A four-location belief task was designed to examine children's understanding of another's uncertain belief after passing a false belief (FB) task. In Experiment 1, after passing the FB task, participants were asked what a puppet would do after he failed to find his toy at the falsely believed location. Most 4-year-olds and half of 6-year-olds…

Does the capacity of visual short-term memory (VSTM) depend on the complexity of the objects represented in memory? Although some previous findings indicated lower capacity for more complex stimuli, other results suggest that complexity effects arise during retrieval (due to errors in the comparison process with what is in memory) that is not…

Twelve-month-olds realize that when an agent cannot see an object, her incomplete perceptions still guide her goal-directed actions. What would happen if the agent had incomplete perceptions because she could see only one part of the object, for example one side of a screen? In the present research, 16-month-olds were first shown an agent who…

Person recognition can be accomplished through several modalities (face, name, voice). Lesion, neurophysiology and neuroimaging studies have been conducted in an attempt to determine the similarities and differences in the neural networks associated with person identity via different modality inputs. The current study used event-related…

It is well established that several motor areas, called the mirror-neuron system (MNS), are activated when an individual observes other's actions. However, whether the MNS responds similarly to robotic actions compared with human actions is still controversial. The present study investigated whether and how the motor area activity is influenced by…

Most theoreticians believe that reading habits explain why Western adults associate small numbers with left space and large numbers with right space (the SNARC effect). We challenge this belief by documenting, in both English and Hebrew, that SNARC changes during reading: small and large numbers in our texts appeared near the left or right ends of…

There is increasing focus on the neurophysiological underpinnings of brain activations, giving birth to an emerging branch of neuroscience--neuroenergetics. However, no common definition of "brain activation" exists thus far. In this article, we define brain activation as the information-driven reorganization of energy flows in a population of…

Many cognitive theories have described behavior as the summation of independent contributions from separate components. Contrasting views have emphasized the importance of multiplicative interactions and emergent structure. We describe a statistical approach to distinguishing additive and multiplicative processes and apply it to the dynamics of…

Adults' causal representations integrate information about predictive relations and the possibility of effective intervention; if one event reliably predicts another, adults can represent the possibility that acting to bring about the first event might generate the second. Here we show that although toddlers (mean age: 24 months) readily learn…

At near-threshold levels of stimulation, identical stimulus parameters can result in very different phenomenal experiences. Can we manipulate which stimuli reach consciousness? Here we show that consciousness of otherwise masked stimuli can be experimentally induced by sensory entrainment. We preceded a backward-masked stimulus with a series of…

Prepositions combine with nouns flexibly when describing concrete locative relations (e.g. "at/on/in" the school) but are rigidly prescribed when paired with abstract concepts (e.g. "at" risk; "on" Wednesday; "in" trouble). In the former case they do linguistic work based on their discrete semantic qualities, and in the latter they appear to serve…

Humans are able to mentally adopt the spatial perspective of others and understand the world from their point of view. We propose that spatial perspective taking (SPT) could have developed from the physical alignment of perspectives. This would support the notion that others have put forward claiming that SPT is an embodied cognitive process. We…

Lumley and Miltenberger (1997) noted the paucity of empirical investigations involving teaching sexual-abuse-protection skills to people with intellectual disabilities. We reviewed relevant empirical investigations since 1997. Six studies trained sexual-abuse-protection skills, and two also included protection skills related to physical and verbal…

DSM-5, the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," was published in May 2013, amidst a storm of controversy. This article focuses on changes made to the diagnostic criteria for Specific Learning Disorders (SLD). Primary criticisms of the changes in the SLD concern…

Since the inception of the L2 motivational self system (Dörnyei, 2005), which operationalises motivation as a function of learners' future identities, the field of L2 motivation has seen a growing interest in mental imagery. Numerous studies have examined the role of a future self-guide, that is, the ideal L2 self, and have confirmed it to be…