The Infona portal uses cookies, i.e. strings of text saved by a browser on the user's device. The portal can access those files and use them to remember the user's data, such as their chosen settings (screen view, interface language, etc.), or their login data. By using the Infona portal the user accepts automatic saving and using this information for portal operation purposes. More information on the subject can be found in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. By closing this window the user confirms that they have read the information on cookie usage, and they accept the privacy policy and the way cookies are used by the portal. You can change the cookie settings in your browser.
Fundamental questions in cognitive science concern the origins and nature of the units that compose visual experience. Here, we investigate the capacity to individuate and store information about non-solid portions, asking in particular whether free-ranging rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) quantify portions of a non-solid substance presented in discrete pouring actions. When presented with portions...
Gradable adjectives denote a function that takes an object and returns a measure of the degree to which the object possesses some gradable property [Kennedy, C. (1999). Projecting the adjective: The syntax and semantics of gradability and comparison. New York: Garland]. Scales, ordered sets of degrees, have begun to be studied systematically in semantics [Kennedy, C. (to appear). Vagueness and grammar:...
We distinguish between grasping gestures associated with using an object for its intended purpose (functional) and those used to pick up an object (volumetric) and we develop a novel experimental framework to show that both kinds of knowledge are automatically evoked by objects and by words denoting those objects. Cued gestures were carried out in the context of depicted objects or visual words. On...
Participants (aged 5–6yrs, 9–10yrs and adults) rated (using a five-point scale) grammatical (intransitive) and overgeneralized (transitive causative)1Throughout this paper, the term “intransitive” (whether referring to a verb or construction) refers only to non-causative intransitives – sometimes termed “inchoative intransitives” – (e.g., The man laughed) and not to intransitives with unspecified...
Do young children who seek the conceptual kind of an artifact weigh the plausibility that a current function constitutes the function intended by the object designer? Three- and four-year-olds were encouraged to question adults about novel artifacts. After inquiring about what an object was, some children were shown a function that plausibly accounted for the structural features of the object; others...
Cohen Kadosh, Tzelgov, and Henik [Cohen Kadosh, R., Tzelgov, J., & Henik, A. (2008). A synesthetic walk on the number line: The size effect. Cognition, 106, 548–557] present a new paradigm to probe properties of the mental number line. They describe two experiments which they argue to be inconsistent with the exact small number model proposed by Verguts, Fias, and Stevens [Verguts, T., Fias, W...
The present research examines the ability of children as young as 4years to use models in tasks that require scaling of distance along a single dimension. In Experiment 1, we found that tasks involving models are similar in difficulty to those involving maps that we studied earlier (Huttenlocher, J., Newcombe, N., & Vasilyeva, M. (1999). Spatial scaling in young children. Psychological Science,...
Several lines of research have suggested the importance of egocentric reference systems for determining how the spatial properties of one’s environment are mentally organized. Yet relatively little is known about the bases for egocentric reference systems in human spatial memory. In three experiments, we examine the relative importance of observer-based reference directions in human memory by controlling...
Are small and large numbers represented similarly or differently on the mental number line? The size effect was used to argue that numbers are represented differently. However, recently it has been argued that the size effect is due to the comparison task and is not derived from the mental number line per se. Namely, it is due to the way that the mental number line is mapped onto the task-relevant...
This paper addresses the nature of the temporary storage buffer used in implicit or statistical learning. Kuhn and Dienes [Kuhn, G., & Dienes, Z. (2005). Implicit learning of nonlocal musical rules: implicitly learning more than chunks. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition, 31(6) 1417–1432] showed that people could implicitly learn a musical rule that was solely based...
The need of bilinguals to continuously control two languages during speech production may exert general effects on their attentional networks. To explore this issue we compared the performance of bilinguals and monolinguals in the attentional network task (ANT) developed by Fan et al. [Fan, J., McCandliss, B.D. Sommer, T., Raz, A., Posner, M.I. (2002). Testing the efficiency and independence of attentional...
A critical question in Cognitive Science concerns how knowledge of specific domains emerges during development. Here we examined how limitations of the visual system during the first days of life may shape subsequent development of face processing abilities. By manipulating the bands of spatial frequencies of face images, we investigated what is the nature of the visual information that newborn infants...
There is considerable evidence that judgment is constrained to additive integration of information. The authors propose an explanation of why serial and additive cognitive integration can produce accurate multiple cue judgment both in additive and non-additive environments in terms of an adaptive division of labor between multiple representations. It is hypothesized that, whereas the additive, independent...
Grapheme-color synesthesia, when achromatic digits evoke an experience of a specific color (photisms), has been shown to be consistent, involuntary, and linked with number concept in adults, yet there have been no comparable investigations with children. We present a systematic study of grapheme-color synesthesia in children aged between 7 and 15 years. Here we show that such children (but not children...
Verguts and Van Opstal [Verguts, T., & Van Opstal, F. (2008). A colorful walk, but is it on the mental number line? Reply to Cohen Kadosh, Tzelgov, and Henik, Cognition, 106, 558–563] cleverly explained the results of Cohen Kadosh, Tzelgov, and Henik [Cohen Kadosh, R., Tzelgov, J., & Henik, A. (2008). A synesthetic walk on the mental number line: The size effect, Cognition, 106, 548–557] as...
Children with reading comprehension difficulties display impaired performance on semantic processing tasks. These impairments are assumed to reflect weaker knowledge about abstract semantic associations between words in poor comprehenders [Nation, K., & Snowling, M. (1999). Developmental differences in sensitivity to semantic relations among good and poor comprehenders: evidence from semantic...
Emotion has been suggested to slow forgetting via a mechanism that enhances memory consolidation. Here, we investigate whether this time dependent process influences the subjective experience of recollection as well as the ability to retrieve specific contextual details of the study event. To do so we examined recognition for emotional and neutral pictures at two retention intervals and collected...
Spatial terms such as right are potentially ambiguous because they can refer to different regions of space when defined by competing reference frames (e.g., my right within a relative reference frame versus an object’s right within an intrinsic reference frame). In such situations, previous research has suggested that multiple reference frames are initially activated, followed by inhibition of the...
Set the date range to filter the displayed results. You can set a starting date, ending date or both. You can enter the dates manually or choose them from the calendar.