A major problem in human cognition is to understand how newly acquired information and long-standing beliefs about the environment combine to make decisions and plan behaviors. Over-dependence on long-standing beliefs may be a significant source of suboptimal decision-making in unusual circumstances. While the contribution of long-standing beliefs…

This study investigates how speakers of Mandarin interpret negative sentences with the conjunction ("he" 'and'). Our experiments test three predictions that follow from the proposal that the Mandarin conjunction is a positive polarity item (PPI) for both children and adults. On this account, the Mandarin conjunction should be interpreted…

The present study investigated the canonical position of instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in both Japanese sentences and noun phrases to determine whether the canonical positions are parallel. A series of sentence/phrase decision tasks were used to compare sentences with different word-orders, including sentences with SA"dv"OV…

Young children struggle more with mapping novel words onto relational referents (e.g., verbs) compared to non-relational referents (e.g., nouns). We present further evidence for this notion by investigating children's extensions of noun-noun compounds, which map onto combinations of non-relational referents, i.e., objects (e.g., "baby"…

It is common to see mirror errors in letters in early stages of reading due to the mirror-generalization process that allows a visual stimulus to be identified independently of its orientation. To avoid such errors, this process must be inhibited. A special case would be children with dyslexia since their difficulties with the alphabetic code may…

In an effort to deepen learning in K-12 science classrooms, there has been a national movement to integrate computational thinking (CT). The purpose of this phenomenographic study was to understand teachers' perceptions of the function and usefulness of a task analysis and a decision tree tool designed to help them with integration. Teachers…

Context-based learning (CBL) environments are widely used in science education to create authentic learning opportunities. Contexts can be authentic through their relation to everyday life, to uncommon scientific phenomena, or to the chemical laboratory. Previous research revealed that students choose contexts that are authentic in different ways…

Previous research has shown that linguistic cues such as mental and modal verbs can influence young children's judgments about the reliability of informants. Further, certain languages include grammatical morphemes (i.e. evidential markers), which clarify the source of information coming from testimony (e.g., Bulgarian, Japanese, Turkish).…

Technology plays a key role in the education and learning of students at the higher education level. It is vital to identify the factors that can develop alignment among the learning objectives of the students and technology. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to examine the effect of factors such as Task Technology Fit, online…

When making decisions, the amount of time remaining matters. When time horizons are long, exploring unknown options can inform later decisions, but when time horizons are short, exploiting known options should be prioritized. While adults and adolescents adapt their exploration in this way, it is unclear when such adaptation emerges and how…

We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., "lion"), artifactual (e.g., "hammer"), and institutional (e.g., "police officer") categories, aiming to identify whether people draw different inferences about which categories are subjective and which are socially constituted. We conducted two studies with 270…

The features of an image can be represented at multiple levels--from its low-level visual properties to high-level meaning. What drives some images to be memorable while others are forgettable? We address this question across two behavioral experiments. In the first, different layers of a convolutional neural network (CNN), which represent…

Studies on young children's comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more "intensive" process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like…

Deception is a multi-faceted social behaviour that is pervasive in human communication. Due to differences in social communication and experiences, autistic and non-autistic adults may contrast in how they respond to situations that elicit deceptive decision-making. This study examined whether autistic and non-autistic adults differed in their…

Korean learners of English are known to repair consonant clusters, which are not allowed in their native language, with an epenthetic vowel [close central unrounded vowel]. The purpose of the present study is to examine whether the perception-production link of such an illusory vowel in a second language (L2) is only within and not across…