Patients with corticobasal degeneration (CBD) have calculation impairments. This study examined whether impaired number knowledge depends on verbal mediation. We focused particularly on knowledge of very small numbers, where there is a precise relationship between a cardinality and its number concept, but little hypothesized role for verbal…

This paper provides an explanation for the nonspecificity of emotion inferences found in previous research [e.g., Language and Cognitive Processes, 19(5), 613-638, 2004]. We first demonstrate that behavioral components of emotions, as opposed to emotions per se, are better markers of readers' mental representations of the main character's…

There is evidence that the conscious mind selects from among possible acts developed by the unconscious. Even lifting a finger may be subject to this shared mental management. Studies examining this point of view are summarized. (JN)

How people select and process current events and political information through the media is studied. Throughout 1976, 21 adults were tested for recall of selected news stories; also, participants recorded daily three news stories that had come to their attention. Results indicated that participants totally ignored 67 percent of newspaper stories.…

Evaluates the effects of a training procedure based on the organizational disequilibrium model of cognitive development. Subjects were children who displayed pretest structural profiles of varying levels of structural elaboration. (DP)

A tri-level structure of cognitive operations in concept learning is proposed, based on results of controlled experimentation and factor analytic studies. Global strategies in concept attainment are hypothesized to consist of three phases: attending to the situation, searching for information, and processing and using the information. Further,…

Fundamental assumptions concerning the cause of learning disabilities are described and criticized. At a broader level, research and theory in three different paradigms are discussed: (1) neuropsychological; (2) information processing; and (3) applied behavior analysis. Four recommendations for future progress in the conceptualization and…

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…

It has been suggested that older adults are more variable in their performance because they are more prone to lapses of either attention or intention. In the present experiment, 9 young and 9 older adults each performed nearly 2,000 trials of a same-different judgment task. As expected, older adults were slower and more variable than young adults.…

Seven-year-old children (N=65) participating in a study of the influence of infant temperament on socioemotional development performed an auditory selective attention task involving words that varied in both affective (positive vs. negative) and social (social vs. nonsocial) content. Parent report of contemporaneous child temperament was also…

The article discusses two important influences of B. F. Skinner, and later workers in the behavior-analytic tradition, on the study of animal timing. The first influence is methodological, and is traced from the invention of schedules imposing temporal constraints or periodicities on animals in "The Behavior of Organisms," through the rate…

This paper questions the assumption that a central processing deficit exists in the speed of performing mental operations by children as compared to adults. Two hypotheses are proposed and data are cited as evidence. (JMB)

Investigates the modern truism that cognition was almost completely suppressed by Watsonian behaviorism and its offspring during the first half of this century. Examined abstracting journals for the period 1910-1960, and relevant reviews over this period. Results provided no support for the triumph of behaviorism. (JAC)

Author was concerned in the greater part of this paper with investigation the prior question of possibility, only at the end drawing some practical conclusions on whether we should or should not be teaching anything that might be called an ethics of belief. (Author)

In the experiments reported here grammaticalness and meaningfulness were found to be of much greater significance than word frequency, interword association or syntactic frame in the comprehension of deviant sentences. (Author/FWB)