The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible…

Ratings of perceptual experience on a trial-by-trial basis are increasingly used in masked priming studies to assess prime awareness. It is argued that such subjective ratings more adequately capture the content of phenomenal consciousness compared to the standard objective psychophysical measures obtained in a session after the priming…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

As researchers in the social sciences, we are often interested in studying not directly observable constructs through assessments and questionnaires. But even in a well-designed and well-implemented study, rapid-guessing behavior may occur. Under rapid-guessing behavior, a task is skimmed shortly but not read and engaged with in-depth. Hence, a…

In three experiments, we used a masked prime in a verification task to investigate the processing stages occurring during multiplication fact retrieval. We aimed to investigate the retrieval process by overlapping its execution with the processing of a masked prime consisting of a number. Participants evaluated the correctness of multiplication…

Performance in elementary cognitive tasks is moderately correlated with fluid intelligence and working memory capacity. These correlations are higher for more complex tasks, presumably due to increased demands on working memory capacity. In accordance with the binding hypothesis, which states that working memory capacity reflects the limit of a…

The aim of this experiment was to determine if dyad practice helped individuals become aware, use, and retain information in a dynamically changing perceptual-motor task compared with practice alone. We used a computerized perceptual-motor task, where individuals were required to intercept balls that dropped from the top of the screen. A colored…

Manipulations that induce disfluency during encoding generally produce lower memory predictions for the disfluent condition than for the fluent condition. Similar to other manipulations of disfluency, generating lies takes longer and requires more mental effort than does telling the truth; hence, a manipulation of lie generation might produce…

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…

This research investigates whether a short mindfulness exercise can reduce children's psychophysiological stress reactions in the face of a performance task. To answer the question, a randomized controlled trial with 106 elementary school children, aged between 5 and 11 years, was conducted. An intervention group completed a two-minute breathing…

Previous research findings indicate that young children from East Asia outperform their counterparts from Europe and North America on executive function (EF) tasks. However, very few cross-national studies have focused on EF development during middle childhood. The current study assessed the EF performance of 170 children in grades 2 and 4 from…

In choice reaction time (RT) tasks, performance is often influenced by the presence of nominally irrelevant stimuli, referred to as distractors. Recent research provided evidence that distractor processing can be adjusted to the utility of the distractors: Distractors predictive of the upcoming target/response were more attended to and also…

A response model that is able to detect guessing behaviors and produce unbiased estimates in low-stake conditions using timing information is proposed. The model is a special case of the grade of membership model in which responses are modeled as partial members of a class that is affected by motivation and a class that responds only according to…

The present research examines the mechanisms underlying the comprehension of focus alternatives. In particular, we investigate whether listeners determine alternatives based on general semantic priming mechanisms or whether they only consider contrastive alternatives, elements that can replace the expression in focus. In a probe recognition…

Memory performance in linear order reasoning tasks (A > B, B > C, C > D, etc.) shows quicker, and more accurate responses to queries on wider (AD) than narrower (AB) pairs on a hypothetical linear mental model (A -- B -- C -- D). While indicative of an analogue representation, research so far did not provide positive evidence for spatial…