Little is known about the mental representation of large multidigit numbers that are usually beyond our personal experience. The present study explored the processing mechanisms of these numbers in a series of experiments, using the numerical comparison task. Experiment 1 included within and between-scale comparisons of multidigit numbers varying…

Categorization researchers have long debated the possibility of multiple category-learning systems. The need persists for paradigms that dissociate explicit-declarative category-learning processes (featuring verbalizable category rules) from implicit-procedural processes (featuring stimulus-response associations lying beneath declarative…

If a target stimulus is presented together with a response-irrelevant distractor stimulus, both stimuli can be encoded together with the response in an event file (see Hommel, 2004). The repetition of any feature of such an event-file can then retrieve the previously encoded response. This kind of feature-based retrieval is an important mechanism…

The evaluative conditioning (EC) phenomenon is central to the study of preference acquisition and attitude formation. Early studies have reported EC in the absence of awareness, but more recent work has questioned this conclusion. In previous work, using briefly presented and pattern-masked conditioned stimuli (CSs), we found that above-chance…

The typical trigonometry, precalculus, or calculus student might not agree that logarithms are hot stuff, but we drew motivation from chili peppers to help students get a better taste for logarithms. The Scoville scale, which ranges from 0 to 16,000,000, has been the sole quantitative metric to measure the pungency (spiciness) of peppers since its…

The role of top-down control in divergent creativity remains heavily debated. An outstanding question about the state dynamics of creativity concerns acute shifts between heightened and lowered creative states. Particularly, do transitions between creative states incur a "switch cost" as observed in other domains of cognition? Prior…

In this study, we examined the efficacy of gestures for the acquisition of L2 segmental phonology. Despite teachers' frequent use of gestures in the classroom to teach pronunciation, the field lacks empirical support for this practice. We attempted to fill this gap by investigating the effects of handclapping on the development of L2 Japanese…

Teachers are confronted with multiple stimuli during instruction. To teach responsively, they must be able to identify and address classroom incidents that are critical for student learning. In the literature, the term "noticing" is used to refer to teachers' perception and interpretation of such incidents, as well as the associated…

Does a visual mask need to be perceptually present to disrupt processing? In the present research, we proposed to explore the link between perceptual and memory mechanisms by demonstrating that a typical sensory phenomenon (visual masking) can be replicated at a memory level. Experiment 1 highlighted an interference effect of a visual mask on the…

How does the concurrent use of language affect perception and memory for exemplars? Labels cue more general category information than a specific exemplar. Applying labels can affect the resulting memory for an exemplar. Here 3 alternative hypotheses are proposed for the role of labeling an exemplar at encoding: (a) labels distort memory toward the…

The field of psychology of time has typically distinguished between prospective timing and retrospective duration estimation: in prospective timing, participants attend to and encode time, whereas in retrospective estimation, estimates are based on the memory of what happened. Prior research on prospective timing has primarily focused on…

The strength of conclusions about the adoption of different categorization strategies--and their implications for theories about the cognitive and neural bases of category learning--depend heavily on the techniques for identifying strategy use. We examine performance in an often-used "information-integration" category structure and…

The semantic picture-word interference task has been used to diagnose how speakers resolve competition while selecting words for production. The attentional demands of this resolution process were assessed in 2 dual-task experiments (tone classification followed by picture naming). In Experiment 1, when pictures and distractor words were presented…

Establishing whether implicit responses to emotional cues are intact in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is fundamental to ascertaining why their emotional understanding is compromised. We used a temporal bisection task to assess for responsiveness to face and wildlife images that varied in emotional salience. There were no significant differences…

Research examining the importance of surface-level information to familiarity in recognition memory tasks is mixed: Sometimes it affects recognition and sometimes it does not. One potential explanation of the inconsistent findings comes from the ideas of dual process theory of recognition and the transfer-appropriate processing framework, which…