Piaget's investigations into children's understanding of the laws governing the movement of a simple pendulum were first reported in 1955 as part of a report into how children's knowledge of the physical world changes during development. Chapter 4 of Inhelder & Piaget (1955/1958) entitled "The Oscillation of a Pendulum and the Operations of…

A simple laboratory exercise is presented that follows the population growth of the common vinegar eel, "Turbatrix aceti" (Nematoda), in a microcosm using a simple culture medium. It lends itself to an exercise in a single semester course. (Contains 4 figures.)

Overlaps in form and meaning between morphologically related words have led to ambiguities in interpreting priming effects in studies of lexical organization. In Semitic languages like Arabic, however, linguistic analysis proposes that one of the three component morphemes of a surface word is the CV-Skeleton, an abstract prosodic unit coding the…

We examined the influence of semantic transparency on morphological facilitation in English in three lexical decision experiments. Decision latencies to visual targets (e.g., CASUALNESS) were faster after semantically transparent (e.g., CASUALLY) than semantically opaque (e.g., CASUALTY) primes whether primes were auditory and presented…

Two experiments are reported that examine the possibility that exercise selectively influences different types of cognition. To our knowledge, these experiments represent the first attempt to study higher-cognitive processes during exercise. Theoretical thinking was guided by the transient hypofrontality hypothesis. In both experiments, athletes…

This paper examines the use of singular and plural pronominal references to split antecedents such as "John and Mary." Current opinion suggests that under the right circumstances, singular reference should be difficult, and plural reference facilitated, but currently only the first of the these predictions has been demonstrated. We report four…

Cross-cultural comparisons of categorization often confound cultural factors with expertise. This paper reports four experiments on the conceptual behavior of Native American and majority-culture fish experts. The two groups live in the same general area and engage in essentially the same set of fishing-related behaviors. Nonetheless, cultural…

Research on the additive interspersal procedure was extended by exposing seventh-grade students to curricula-based (e.g., educationally valid) language arts assignments. In Experiment I, each student was given a control language arts assignment containing 20 discrete target items and an experimental assignment containing 24 equivalent target…

A number of studies using trial-by-trial learning tasks have shown that judgments of covariation between a cue c and an outcome o deviate from normative metrics. Parameters based on trial-by-trial predictions were estimated from signal detection theory (SDT) in a standard causal learning task. Results showed that manipulations of P(c) when…

Judgments of learning (JOLs) made during multiple study-test trials underestimate increases in recall performance across those trials, an effect that has been dubbed the underconfidence-with-practice (UWP) effect. In 3 experiments, the authors examined the contribution of retrieval fluency to the UWP effect for immediate and delayed JOLs. The UWP…

In 5 experiments, the authors tested whether the processing of nonconscious spatial stimulus information depends on a prior intention. This test was conducted with the metacontrast dissociation paradigm. Experiment 1 demonstrated that masked primes that could not be discriminated above chance level affected responses to the visible stimuli that…

In four conditioned taste aversion experiments with rats as subjects, the effects of extinguished or pre-exposed flavors on retardation and summation tests was compared. Experiment 1 showed that when steps were taken to ensure similar exposure to the target flavor in all conditions, acquisition after pre-exposure and reacquisition after extinction…

Dynamic Visual Acuity (DVA) can be measured from two types of equivalently considered movement referred to as drifting-motion and displacement-motion. Displacement motion can be best described as the horizontal displacement of a stimulus, thus implying pursuit eye movements, and involves moving the stimulus from the fixation point of gaze towards…

In tone languages, the identity of a word depends on its tone pattern as well as its phonetic structure. The primary cue to tone identity is the fundamental frequency (F0) contour. Two experiments explore how listeners perceive Mandarin monosyllables in which all or part of the F0 information has been neutralized. In Experiment 1, supposedly…

Operant and classical conditioning are major processes shaping behavioral responses in all animals. Although the understanding of the mechanisms of classical conditioning has expanded significantly, the understanding of the mechanisms of operant conditioning is more limited. Recent developments in "Aplysia" are helping to narrow the gap in the…