A fundamental question in reading research concerns whether attention is allocated strictly serially, supporting lexical processing of one word at a time, or in parallel, supporting concurrent lexical processing of two or more words (Reichle, Liversedge, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2009). The origins of this debate are reviewed. We then report three…

Typical spatial descriptions, such as "The car is in front of the house," describe the position of a located object (LO; e.g., the car) in space relative to a reference object (RO) whose location is known (e.g., the house). The orientation of the RO affects spatial language comprehension via the reference frame selection process.…

The research examined relational processing following stroke. Stroke patients (14 with frontal, 30 with non-frontal lesions) and 41 matched controls completed four relational processing tasks: sentence comprehension, Latin square matrix completion, modified Dimensional Change Card Sorting, and n-back. Each task included items at two or three…

Across the languages of a bilingual, translation equivalents can have the same orthographic form and shared meaning (e.g., TABLE in French and English). How such words, called orthographically identical cognates, are processed and represented in the bilingual brain is not well understood. In the present study, late French-English bilinguals…

The rise in popularity of Response to Intervention (RTI) as a method of identifying Learning Disabilities (LD) is partially due to the psychometric and theoretical issues inherent to the use of IQ tests in the once popular discrepancy method of identification. However, both RTI and discrepancy theories have their shortcomings, and criticisms…

In this paper, there will be a particular focus on mental models and their application to inductive reasoning within the realm of instruction. A basic assumption of this study is the observation that the construction of mental models and related reasoning is a slowly developing capability of cognitive systems that emerges effectively with proper…

In their comment, Roelofs, Piai, and Schriefers (2011) argue against our interpretation of the distractor frequency effect in terms of a late blocking mechanism. They state that the experiments reported by Dhooge and Hartsuiker (2010) can be incorporated in WEAVER++ when assuming an early input blocking mechanism. We first rectify a…

Atkinson and Shiffrin's (1968) dual-store model of memory includes structural aspects of memory along with control processes. The rehearsal buffer is a process by which items are kept in mind and long-term episodic traces are formed. The model has been both influential and controversial. Here, we describe a novel variant of Atkinson and Shiffrin's…

Spatial memories are often organized around reference frames, and environmental shape provides a salient cue to reference frame selection. To date, however, the environmental cues responsible for influencing reference frame selection remain relatively unknown. To connect research on reference frame selection with that on orientation via…

We have a remarkable ability to accurately estimate average featural information across groups of objects, such as their average size or orientation. It has been suggested that, unlike individual object processing, this process of "feature averaging" occurs automatically and relatively early in the course of perceptual processing,…

Experienced mental abacus (MA) users are able to perform mental arithmetic calculations with unusual speed and accuracy. However, it remains unclear whether their extraordinary gains in mental arithmetic ability are accompanied by an improvement in numerical processing efficiency. To address this question, the present study, using a numerical…

Written production studies investigating central processing have ignored research on the peripheral components of movement execution, and vice versa. This study attempts to integrate both approaches and provide evidence that central and peripheral processes interact during word production. French participants wrote regular words (e.g. FORME),…

The belief that one can exert intentional control over behavior is deeply rooted in virtually all human beings. It has been shown that weakening such belief--e.g. by exposure to "anti-free will" messages--can lead people to display antisocial tendencies. We propose that this cursory and irresponsible behavior may be facilitated by a breakdown of…

This work examines how a better understanding of visual perception and attention can impact visualization design. In a collection of studies, I explore how different levels of the visual system can measurably affect a variety of visualization metrics. The results show that expert preference, user performance, and even computational performance are…

Proactive interference (PI) refers to the finding that memory for recently studied (target) information can be vastly impaired by the previous study of other (nontarget) information. PI can be reduced in a number of ways, for instance, by directed forgetting of the prior nontarget information, the testing of the prior nontarget information, or an…