Search for a ball that has undergone hidden motion rapidly improves during the second year of life ("Dev. Psychol.," 2000; 36:394-401). In three experiments we investigated whether the poor performance of younger toddlers was due to attentional failure by highlighting the major cue for the hidden object. We observed only slight improvement in…

This study investigates the effects of prior experience, task instruction, and choice on creative performance. Although extant research suggests that giving people choice in how they approach a task could enhance creative performance, we propose that this view needs to be circumscribed. Specifically, we argue that when choice is administered…

The social cognition and perception-action literatures are largely separate, both conceptually and empirically. However, both areas of research emphasize infants' emerging abilities to use available information--social and perceptual information, respectively--for making decisions about action. Borrowing methods from both research traditions, this…

This research investigates whether children with autism learn picture, word and object relations as associative pairs or whether they understand such relations as referential. In Experiment 1, children were taught a new word (e.g. "whisk") repeatedly paired with a novel picture. When given the picture and a previously unseen real whisk and asked…

One key issue for models of bilingual memory is to what degree the semantic representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language. In the present paper, we examine whether there is an early, automatic semantic priming effect across languages for noncognates with highly proficient (Basque/Spanish) bilinguals. Experiment 1 was a…

Rapid acquisition of linguistic categories or constructions is sometimes regarded as evidence of innate knowledge. In this paper, we examine Polish children's early understanding of an idiosyncratic, language-specific construction involving the instrumental case--which could not be due to innate knowledge. Thirty Polish-speaking children aged 2; 6…

It is well established that glucocorticoid hormones strengthen the consolidation of hippocampus-dependent spatial and contextual memory. The present experiments investigated glucocorticoid effects on the long-term formation of conditioned taste aversion (CTA), an associative learning task that does not depend critically on hippocampal function.…

This paper presents two experiments in the acquisition of the nominal domain in English by Japanese and Spanish second language (L2) learners. The first experiment tests the L2 learners' ability to distinguish between count and mass nouns using a grammaticality judgement task and the second experiment tests learners on different types of definite…

Young children learning English are biased to attend to the shape of solid rigid objects when learning novel names. This study seeks further understanding of the processes that support this behavior by examining a previous finding that three-year-old children are also biased to generalize novel names for objects made from deformable materials by…

Stereotypic behavior exhibited by a third grade boy with autism was maintained by automatic reinforcement and occurrences of stereotypy were brought under stimulus control. The intervention consisted of pairing a green discriminative stimulus card (SD) with free access to stereotypy and a red card (SD absent) with vocal redirection and blocking…

Purpose: Two studies examined speech skill learning in persons with apraxia of speech (AOS). Motor-learning research shows that delaying or reducing the frequency of feedback promotes retention and transfer of skills. By contrast, immediate or frequent feedback promotes temporary performance enhancement but interferes with retention and transfer.…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to evaluate aspects of the "functional distance hypothesis," which predicts that tasks regulated by brain networks in closer anatomic proximity will interfere more with each other than tasks controlled by spatially distant regions. Speech, verbal fluency, and manual motor tasks were examined to ascertain whether…

Eighteen temporal lobectomy patients (9 left, LTL; 9 right, RTL) were administered four verbal tasks, an Affective Implicit Task, a Neutral Implicit Task, an Affective Explicit Task, and a Neutral Explicit Task. For the Affective and Neutral Implicit Tasks, participants were timed while reading aloud passages with affective or neutral content,…

Research on incidental sequence learning typically is concerned with the characteristics of implicit or nonconscious learning. In this article, the authors aim to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms that contribute to the generation of explicit, reportable sequence knowledge. According to the unexpected-event hypothesis (P. A. Frensch, H. Haider,…

This study examined the role of attention difficulties as a mediator of associations between children's insecure representations of the interparental relationship and their school adjustment in a sample of two hundred and sixteen 6-year-old children. Consistent with hypotheses, findings from structural equation models indicated that observer…