This study investigated how young children's increasingly flexible use of spatial reference frames enables accurate search for hidden objects by using a task that 3-year-olds have been shown to perform with great accuracy and 2-year-olds have been shown to perform inaccurately. Children watched as an object was rolled down a ramp, behind a panel…

This study compared the effect of stimulus inversion on 3- to 5-year-olds' recognition of faces and two nonface object categories matched with faces for a number of attributes: shoes (Experiment 1) and frontal images of cars (Experiments 2 and 3). The inversion effect was present for faces but not shoes at 3 years of age (Experiment 1). Analogous…

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder, which stems from a genetic deletion on chromosome 7 and causes a profound weakness in visuospatial cognition. Our current study explores how orientation perception may contribute to the visuospatial deficits in WS. In Experiment 1, we found that WS individuals and normal 3-4 year olds…

This study used the Remember/Know (R/K) procedure combined with signal detection analyses to assess recognition memory in 20 elders with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), 10 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) as well as matched healthy older adults. Signal detection analyses first indicated that aMCI and control participants…

This research investigated the development of affective decision-making (ADM) during early childhood, in particular role of difficulty in learning a gain/loss schedule. In Experiment 1, we administrated the Children's Gambling Task (CGT) to 60 Chinese children aged 3 and 4, replicating the results obtained by Kerr and Zelazo [Kerr, A., & Zelazo,…

Like adults, infants use working memory to represent occluded objects and can update these memory representations to reflect changes to a scene that unfold over time. Here we tested the limits of infants' ability to update object representations in working memory. Eleven-month-old infants participated in a modified foraging task in which they saw…

Previous research has shown that multicolored scales are superior to ordered brightness scales for supporting identification tasks on complex visualizations (categorization, absolute numeric value judgments, etc.), whereas ordered brightness scales are superior for relative comparison tasks (greater/less). We examined the processes by which such…

Purpose: This research assessed the influence of visual speech on phonological processing by children with hearing loss (HL). Method: Children with HL and children with normal hearing (NH) named pictures while attempting to ignore auditory or audiovisual speech distractors whose onsets relative to the pictures were either congruent, conflicting in…

The sequential nature of action ensures that an individual can anticipate the conclusion of an observed action via the use of semantic rules. The semantic processing of language and action has been linked to the N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP). The authors developed an ERP paradigm in which infants and adults observed simple…

We demonstrate here that initially neutral items can acquire "specific" value based on their associated outcomes, and that responses of physiological systems to such previously meaningless stimuli can rapidly reflect this associative history. Each participant participated in an associative learning task in which four neutral abstract pictures were…

This article presents a practical methodology for creating and sustaining strategic planning, the task analysis. Utilizing our Teaching & Learning Center Strategic Plan as a model, we demonstrate how working with a weekly status report provides a comprehensive listing of detail necessary to analyze and revise the plan. The new methodology is…

People discriminate remarkably well among large numerosities. These discriminations, however, need not entail numerical representation of the quantities being compared. This research evaluated the role of both non-numerical and numerical information in adult judgments of relative numerosity for large-numerosity spatial arrays. Results of…

The authors introduce a model of skill acquisition that incorporates elements of both traditional models and models based on embedded cognition by striking a balance between top-down and bottom-up control. A knowledge representation is used in which pre- and postconditions are attached to actions. This model captures improved performance due to…

A model of cognitive control in task switching is developed in which controlled performance depends on the system maintaining access to a code in episodic memory representing the most recently cued task. The main constraint on access to the current task code is proactive interference from old task codes. This interference and the mechanisms that…

When switching between tasks, participants are sometimes required to use different response sets for each task. Thus, task switch and response set switch are confounded. In 5 experiments, the authors examined transitions of response within a linear 4-finger arrangement. A random baseline condition was compared with the cuing of specific response…