A contrast category effect on categorization occurs when the decision to apply a category term to an entity not only involves a comparison between the entity and the target category but is also influenced by a comparison of the entity with 1 or more alternative categories from the same domain as the target. Establishing a contrast category effect…

Unsworth and Engle (2007) recently proposed a model of working memory capacity characterized by, among other things, the ability to conduct a strategic, cue-dependent search of long-term memory. Although this ability has been found to mediate individual variation in a number of higher order cognitive tasks, the component processes involved remain…

Recent research provides evidence that individuals shift in their perception of variants depending on social characteristics attributed to the speaker. This paper reports on a speech perception experiment designed to test the degree to which the age attributed to a speaker influences the perception of vowels undergoing a chain shift. As a result…

When conducting research on sensitive topics, it is challenging to use new methods of data collection given the apprehensions of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). This is especially worrying because sensitive topics of research often require novel approaches. In this article a brief personal history of navigating the IRB process for conducting…

Clinicians are believed to use two predominant reasoning strategies: system 1 based pattern recognition, and system 2 based analytical reasoning. Balancing these cognitive reasoning strategies is widely believed to reduce diagnostic error. However, clinicians approach different problems with different reasoning strategies. This study explores…

A search of the literature from the past 30 years reveals that there is a dearth of research surrounding effective interventions for intellectually gifted children in the early childhood years. The findings of 11 empirical studies of educational provisions for young gifted children were located and the methodological rigor of the studies examined.…

As a medium for learning, digital games provide promising possibilities to motivate and engage students in subject learning. In this study, a game-based learning system, My-Pet-My-Quest, is developed to support pupils' math learning. This is due to the fact that most students in Taiwan have relatively lower positive attitude towards math learning,…

Purpose: This investigation examined the effect of repeated exposure to novel and repeated spoken words in typical environments on the intelligibility of 2 synthesized voices and human recorded speech in preschools. Method: Eighteen preschoolers listened to and repeated single words presented in human-recorded speech, DECtalk Paul, and AT&T Voice…

We propose market-based coordinated task allocation mechanisms, which allocate complex tasks that require synchronized and collaborated services of multiple robot agents to robot agents, and an auditing mechanism, which ensures proper behaviors of robot agents by verifying inter-agent activities, for self-interested, fully-distributed, and…

This article presents a creative and practical process for dealing with the problem of selection bias. Taking an algorithmic approach and capitalizing on the known treatment-associated variance in the X matrix, we propose a data transformation that allows estimating unbiased treatment effects. The approach does not call for modelling the data,…

The authors show that a narrowband noise (NBN) is perceived as longer when presented immediately after a wideband noise (WBN), compared to when the WBN is absent. This effect depended on the WBN's frequency spectrum overlapping that of the NBN, and it increased as the duration of the WBN increased up to 300 ms. It decreased when a silent gap was…

Bayesian network models offer a large degree of flexibility for modeling dependence among observables (item outcome variables) from the same task, which may be dependent. This article explores four design patterns for modeling locally dependent observations: (a) no context--ignores dependence among observables; (b) compensatory context--introduces…

Forgetting what one was doing prior to interruption is an everyday problem. The recent soft constraints hypothesis (Gray, Sims, Fu, & Schoelles, 2006) emphasizes the strategic adaptation of information processing strategy to the task environment. It predicts that increasing information access cost (IAC: the time, and physical and mental effort…

Snap discs made of bimetal have many technical applications as thermostats. Jumping discs are a toy version of such snap discs. Besides giving technical information, we describe physical investigations. We show especially how, through simple measurements and calculations, you can determine the initial speed ([approximately equal to]3.5 m…

Building on P. H. Allum and L. Wheeldon (2007), the authors conducted 5 experiments to investigate the scope of lexical access during spoken sentence production in Japanese and English. Speakers described pairs of pictured objects, and on critical trials, 1 object was previewed. In Japanese, sentence onset is speeded by the preview of each of the…