The coherence principle suggests removing unnecessary--or seductive--content from educational texts to reduce cognitive load. However, the binary proposition that all seductive details should be excluded neglects images' potential to prime semantically related concepts, which makes texts easier to process. It was hypothesized that this priming…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show particular deficits in the generation of sequenced action--the quintessential procedural task. Practiced imitation of a sequence may become rote and require reduced procedural memory. This study explored whether speech motor deficits in children with SLI occur generally or only in…

According to Geary's evolutionary approach, humans are able to easily acquire primary knowledge and, with more efforts, secondary knowledge. The present study investigates how primary knowledge contents can facilitate the learning of formal logical rules, i.e., secondary knowledge. Framing formal logical problems in evolutionary salient contexts…

In this paper two studies are reported in which two contrasting claims concerning the intuitiveness of the law of large numbers are investigated. While Sedlmeier and Gigerenzer ("J Behav Decis Mak" 10:33-51, 1997) claim that people have an intuition that conforms to the law of large numbers, but that they can only employ this intuition…

The present research examines the nature of the different processes that have been proposed to underlie semantic priming. Specifically, it has been argued that priming arises as a result of "automatic target activation" and/or the use of strategies like prospective "expectancy generation" and "retrospective semantic…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) learners of English could learn to produce stranded prepositions through structural priming. Structural priming is the tendency for speakers to repeat the structure of previously experienced sentences, without intention or conscious awareness of such behaviour, and is thought to be associated…

In reaction time research, there has been an increasing appreciation that response-initiation processes are sensitive to recent experience and, in particular, the difficulty of previous trials. From this perspective, the authors propose an explanation for a perplexing property of masked priming: Although primes are not consciously identified,…

Negative priming (NP) refers to the finding that people's responses to probe targets previously presented as prime distractors are usually slower than to unrepeated stimuli. Intriguingly, the effect sizes of tactile NP were much larger than the effect sizes for visual NP. We analyzed whether the large tactile NP effect is just a side effect of the…

Using a novel variant of dichotic selective listening, we examined the control of auditory selective attention. In our task, subjects had to respond selectively to one of two simultaneously presented auditory stimuli (number words), always spoken by a female and a male speaker, by performing a numerical size categorization. The gender of the…

Predictions from perceptual load theory (Lavie, 1995, 2005) regarding object recognition across the same or different viewpoints were tested. Results showed that high perceptual load reduces distracter recognition levels despite always presenting distracter objects from the same view. They also showed that the levels of distracter recognition were…