The induction cooker is a common appliance nowadays. How does it work? Why is it not possible to use aluminium utensils with it? What experiments can be carried out with it (at different levels) and not only in physics lessons? Searching for the answers to these and other questions is the purpose of this article. (Contains 5 figures.)

Past research has demonstrated emergent conditional relations using a go/no-go procedure with pairs of figures displayed side-by-side on a computer screen. The present study sought to extend applications of this procedure. In Experiment 1, we evaluated whether emergent conditional relations could be demonstrated when two-component stimuli were…

There has been much debate, in both the linguistics and the psycholinguistics literature, concerning numbers and the interpretation of number denoting determiners ("numerals"). Such debate concerns, in particular, the nature and distribution of upper-bounded ("exact") interpretations vs. lower-bounded ("at-least") construals. In the present paper…

In 1920, John Watson and Rosalie Rayner claimed to have conditioned a baby boy, Albert, to fear a laboratory rat. In subsequent tests, they reported that the child's fear generalized to other furry objects. After the last testing session, Albert disappeared, creating one of the greatest mysteries in the history of psychology. This article…

Subjective expected relative similarity (SERS) is a descriptive theory that explains cooperation levels in single-step prisoner's dilemma (PD) games. SERS predicts that individuals cooperate whenever their "subjectively perceived similarity" with their opponent exceeds a situational index, namely the game's "similarity threshold." A thought…

Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007) reported a series of experiments in which processing unrelated words in terms of their relevance to a grasslands survival scenario led to better retention relative to other semantic processing tasks. The impetus for their study was the premise that human memory systems evolved under the selection pressures…

The generation manipulation has been critical in delineating differences between implicit and explicit memory. In contrast to past research, the present experiments indicate that generating from a rhyme cue produces as much perceptual priming as does reading. This is demonstrated for 3 visual priming tasks: perceptual identification, word-fragment…

Two diverging hypotheses concerning the influence of surprising events on hindsight effects have been proposed: Although some authors believe that surprising events lead to a reversal of hindsight bias, others have proposed that surprise increases hindsight bias. Drawing on the separate-components view of the hindsight bias (which argues that…

Two independent lines of research--mental simulations and thought experiments--provide strong arguments about the importance of perceptual modalities for the instructional practices in science education. By situating the use of mental simulations in the framework of thought experiments, this study investigated the nature and the role of mental…

Adults rapidly learn phonotactic constraints from brief production or perception experience. Three experiments asked whether this learning is modality-specific, occurring separately in production and perception, or whether perception transfers to production. Participant pairs took turns repeating syllables in which particular consonants were…

A simple low cost demonstration experiment is performed using common apparatus in order to show various flexural patterns and to give a dynamical measure of Young's modulus. (Contains 4 figures.)

By 7 months of age, infants are able to learn rules based on the abstract relationships between stimuli ( Marcus et al., 1999 ), but they are better able to do so when exposed to speech than to some other classes of stimuli. In the current experiments we ask whether multimodal stimulus information will aid younger infants in identifying abstract…

The present research examined whether infants as young as 6 months of age would consider what objects a human agent could perceive when interpreting her actions on the objects. In two experiments, the infants took the agent's actions of repeatedly reaching for and grasping one of two possible objects as suggesting her preference for that object…

For adults, prior information about an individual's likely goals, preferences or dispositions plays a powerful role in interpreting ambiguous behavior and predicting and interpreting behavior in novel contexts. Across two studies, we investigated whether 10-month-old infants' ability to identify the goal of an ambiguous action sequence was…

In the current paper, we asked at what level in the speech planning process speakers retrieve stored syllables. There is evidence that syllable structure plays an essential role in the phonological encoding of words (e.g., online syllabification and phonological word formation). There is also evidence that syllables are retrieved as whole units.…