Purpose: The purpose was to determine the number of semantic neighbors, namely, "semantic set size," for 88 nonobjects (J. F. Kroll & M. C. Potter, 1984) and determine how semantic set size related to other measures and age. Method: Data were collected from 82 adults and 92 preschool children in a discrete association task. The nonobjects were…

Everyday experience affords us many opportunities to learn about objects through multiple senses using physical interaction. Previous work has shown that active motor learning of unisensory items enhances memory and leads to the involvement of motor systems during subsequent perception. However, the impact of active motor learning on subsequent…

A longstanding and fundamental debate in developmental science is whether knowledge is acquired through domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms. To date, there exists no tool to determine whether experimental data support one theoretical approach or the other. In this article, we argue that the U- and N-shaped curves found in a number of…

Four experiments examined the role of selective attention in a new causal judgment task that allowed measurement of both causal strength and cue recognition. In Experiments 1 and 2, blocking was observed; pretraining with 1 cue (A) resulted in reduced learning about a 2nd cue (B) when those 2 cues were trained in compound (AB+). Participants also…

What do learners do when they control whether to engage in massed or spaced practice? According to theories by Son (2004) and by Metcalfe and Kornell (2005), the tendency for learners to choose spaced practice over massed practice should decline as item difficulty becomes greater. Support originally was obtained when pairs containing unfamiliar…

Researchers of metacognitive development in adulthood have exclusively used extreme-age-groups designs. We used a full cross-sectional sample (N = 285, age range: 18-80) to evaluate how associative relatedness and encoding strategies influence judgments of learning (JOLs) in adulthood. Participants studied related and unrelated word pairs and made…

Perruchet, Cleeremans, and Destrebecqz (2006) reported a striking dissociation between trends in the conscious expectancy of an event and the speed of a response that is cued by that event. They argued that this indicates the operation of independent processes in human associative learning. However, there remains a strong possibility that this…

The current study investigates the limited attainment of adult language acquisition in terms of an associative learning phenomenon whereby earlier learned cues attentionally block those that are experienced later. Short- and long-term blocking are demonstrated in experimental investigations of learned attention in the acquisition of temporal…

The basolateral complex (BLA) and central nucleus (CEA) of the amygdala play critical roles in associative learning, including Pavlovian conditioning. However, the precise role for these structures in Pavlovian conditioning is not clear. Recent work in appetitive conditioning paradigms suggests that the amygdala, particularly the BLA, has an…

The present study focused on the processes underlying cognitive association formation by investigating subsequent memory effects. Event-related potentials were recorded as participants studied pairs of words, presented one word at a time, for later recall. The findings showed that a frontal-positive late wave (LW), which occurred 1-1.6 s after the…

Purpose: The purpose was to determine whether semantic set size, a measure of the number of semantic neighbors, influenced word learning, and whether the influence of semantic set size was broad, showing effects on multiple measures both during and after learning. Method: Thirty-six preschool children were exposed to 10 nonobjects, varying in…

One likely mechanism in learning new skills is change in synchronous connections between distributed neural networks, which can be measured by coherence analysis of electroencephalographic patterns. This study examined coherence changes during the learning of two tasks, a word association task and a figure association task. Although learning…

In the present study, we address two questions concerning the relation between children's false belief and their understanding of complex object complements. The first question is whether the previously demonstrated association between tensed complements and false belief generalizes to infinitival complements (de Villiers & Pyers, 2002). The…

In 5 experiments, the authors examined the development of automatic response inhibition in the go/no-go paradigm and a modified version of the stop-signal paradigm. They hypothesized that automatic response inhibition may develop over practice when stimuli are consistently associated with stopping. All 5 experiments consisted of a training phase…

This study examines evidence for the hypothesis (e.g., Muñoz, 2006) that an early starting age is not necessarily more beneficial to the successful learning of L2 inflectional morphology in strictly formal instructional settings. The present author investigated the quantitative and qualitative differences in the production and reception of 5…