Recently, the nature of children's mental number line has received much investigation. In the number line task, children are required to mark a presented number on a physical number line with fixed endpoints. Typically, it was observed that the estimations of younger/inexperienced children were accounted for best by a logarithmic function, whereas…

The brain exhibits remarkable facility in exerting attentional control in most circumstances, but it also suffers apparent limitations in others. The authors' goal is to construct a rational account for why attentional control appears suboptimal under conditions of conflict and what this implies about the underlying computational principles. The…

In the stop-signal paradigm, fast responses are harder to inhibit than slow responses, so subjects must balance speed is the go task with successful stopping in the stop task. In theory, subjects achieve this balance by adjusting response thresholds for the go task, making proactive adjustments in response to instructions that indicate that…

The current study evaluated the relative roles of conceptual knowledge and executive control on the development of "categorical flexibility," the ability to switch between simultaneously available but conflicting categorical representations of an object. Experiment 1 assessed conceptual knowledge and executive control together; Experiment 2…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of executive functions (EF) in theory-of-mind (ToM) performance in deaf children and adolescents. Four groups of deaf children aged 7-16 years, with different language backgrounds at home and at school, that is, bilingually instructed native signers, oralist-instructed native signers, and…

To explore the possible neural foundations of individual differences in intelligence test scores, we examined the associations between Raven's Matrices scores and two tasks that were administered in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) setting. The two tasks were an n-back working memory (N = 37) task and inspection time (N = 47). The…

Three experiments examined whether salient color singleton distractors automatically interfere with the detection singleton form targets in visual search (e.g., J. Theeuwes, 1992), or whether the degree of interference is top-down modulable. In Experiments 1 and 2, observers started with a pure block of trials, which contained either never a…

Previous research has found age-related deficits in a variety of cognitive processes. However, some studies have demonstrated age-related sparing on tasks where individuals have substantial experience, often attained over many decades. Here, the authors examined whether decades of experience in a fast-paced demanding profession, air traffic…

Background: Efficient memory functions are important to the development of cognitive and functional skills, allowing individuals to manipulate and store information. Theories of memory have suggested the presence of domain-specific (i.e. verbal and spatial) and general processing mechanisms across memory domains, including memory functions…

Objective: This study evaluated the effects of sexual victimization history, rape myth acceptance, implicit attention, and recent learning on the cognitive processes underlying undergraduate women's explicit risk judgments. Method: Participants were 194 undergraduate women between 18 and 24 years of age. The sample was ethnically diverse and…

People with disabilities constitute a collective that requires continuous and customized attention, since their conditions or abilities are affected with respect to specific standards. People with "Acquired Brain Injury" (ABI), or those who have suffered brain injury at some stage after birth, belong to this collective. The treatment these people…

The authors analyze the shape categorization of rhesus monkeys ("Macaca mulatta") and the role of prototype- and exemplar-based comparison processes in monkeys' category learning. Prototype and exemplar theories make contrasting predictions regarding performance on the Posner-Homa dot-distortion categorization task. Prototype theory--which…

In 2 experiments, the authors explored age of acquisition (AoA) and word frequency (WF) effects in picture naming using the psychological refractory period paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants named a picture and then, a short time later, categorized 1 of 3 possible auditory tones as high, medium, or low. Both AoA (Experiment 1A) and WF…

In this study, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to examine the effects of aging on processes underlying task switching. The response time data revealed an age-related increase in mixing costs before controlling for general slowing and no effect of aging on switching costs. In the cue-locked epoch, the ERP data revealed little effect…

Two experiments investigated how 3-year-old children select a tool to perform a manual task, with a focus on their perseverative parameter choices for the various relationships involved in handling a tool: the actor-to-tool relation and the tool-to-target relation (topology). The first study concerned the parameter value for the tool-to-target…