Mental effort expended during the creation of sentence elaborations by fifth graders performing two simultaneous tasks was greater for inaccessible than accessible pairs. The difference was not observed when subjects were provided with pair members in sentences. (RH)

Reflects on Needham's findings on infants' object recognition and segregation. Examines the role for perceptual bias in explaining infant performance, places Needham's studies in historical perspective, and assesses their theoretical significance. Discusses the merits of positing different kinds of information sources for object segregation, and…

Italian speakers were asked to name pictures of actions (e.g. "bere", to drink). Pictures were presented at the same time as distracter words that were semantically related or unrelated to the picture names, and were of the same or different grammatical class (verbs or nouns). Half of the participants named the actions as verbs in citation form,…

This article reports an error in the article "Retrieval of Incidental Stimulus-Response Associations as a Source of Negative Priming" by Rothermund et al. ("Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition," Vol 31(3) May 2005, 482-495). Table 1 (p. 484) was incorrectly typeset. The correct layout is provided. (The following…

Five experiments explored whether fluency in musical sequence production relies on matches between the contents of auditory feedback and the planned outcomes of actions. Participants performed short melodies from memory on a keyboard while musical pitches that sounded in synchrony with each keypress (feedback contents) were altered. Results…

In two experiments, the use of mutual exclusivity in the naming of whole objects was examined in monolingual and bilingual 3- and 6-year-olds. Once an object has a known name, then via principles of mutual exclusivity it is often assumed that a new name given to the object must refer to some part, substance, or other property of the object.…

Young children are readily able to use known labels to constrain hypotheses about the meanings of new words under conditions of referential ambiguity. At issue is the kind of information children use to constrain such hypotheses. According to one theory, children take into account the speaker's intention when solving a referential puzzle. In the…

The present work introduces a form of associative mechanosensory conditioning of the proboscis extension reflex (PER) in honeybees. In our paradigm, harnessed honeybees learn the elemental association between mechanosensory, antennal stimulation and a reward of sucrose solution delivered to the proboscis. Thereafter, bees extend their proboscis to…

The social transmission of food preference task (STFP) has been used to examine the involvement of the hippocampus in learning and memory for a natural odor-odor association. However, cortical involvement in STFP has not been extensively studied. The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is important in odor-guided learning, and cholinergic depletion of the…

If an organism is explicitly taught an A[arrow right]B association, then might it also spontaneously learn the symmetrical B[arrow right]A association? Little evidence attests to such "associative symmetry" in nonhuman animals. We report for the first time a clear case of associative symmetry in the pigeon. Experiment 1 used a successive go/no go…

Skilled reading requires attention to many aspects of print at the same time. Some children demonstrate difficulty in attending flexibly to multiple features of print, often focusing solely on decoding or word-level information. These children often lack the insight that reading is more than decoding; they have a difficult time thinking about…

Feeding behavior of Aplysia provides an excellent model system for analyzing and comparing mechanisms underlying appetitive classical conditioning and reward operant conditioning. Behavioral protocols have been developed for both forms of associative learning, both of which increase the occurrence of biting following training. Because the neural…

Implicitly repeating categories by presenting words not present in the original categorized list but logically members of previously studied categories significantly increased acquisition and retention relative to repeating category labels, repeating members of categories, and repeating neither labels nor members. The efficiency of repetition…

Article described a series of models for concept teaching, using both deductive and inductive procedures, and because such procedures inevitably use language, even when making use of concrete objects or props, article started with a discussion of the relationship of language and concepts. (Author/RK)

There are difficulties and unanswered questions involved in Jensen's plan, but those critics who dismiss him as a racist are not really looking at the conclusions he has drawn. (Editor)