Reports a retraction of "Hierarchical encoding of behavior: Translating perception into action" by Bridgette Martin Hard, Sandra C. Lozano and Barbara Tversky (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2006[Nov], Vol 135[4], 588-608). All authors retract this article. Co-author Tversky and co-author Hard believe that the research results cannot…

Participants searched a visual display for a target among distractors. Each of 3 experiments tested a condition proposed to require attention and for which certain models propose a serial search. Serial versus parallel processing was tested by examining effects on response time means and cumulative distribution functions. In 2 conditions, the…

In previous work the authors argued that the potential number of effectors in the response set is crucial in discriminating (multiple-effector) keypress from (single-effector) reaching responses. It is not clear, however, what influence the locus of responding (on vs. off the stimulus location for reaching and keypressing, respectively) has on…

This article describes a novel experiment focused on metal ion hydrolysis and the equilibria related to metal ions in aqueous systems. Using [superscript 27]Al NMR, the students become familiar with NMR spectroscopy as a quantitative analytical tool for the determination of aluminum by preparing a standard calibration curve using standard aluminum…

Three experiments investigated whether production of low-frequency spellings could be influenced by other words containing those spellings. Participants saw visually-presented primes (Experiment 1) or heard primes presented auditorily and produced their spelling (Experiments 2 and 3). Primes either shared both orthography and phonology (e.g.,…

To establish a series of derived relations between arbitrary stimuli, 20 subjects were exposed to nonarbitrary and arbitrary relational training and testing procedures. Subjects were then exposed to an avoidance conditioning procedure in which one member from each relation was established as a discriminative stimulus for avoidance and…

This lesson can be used at the beginning of the year to teach students how to conduct inquiries using the essential features described in "Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards" (NRC 1996). The lesson is divided into several activities which may be spread over several days or interspersed with your other beginning-of-the-year…

Two picture naming experiments, in which an initial picture was occasionally replaced with another (target) picture, were conducted to study the temporal coordination of abandoning one word and resuming with another word in speech production. In Experiment 1, participants abandoned saying the initial name, and resumed with the name of the target…

An eye-movement study examined the processing of expressions requiring complement coercion (J. Pustejovsky, 1995), in which a noun phrase that does not denote an event (e.g., the book) appears as the complement of an event-selecting verb (e.g., began the book). Previous studies demonstrated that these expressions are more costly to process …

Three experiments explored whether conceptual mappings in conventional metaphors are productive, by testing whether the comprehension of novel metaphors was facilitated by first reading conceptually related conventional metaphors. The first experiment, a replication and extension of Keysar et al. [Keysar, B., Shen, Y., Glucksberg, S., Horton, W.…

A key question in language processing concerns the rule-like nature of many aspects of grammar. Much research on this topic has focused on English past tense morphology, which comprises a regular, rule-like pattern (e.g., bake-baked) and a set of irregular forms that defy a rule-based description (e.g., take-took). Previous studies have used past…

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated the role of pitch accents during online discourse comprehension. Participants faced a grid with ornaments, and followed prerecorded instructions such as "Next, hang the blue ball" to decorate holiday trees. Experiment 1 demonstrated a processing advantage for felicitous as compared to infelicitous uses…

In his presidential address Jess Gilbert examines two democratic experiments of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) during the New Deal: first, county planning that coordinated federal programs through citizen committees, and second, land redistribution to landless southern farmers, including a small number of black sharecroppers…

Behavioral data suggest that distinguishable orientations may be necessary for place learning even when distal cues define different start points in the room and a unique goal location. We examined whether changes in orientation are also important in place learning and navigation in a water T-maze. In Experiment 1, rats were trained to locate a…

A common moving-coil loudspeaker is useful for learning harmonic motion. A simple optical method is used to observe free and forced oscillations of the diaphragm of a loudspeaker. With a lock-in amplifier and data-acquisition system, the frequency response of the loudspeaker and its electrical impedance are automatically recorded versus frequency.…