Clinical intuition and resent research (Senju et al., 2009) suggests that adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) are able to use explicit verbal information but fail to react upon subtle nonverbal cues in order to understand others and navigate social encounters. In order to investigate the relative influence of different domains of socially…

Object substitution masking (OSM) is typically studied using a brief search display. The target item may be indicated by a cue/mask surrounding but not overlapping it. Report of the target is reduced when mask offset trails target offset rather than being simultaneous with it. We report 5 experiments investigating whether OSM can be obtained if…

The criteria by which raters judge pragmatic appropriateness of language learners' speech acts are underexamined, especially when raters evaluate extended discourse. To shed more light on this process, the present study investigated what factors are salient to raters when scoring pragmatic appropriateness of extended request sequences, and which…

Alzheimer's disease (AD) can impair metacognition in addition to more basic cognitive functions like memory. However, while global metacognitive inaccuracies are well documented (i.e., low deficit awareness, or anosognosia), the evidence is mixed regarding the effects of AD on local or task-based metacognitive judgments. Here we investigated local…

Three experiments were designed to examine how experience affects young children's spatio-symbolic skills over short time scales. Spatio-symbolic reasoning refers to the ability to interpret and use spatial relations, such as those encountered on a map, to solve symbolic tasks. We designed three tasks in which the featural and spatial…

How do the characteristics of sounds influence the allocation of visual-spatial attention? Natural sounds typically change in frequency. Here we demonstrate that the direction of frequency change guides visual-spatial attention more strongly than the average or ending frequency, and provide evidence suggesting that this cross-modal effect may be…

Ample evidence suggests that global perception may involve low spatial frequency (LSF) processing and that local perception may involve high spatial frequency (HSF) processing (Shulman, Sullivan, Gish, & Sakoda, 1986; Shulman & Wilson, 1987; Robertson, 1996). It is debated whether SF selection is a low-level mechanism associating global…

Participants' reaction time (RT) data in a prime-probe flanker task (e.g., ABA-CAC) were analyzed in terms of the characteristics of RT distribution to examine possible mechanisms that produce negative priming. When the prime and probe were presented in the same context and the proportion of repetition-target trials (TRP) was 0.33, negative…

This study takes inventory of available evidence on response repetition (RR) effects in task switching, in particular the evidence for RR cost when the task switches. The review reveals that relatively few task-switching studies in which RR effects were addressed have shown statistical support for RR cost, and that almost all are affected by 1 of…

Patients with apparently selective short-term memory (STM) deficits for semantic information have played an important role in developing multi-store theories of STM and challenge the idea that verbal STM is supported by maintaining activation in the language system. We propose that semantic STM deficits are not as selective as previously thought…

We report how the trajectories of saccadic eye movements are affected by memory interference acquired during associative learning. Human participants learned to perform saccadic choice responses based on the presentation of arbitrary central cues A, B, AC, BC, AX, BY, X, and Y that were trained to predict the appearance of a peripheral target…

The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of prosodic stress patterns and semantic depth on word learning. Twelve preschool-aged children with typically developing speech and language skills participated in a word learning task. Novel words with either a trochaic or iambic prosodic pattern were embedded in one of two learning…

Three studies explored whether younger and older adults' free recall performance can benefit from prior exposure to distraction that becomes relevant in a memory task. Participants initially read stories that included distracting text. Later, they studied a list of words for free recall, with half of the list consisting of previously distracting…

How information is exchanged between the cognitive mechanisms responsible for gaze perception and social attention is unclear. These systems could be independent; the "gaze cueing" effect could emerge from the activation of a general-purpose attentional mechanism that is ignorant of the social nature of the gaze cue. Alternatively, orienting to…

American listeners' perception of Japanese contrasts of vowel length (e.g., kiro vs. kiiro), consonant length (e.g., kite vs. kitte) and syllable number/length (e.g., kjoo vs. kijoo) was examined. Stimuli consisted of sentence-length utterances produced by a native Japanese talker; five minimal pairs of each contrast type were included. Questions…