerges much earlier. This leads to a developmental paradox: if young…