Two experiments investigated the effects of characteristic features of concept mapping used for prior knowledge activation. Characteristic demands of concept mapping include connecting lines representing the relationships between concepts and labeling these lines, specifying the type of the semantic relationships. In the first experiment,…

According to classical theories, automatic processes are autonomous and independent of higher level cognitive influence. In contrast, the authors propose that automatic processing depends on attentional sensitization of task-congruent processing pathways. In 3 experiments, the authors tested this hypothesis with a modified masked semantic priming…

Lexical-semantic knowledge is a core language component that undergoes prolonged development throughout childhood and is therefore highly amenable to developmental studies. Most previous lexical-semantic functional MRI (fMRI) studies have been limited to single-word or word-pair tasks, outside a sentence context. Our objective was to investigate…

The purpose of this study was to explore changes in activation of the cortical network that serves auditory sentence comprehension in children in response to increasing demands of complex sentences. A further goal is to study how individual differences in children's receptive language abilities are associated with such changes in cortical…

Response preparation usually facilitates performance, but it may also interfere with other concurrent tasks. In this article, the authors used event-related brain potentials to study how intervening tasks affect response preparation. In 3 experiments, participants performed intervening tasks during the preparation of a precued hand choice…

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology who seek to understand the mind. In this article, the author considers findings from this field that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application. He examines how technology has…

We examined how maternal strategic behaviors during a mother-child collaborative sort-recall task of categorically similar items related to children's recall and children's strategic behavior in a sort-recall task that they completed independently. Mother-child dyads participated in the collaborative sort-recall task when children were 40 months…

A cross-cultural comparison between U.S. and Hong Kong preschoolers examined factors responsible for young children's analogical reasoning errors. On a scene analogy task, both groups had adequate prerequisite knowledge of the key relations, were the same age, and showed similar baseline performance, yet Chinese children outperformed U.S. children…

Neural resources subserving spatial processing in either egocentric or allocentric reference frames are, at least partly, dissociated. However, it is unclear whether these two types of representations are independent or whether they interact. We investigated this question using a learning transfer paradigm. The experiment and material were…

DevDevelopmental improvements in face identity recognition ability are widely documented, but the source of children's immaturity in face recognition remains unclear. Differences in the way in which children and adults visually represent faces might underlie immaturities in face recognition. Recent evidence of a face identity aftereffect (FIAE),…

Anticipatory emotions precede behavioral outcomes and provide a means to infer interactions between emotional and cognitive processes. A number of theories hold that anticipatory emotions serve as inputs to the decision process and code the value or risk associated with a stimulus. We argue that current data do not unequivocally support this…

Temporal order judgements (TOJ) for two tactile stimuli, one presented to the left and one to the right hand, are less precise when the hands are crossed over the midline than when the hands are uncrossed. This "crossed hand" effect has been considered as evidence for a remapping of tactile input into an external reference frame. Since late, but…

Autism is thought to be associated with a bias towards detail-focussed processing. While the cognitive basis remains controversial, one strong hypothesis is that there are high processing costs associated with changing from local into global processing. A possible neural mechanism underlying this processing style is abnormal neural connectivity;…

We explored whether a rising trend to blindly "overcopy" a model's causally irrelevant actions between 3 and 5 years of age, found in previous studies, predicts a more circumspect disposition in much younger children. Children between 23 and 30 months of age observed a model use a tool to retrieve a reward from either a transparent or opaque…

We examined the effect of an irrelevant visual transient on the decision where to look for a hidden object. Participants also performed a conventional "inhibition of return" localization task. In Experiments 1 and 2 the two tasks were blocked and in Experiments 3 and 4 they were randomly interleaved. In every experiment there was a bias to select…