Learning to associate specific objects with value contributes to the human's adaptive behavior. However, the intrinsic nature of associative memory posits a challenge that newly learned associations may interfere with the old ones if they share common features (e.g., a reward). In the present study, we conducted a set of behavioral experiments and…

Theories of perceptual decision making have been dominated by the idea that evidence accumulates in favor of different alternatives until some fixed threshold amount is reached, which triggers a decision. Recent theories have suggested that these thresholds may not be fixed during each decision but change as time passes. These collapsing…

It has been demonstrated that the Simon effect may be increased or reversed due to proportion congruency manipulation, suggesting that learned spatial irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations are used to guide responses. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that learning spatial irrelevant S-R associations by rewards may show a similar…

The purpose of this study was to examine kindergarten children's motivation choice after successfully completing a mathematical task. Three succeeding measurements took place in two-week intervals. In each measurement a different choice dyad was presented to participating children. After the successful completion of a mathematical activity,…

Research has demonstrated a link between perspective taking and working memory. Here we used eye tracking to examine the time course with which working memory load (WML) influences perspective-taking ability in a referential communication task and how motivation to take another's perspective modulates these effects. In Experiment 1, where there…

In the 2011 census almost one in three Irish teenagers claimed to be unable to speak Irish (Central Statistics Office, Ireland, 2012), despite the language being taught daily in school. The challenges facing the Irish language in schools are complex and multifaceted. The research reported here attempts to address some of these challenges by…

In this article we present an interactive extensible software, "The 7 Keys of the Dragon," for the teaching/learning of Albanian and Russian to students that attend primary and secondary education in Greece with the respective languages as their heritage languages. We address the key challenges we encountered during the conceptualization…

Few studies have examined the influence of environmental factors on children's executive functioning (EF) performance. The present study examined the effects of a punitive vs. non-punitive school environment on West African children's EF skills. Tasks included a "cool" (relatively non-affective) and "hot" (relatively…

The subjective value of rewards declines as a function of the delay to receive them (temporal discounting). Three temporal discounting tasks that assessed preferences between small amounts of money (10 pence) over short delays (60 s), moderate amounts of money (10 British Pounds) over moderate delays (2 weeks), and large amounts of money (1000…