Infants' representations of physical events are surprisingly flexible. Brief exposure to one event can immediately enhance infants' representations of another event. The present experiments tested two potential mechanisms underlying this priming: enhanced encoding or improved retrieval. Five-month-olds saw a target block become hidden inside a…

There is a renewed debate about whether educated adults solve simple addition problems (e.g., 2 + 3) by direct fact retrieval or by fast, automatic counting-based procedures. Recent research testing adults' simple addition and multiplication showed that a 150-ms preview of the operator (+ or ×) facilitated addition, but not multiplication,…

Seeing pictures of objects activates the motor cortex and can have an influence on subsequent grasping actions. However, the exact nature of the motor representations evoked by these pictures is unclear. For example, action plans engaged by pictures could be most affected by direct visual input and computed online based on object shape.…

Stimuli co-occurring with targets in a detection task are better remembered than stimuli co-occurring with distractors--the attentional boost effect (ABE). The ABE is of interest because it is an exception to the usual finding that divided attention during encoding impairs memory. The effect has been demonstrated in tests of item memory but it is…

Three experiments examined the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. In Experiment 1, homophone and spelling control errors were embedded in a story context and participants performed a proofreading task as they read for meaning. For both good and poor readers, more homophone errors went undetected than spelling…

The present study aims to reveal some facts concerning first language (L[subscript 1]) and second language (L[subscript 2]) spoken-word processing in unbalanced proficient bilinguals using behavioral measures. The intention here is to examine the effects of auditory repetition word priming and semantic priming in first and second languages of…

With the present research, the authors examined whether reminders could maintain 18-month-olds' memories generated from picture books and videos. Infants (N = 98) were shown a series of target actions in a picture book or on video. Either 24 hr or 2 weeks prior to a 4-week deferred imitation test, they were exposed to a reminder, a partial…

A hierarchical progression in infants' ability to use surface features, such as color, as a basis for object individuation in the first year has been well established (Tremoulet, Leslie, & Hall, 2000; Wilcox, 1999). There is evidence, however, that infants' sensitivity to surface features can be increased through multisensory (i.e.,…

The relative position priming effect is a type of subset priming in which target word recognition is facilitated as a consequence of priming the word with some of its letters, maintaining their relative position (e.g., "csn" as a prime for "casino"). Five experiments were conducted to test whether vowel-only and consonant-only…

Combining regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) and novelty categorization theory (Forster, Marguc, & Gillebaart, 2010), we predicted that novel stimuli would be more positively evaluated when focused on growth as compared with security and that familiar stimuli would be more negatively evaluated when focused on growth as compared with security.…

With attention and eye-movements humans orient to targets of interest. This orienting occurs faster when the same target repeats: priming of pop-out (PoP). While reaction times (RTs) can be important, PoP's real function could be to steer "where" to orient, a possibility underexposed in many current paradigms, as these predesignate a target to…

Single-prime negative priming refers to the phenomenon wherein repetition of a prime as the probe target results in delayed response. Sometimes this effect has been found to be contingent on participants' unawareness of the primes, and sometimes it has not. Further, sometimes this effect has been found to be eliminated when the prime could predict…

Mediated priming refers to the activation of a target (e.g., "stripes") by a prime (e.g., "lion") that is related indirectly via a connecting mediator (e.g., tiger). In previous mediated priming studies (e.g., McNamara & Altarriba, 1988), the mediator was associatively related to the prime. In contrast, pure mediated…

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had…

Three studies sought to determine whether incubation effects could be reliably generated in a problem-solving task. Experimental variables manipulated were the duration of the interval between two problem-solving opportunities and the activity performed by the problem solvers during the interval. A multisolution anagram task was used which…