This research explores the role of affect in the domain of human wayfinding by asking if increased motivation will alter the performance across various routes of increasing complexity. Participants were asked to perform certain navigation tasks within an indoor Virtual Reality (VR) environment under either motivated and not-motivated instructions.…

The qualitative difference method for distinguishing between aware and unaware processes was applied here to a spatial priming task. Participants were asked simply to locate a target stimulus that appeared in one of four locations, and this target stimulus was preceded by a prime in one of the same four locations. The prime location predicted the…

Four experiments examined the effects of precues on visual search for targets defined by a color-orientation conjunction. Experiment 1 showed that cueing the identity of targets enhanced the efficiency of search. Cueing effects were stronger with color than with orientation cues, but this advantage was additive across array size. Experiment 2…

Research suggests that individuals prefer self-determined reinforcers over experimenter-determined ones. The present study had 518 college students complete a delay-discounting task in which the commodity was cigarettes, a grocery store gift card, casino tokens, cash, or the choice of the four. The least amount of delay discounting was observed…

Previous research has revealed that infants can reason correctly about single-event probabilities with small but not large set sizes (Bonatti, 2008; Teglas "et al.", 2007). The current study asks whether infants can make predictions regarding single-event probability with large set sizes using a novel procedure. Infants completed two trials: A…

In a task where participants' overt task was to track the location of an object across a sequence of events, reaction times to unpredictable probes requiring an inference about a social agent's beliefs about the location of that object were obtained. Reaction times to false belief situations were faster than responses about the (false) contents of…

Unexpected events often distract us. In the laboratory, novel auditory stimuli have been shown to capture attention away from a focal visual task and yield specific electrophysiological responses as well as a behavioral cost to performance. Distraction is thought to follow ineluctably from the sound's low probability of occurrence or, put more…

Learning a second language as an adult is particularly effortful when new phonetic representations must be formed. Therefore the processes that allow learning of speech sounds are of great theoretical and practical interest. Here we examined whether perception of single formant transitions, that is, sound components critical in speech perception,…

Usage-based approaches to language acquisition argue that children acquire the grammar of their target language using general-cognitive learning principles. The current paper reports on an experiment that tested a central assumption of the usage-based approach: argument structure patterns are connected to high frequency verbs that facilitate…

This fMRI study investigated top-down letter processing with an illusory letter detection task. Participants responded whether one of a number of different possible letters was present in a very noisy image. After initial training that became increasingly difficult, they continued to detect letters even though the images consisted of pure noise,…

In a corpus analysis of spontaneous speech Jaeger and Snider (2007) found that the strength of structural priming is correlated with verb alternation bias. This finding is consistent with an implicit learning account of syntactic priming: because the implicit learning model implemented by Chang (2002), Chang, Dell, and Bock (2006), and Chang,…

It is commonly held that implicit knowledge expresses itself as fluency. A perceptual clarification task was used to examine the relationship between perceptual processing fluency, subjective familiarity, and grammaticality judgments in a task frequently used to produce implicit knowledge, artificial grammar learning (AGL). Four experiments…

Retrieval of memories is enhanced when bilateral saccades are made immediately before attempting retrieval. One hypothesis is that saccades enhance retrieval by increasing interaction of the brain hemispheres. To test this, subjects viewed arrays of lateralized letters and indicated whether target letters matched either of two probe letters.…

This article is an introduction to two other articles in this issue, Catherine Maxwell's "Teaching 19th-century aesthetic prose" and Kirsteen Anderson's "The whole learner: the role of imagination in developing disciplinary learning". It highlights the significance of the courses described in Maxwell's and Anderson's accounts…

How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities? The current study tested 56 preschoolers on false-belief and knowledge-ignorance tasks about the mental states of contrasting agents--some agents were ordinary humans, some had exceptional perceptual capacities, and others possessed extraordinary mental…