Processing information in working memory requires selective access to a subset of working-memory contents by a focus of attention. Complex cognition often requires joint access to 2 items in working memory. How does the focus select 2 items? Two experiments with an arithmetic task and 1 with a spatial task investigate time demands for successive…

Three children diagnosed with pervasive developmental disabilities emitted a high rate of mands and a low-to-zero rate of appropriate play responses when the two responses were reinforced on concurrent Fixed Ratio 1 (FR1) schedules. When mands were reinforced on an FR10 schedule and play responses were concurrently reinforced on an FR1 schedule,…

In a series of 3 experiments, the authors examined 6- and 8-month-old infants' capacities to detect target actions in a continuous action sequence. In Experiment 1, infants were habituated to 2 different target actions and subsequently were presented with 2 continuous action sequences that either included or did not include the familiar target…

In three experiments we investigated how people determine whether or not they are in control of sounds they hear. The sounds were either triggered by participants' taps or controlled by a computer. The task was to distinguish between self-control and external control during active tapping, and during passive listening to a playback of the sounds…

Null hypotheses are simple, precise, and theoretically important. Conventional statistical analysis cannot support them; Bayesian analysis can. The challenge in a Bayesian analysis is to formulate a suitably vague alternative, because the vaguer the alternative is (the more it spreads out the unit mass of prior probability), the more the null is…

The combined postdictive value of postdecision confidence, decision time, and Remember-Know-Familiar (RKF) judgments as markers of identification accuracy was evaluated with 10 targets and 720 participants. In a pedestrian area, passers-by were asked for directions. Identifications were made from target-absent or target-present lineups. Fast…

The term "goal directed" conventionally refers to either of 2 separate process types--motor processes organizing action oriented toward physical targets and decision-making processes that select these targets by integrating desire for and knowledge of action outcomes. Even newborns are goal directed in the first sense, but the status of…

Three experiments examined the difficulty of translating cues into verbal representations of task goals by varying the degree of cue transparency (auditory transparent cues, visual transparent cues, visual arbitrary cues) in the Advanced Dimensional Change Card Sort, which requires switching between color- and shape-sorting rules on the basis of…

This paper describes a framework for learning where learners undergo experimentations with the phenomena at hand according to progressive and staged goals. Bowling is used as a case study in this paper. The premise for experimentations is that learners can experience hidden efficacies, including the formation of "bad habits." A distinction is made…

In 3 experiments, the role of item strength in the retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm was tested. According to the inhibition theory of forgetting proposed by M. C. Anderson, R. A. Bjork, and E. L. Bjork (1994), retrieval-induced forgetting should be larger for items that are more strongly associated with the category cue. In the present…

The Internet Age has seen the emergence of richly annotated image data collections numbering in the billions of items. This work makes contributions in three primary areas which aid the management of this data: image representation, efficient retrieval, and annotation based on content and metadata. The contributions are as follows. First,…

This study examined the impact of different levels of task difficulty and expertise on self-efficacy judgments. In addition, the study examines how self-efficacy judgments affect the amount of mental effort investment and task performance under different levels of task difficulty and expertise. Results from this study are used to build a…

Multidomain environments where multiple organizations interoperate with each other are becoming a reality as can be seen in emerging Internet-based enterprise applications. Access control to ensure secure interoperation in such an environment is a crucial challenge. A multidomain environment can be categorized as "tightly-coupled" and…

The substantial distractor interference obtained for small displays when the target appears alone is reduced in large displays when the target is embedded among neutral letters. This finding has been interpreted as reflecting low-load and high-load processing, respectively, thereby supporting the theory of perceptual load (Lavie & Tsal, 1994).…

Infants' responses to typical and scrambled human body shapes were assessed in relation to the realism of the human body stimuli presented. In four separate experiments, infants were familiarized to typical human bodies and then shown a series of scrambled human bodies on the test. Looking behaviour was assessed in response to a range of different…