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An important aspect of human thought is the value we place on unique individuals. Adults place higher value on authentic works of art than exact replicas, and young children at times value their original possessions over exact duplicates. What is the scope of this preference in early childhood, and when do children understand its subjective nature? On a series of trials, we asked three-year-olds (N=36)...
Memory is a dynamic process. While memory becomes increasingly resistant to interference after consolidation, a brief reactivation renders it unstable again. Previous studies have shown that interference, when applied upon reactivation, impairs the consolidated memory, presumably by disrupting the reconsolidation of the memory. However, attempts have failed in disrupting human declarative memory,...
Previous work has found that people feel significantly more satisfied with explanations of psychological phenomena when those explanations contain neuroscience information—even when this information is entirely irrelevant to the logic of the explanations. This seductive allure effect was first demonstrated by Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, and Gray (2008), and has since been replicated several...
Previous research revealing universal biases in infant vowel perception forms the basis of the Natural Referent Vowel (NRV) framework (Polka & Bohn, 2011). To explore the feasibility of extending this framework to consonant manner perception, we investigated perception of the stop vs. fricative consonant contrast /b/-/v/ to test the hypothesis that young infants will display a perceptual bias...
Two classes of space define our everyday experience within our surrounding environment: vista spaces, such as rooms or streets which can be perceived from one vantage point, and environmental spaces, for example, buildings and towns which are grasped from multiple views acquired during locomotion. However, theories of spatial representations often treat both spaces as equal. The present experiments...
We investigate the extent to which syntactic choice in written English is influenced by processing considerations as predicted by Gibson’s (2000) Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) and Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008). A long line of previous work attests that languages display a tendency for shorter dependencies, and in a previous corpus study, Temperley (2007) provided evidence that this...
To investigate whether children rectify social inequalities in a resource allocation task, participants (N=185 African-American and European-American 5–6year-olds and 10–11year-olds) witnessed an inequality of school supplies between peers of different racial backgrounds. Assessments were conducted on how children judged the wrongfulness of the inequality, allocated new resources to racial ingroup...
The capacity to inhibit actions is central to voluntary motor control. However, the control mechanisms and subjective experience involved in voluntarily stopping an involuntary movement remain poorly understood. Here we examined, in humans, the voluntary inhibition of the Kohnstamm phenomenon, in which sustained voluntary contraction of shoulder abductors is followed by involuntary arm raising. Participants...
We investigated the relative attentional capture by positive versus simultaneously presented negative images in extrafoveal vision for female observers. Pairs of task-irrelevant pleasant and unpleasant visual scenes were displayed peripherally (⩾5° away from fixation) during a task-relevant letter-discrimination task at fixation. Selective attentional orienting was assessed by the probability of first...
We investigated whether nonhuman great apes (N=23), 2.5-year-old (N=20), and 3-year-old children (N=40) infer causal relations from patterns of variation and covariation by adapting the blicket detector paradigm for apes. We presented chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), bonobos (Pan paniscus), orangutans (Pongo abelii), gorillas (Gorilla gorilla), and children (Homo sapiens) with a novel reward dispenser,...
The division of labor hypothesis proposed by Nespor, Peña, and Mehler (2003) postulates that consonants are more important than vowels in lexical processing (when learning and recognizing words). This consonant bias (C-bias) is supported by many adult and toddler studies. However, some cross-linguistic variation has been found in toddlerhood, and various hypotheses have been proposed to account for...
A recent study reported an asymmetry between subjective estimates of future and past distances with passive estimation and virtual movement. The temporal Doppler effect refers to the contraction of future distance judgments relative to past ones. We aimed to replicate the effect using real and imagined motion in both directions as well as different temporal perspectives. To avoid the problem of subjective...
Recent studies demonstrate that interleaving the exemplars of different categories, rather than blocking exemplars by category, can enhance inductive learning—the ability to categorize new exemplars—presumably because interleaving affords discriminative contrasts between exemplars from different categories. Consistent with this view, other studies have demonstrated that decreasing between-category...
This paper attempts to evaluate the capacity of immediate memory to cope with new situations in relation to the compressibility of information likely to allow the formation of chunks. We constructed a task in which untrained participants had to immediately recall sequences of stimuli with possible associations between them. Compressibility of information was used to measure the chunkability of each...
Cognitive control requires choosing contextual information to update into working memory (input gating), maintaining it there (maintenance) stable against distraction, and then choosing which subset of maintained information to use in guiding action (output gating). Recent work has raised the possibility that the development of rule-guided behavior, in the transition from childhood to adolescence,...
Classical explanations for the modality effect—superior short-term serial recall of auditory compared to visual sequences—typically recur to privileged processing of information derived from auditory sources. Here we critically appraise such accounts, and re-evaluate the nature of the canonical empirical phenomena that have motivated them. Three experiments show that the standard account of modality...
Recent studies indicate that competition between conflicting action representations slows down planning of object-directed actions. The present study aims to assess whether similar conflict effects exist during manipulable object perception. Twenty-six young adults performed reach-to-grasp and semantic judgements on conflictual objects (with competing structural and functional gestures) and non-conflictual...
To accurately localize our limbs and guide movements toward external objects, the brain must represent the body and its surrounding (peripersonal) visual space. Specific multisensory neurons encode peripersonal space in the monkey brain, and neurobehavioral studies have suggested the existence of a similar representation in humans. However, because peripersonal space lacks a distinct perceptual correlate,...
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