In rule-based (RB) category-learning tasks, the optimal strategy is a simple explicit rule, whereas in information-integration (II) tasks, the optimal strategy is impossible to describe verbally. This study investigates the effects of two different category properties on learning difficulty in category learning tasks--namely, linear separability…

The objective of this study is to determine whether attention toward fear messages is affected by variation in the controllability of the associated danger. There is no consensus regarding the effectiveness of fear appeals in driving adaptive behaviour, and it may be the case that threat messages fail to capture attention if the associated danger…

Problem-solving activities have been studied from a diversity of epistemological perspectives. In problem-solving activities, the initial tensions of a problematic situation led to a cognitive dissonance between conflicting motives and instruments to reach the activity goal. We analyze problem-solving in the continuation of Sannino and Laitinen's…

It has been suggested that the Stroop task gives rise to 2 conflicts: the information conflict (color vs. word meaning) and the task conflict (name the color vs. read the word). However, behavioral indications for task conflict (reaction time [RT] congruent condition longer than RT neutral condition) appear under very restricted conditions. We…

Feedback is highly contingent on behavior if it eventually becomes easy to predict, and weakly contingent on behavior if it remains difficult or impossible to predict even after learning is complete. Many studies have demonstrated that humans and nonhuman animals are highly sensitive to feedback contingency, but no known studies have examined how…

Serial position functions with marked primacy and recency effects are ubiquitous in episodic memory tasks. The demonstrations reported here explored whether bow-shaped serial position functions would be observed when people ordered exemplars from various categories along a specified dimension. The categories and dimensions were: actors and age;…

Performing 2 highly similar tasks at the same time requires an adaptive regulation of cognitive control to shield prioritized primary task processing from between-task (cross-talk) interference caused by secondary task processing. In the present study, the authors investigated how implicitly and explicitly delivered information promotes the…

To what extent do more creative people process emotional information differently than less creative people? This study examined the role of emotion processing in creativity and its implications for the creativity-psychopathology association. A total of 117 participants performed a memory recognition task for negative, positive, and neutral words;…

A robust finding in the literature is that spacing material leads to better retention than massing; however, the benefit of spacing for concept learning is less clear. When items are massed, it may help the learner to discover the relationship between instances, leading to better abstraction of the underlying concept. Two experiments addressed…

Effective motor control involves both the execution of appropriate responses and the inhibition of inappropriate responses that are evoked by response-associated stimuli. The inhibition of a motor response has traditionally been characterized as either a voluntary act of cognitive control or a low-level perceptual bias arising from processes such…

We aimed to investigate whether novel stimulus relations would emerge from stimulus correlations when those relations explicitly conflicted with reinforced relations. In a symbolic matching-to-sample task using kanji characters as stimuli, we arranged class-specific incorrect comparison stimuli in each of three classes. After presenting either Ax…

Transformational leadership is supposed to enhance employees' creativity. However, results of meta-analytic research on the relationships between transformational leadership and creativity fell short of expectations. In addition, the coefficients showed a huge variability. In this study, it was argued that relevant task and employee…

College students frequently experience inattentive and hyperactive concerns. In multiple independent samples and three randomised experiments, we examined multiple versions of a short performance-based measure translated from basic research on how organisms learn sequential stimuli patterns when such patterns are interleaved with information that…

The backward-compatibility effect (BCE) is a major index of parallel processing in dual tasks and is related to the dependency of Task 1 performance on Task 2 response codes (Hommel, 1998). The results of four dual-task experiments showed that a BCE occurs when the stimuli of both tasks are included in the same visual object (Experiments 1 and 2)…

The present study proposes and examines the multidimensional vector (MDV) model framework as a modeling schema for choice response times. MDV extends the Thurstonian model, as well as signal detection theory, to classification tasks by taking into account the influence of response properties on stimulus discrimination. It is capable of accounting…