This special issue investigates early responses--responsive actions that (start to) unfold while the production of the responded-to turn and action is still under way. Although timing in human conduct has gained intense interest in research, the early production of responsive actions has so far largely remained unexplored. But what makes early…

Sequential effects in conflict processing (postconflict slowing and conflict adaptation) have primarily been studied in stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) tasks. Moreover, results obtained in SRC paradigms are often proposed as a model of higher-level motivational conflicts. The authors present 3 experiments suggesting that motivational…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficulties acquiring the grammatical rules of their native language. It has been proposed that children's detection of sequential statistical patterns correlates with grammatical proficiency and hence that a deficit in the detection of these regularities may underlie the difficulties with…

Sleep is considered to support the formation of skill memory. In juvenile but not adult song birds learning a tutor's song, a stronger initial deterioration of song performance over night-sleep predicts better song performance in the long run. This and similar observations have stimulated the view of sleep supporting skill formation during…

The effect of recent experience on current behavior has been studied extensively in simple laboratory tasks. We explore the nature of sequential effects in the more naturalistic setting of automobile driving. Driving is a safety-critical task in which delayed response times may have severe consequences. Using a realistic driving simulator, we find…

In the domain of discourse processing, it has been claimed that older adults (60-0-year-olds) are less likely to encode and remember some kinds of information from texts than young adults. The experiment described here shows that they do make a particular kind of inference to the same extent that college-age adults do. The inferences examined were…

Recent evidence suggests substantial response-time costs associated with lag-2 repetitions of tasks within explicitly controlled task sequences [Koch, I., Philipp, A. M., Gade, M. (2006). Chunking in task sequences modulates task inhibition. "Psychological Science," 17, 346-350; Schneider, D. W. (2007). Task-set inhibition in chunked task…

Adaptive learning techniques have typically scheduled practice using learners' accuracy and item presentation history. We describe an adaptive learning system (Adaptive Response Time Based Sequencing--ARTS) that uses both accuracy and response time (RT) as direct inputs into sequencing. Response times are used to assess learning strength and to…

Great controversy exists on whether associative learning occurs without awareness. In Experiment 1, 31 participants received discrimination training by repeated presentations of two stimulus sequences (S1[subscript A] right arrow S2[subscript A], and S1[subscript B] right arrow S2[subscript B]), S1 being a masked stimulus. S2 were imperative…

Two studies compared the speech and nonspeech sequence skill learning of nine persons who stutter (PWS) and nine matched fluent speakers (PNS). Sequence skill learning was defined as a continuing process of stable improvement in speed and/or accuracy of sequencing performance over practice and was measured by comparing PWS's and PNS's performance…