This study uses a complexity-accuracy-lexis-fluency (CALF) framework to explore performance on 2 speaking tasks: a narrative picture-based task and an interactive decision-making task. A preliminary aim is to compare performance on the 2 tasks, using a wide range of CALF measures to explore where scores are similar and where they are different.…

The current laboratory-based study examined individual differences in sadness coherence (i.e., coherence between objectively coded sad facial expressions and heart rate in response to a sad film clip) and associations with dispositional affect (i.e., positive and negative affect, extraversion, neuroticism) and age in a sample of younger and older…

The effect of religious priming has been studied in relation to a number of variables, most extensively with prosocial behavior. The effects of priming on cognitive domains, however, are relatively understudied. The present study examined the effects of religious priming, compared with reflective and neutral priming, on the conjunction fallacy.…

Readers' memory for belief-consistent texts is often stronger than for belief-inconsistent texts (text-belief consistency effect). However, presenting belief-consistent and belief-inconsistent texts alternatingly reduces the discrepancy between the memory strengths of belief-consistent and belief-inconsistent texts. The present study used eye…

Individuals track probabilities, such as associations between events in their environments, but less is known about the degree to which experience--within a learning session and over development--influences people's use of incoming probabilistic information to guide behavior in real time. In two experiments, children (4-11 years) and adults…

Reduced autobiographical memory specificity (AMS) has robust associations with psychopathology. As such, understanding the development of AMS (or its inverse, overgeneral autobiographical memory) and how it may be unique from other aspects of memory performance is important. In particular, it is unclear whether child AMS is distinct from…

Background: Task performance is a critical factor for learning in individuals with intellectual disabilities. This study aimed to examine mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) to improve task performance for children with intellectual disability (ID). Methods: Three elementary school children with ID participated in the study. A multiple baseline…

There is a debate as to whether topic structures in Chinese involve A'-movement or result from base-generation of the topic in the left periphery. If Chinese topicalization was derived by movement, under the assumptions of Friedmann et al.'s Relativized Minimality (Lingua 119:67-88, 2009), we would expect children's comprehension of object…

Cognitive effort is costly and this cost likely influences the activities in which children engage. Yet, little is known about how school-age children perceive cognitive effort. The subjective value of cognitive effort, that is, how valuable or costly effort is perceived, was investigated in seventy-three 7- to 12-year-olds using an effort…

Previous studies report that children use color words haphazardly before acquiring conventional, adult-like meanings. The most common explanation for this is that children do not abstract color as a domain of linguistic meaning until several months after they begin producing color words, resulting in a stage during which they produce but do not…

Adults find negative sentences difficult to process, but an informative context can facilitate processing substantially, suggesting that much of this difficulty may come from the pragmatics of negation. Are children sensitive to the pragmatics of negation as well? Although children perform poorly on many tests of negation comprehension, we argue…

Self-assessment and task selection are important self-regulated learning skills for secondary school students. More specifically, selecting new tasks based on self-assessments is very important for them, because teachers are not always present or able to select tasks for them individually. However, little is known about the processes underlying…

Purpose: The goals of this study were to (a) classify speech movements of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in presymptomatic and symptomatic phases of bulbar function decline relying solely on kinematic features of lips and jaw and (b) identify the most important measures that detect the transition between early and late bulbar…

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is widely used to study decision-making within healthy and psychiatric populations. However, the complexity of the IGT makes it difficult to attribute variation in performance to specific cognitive processes. Several cognitive models have been proposed for the IGT in an effort to address this problem, but currently no…

Children's ability to refer is underpinned by their developing cognitive skills. Using a production task (n = 57), we examined pre-articulatory visual fixations to contrast objects (e.g., to a large apple when the target was a small one) to investigate how visual scanning drives informativeness across development. Eye-movements reveal that…