We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7-month-old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the…

Experts perceive and evaluate domain-specific visual information with high accuracy. In doing so, they exhibit eye movements referred to as "expert gaze" to rapidly focus on task-relevant areas. Using eye tracking, it is possible to record these implicit gaze patterns and present them to histology novice learners during training. This…

Echocardiographers are highly specialised, skilled practitioners who play a critical role in medical imaging diagnostics. Yet, little is known about the cognitive and perceptual attributes of experts within this domain. This study was designed to examine the role of individual differences in expertise. Specifically, the contribution of a domain…

Binary cueing systems assist in many tasks, often alerting people about potential hazards (such as alarms and alerts). We investigate whether cues, besides possibly improving decision accuracy, also affect the effort users invest in tasks and whether the required effort in tasks affects the responses to cues. We developed a novel experimental tool…

The gap transfer illusion is an auditory illusion where a temporal gap inserted in a longer glide tone is perceived as if it were in a crossing shorter glide tone. Psychophysical and phenomenological experiments were conducted to examine the effects of sound-pressure-level (SPL) differences between crossing glides on the occurrence of the gap…

The literature on testing effects is vast but supports surprisingly few prescriptive conclusions for how to schedule practice to achieve both durable and efficient learning. Key limitations are that few studies have examined the effects of initial learning criterion or the effects of relearning, and no prior research has examined the combined…

This paper examines the role of morphology in gradeschool children's learning to read nonpointed Hebrew. It presents two experiments testing the reading of morphologically based nonpointed pseudowords. One hundred seventy-one Hebrew-speaking children and adolescents in seven age/schooling groups (beginning and end of 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, and 11th…

This paper seeks to establish a research framework for an investigation into the extent to which pupils are able to visualise figural cues in multiple ways within the context of pattern generalisation. Enactivism, along with the constructs of knowledge objectification and figural apprehension, are identified as forming an ideal theoretical…

In the ordered RNR/RNN serial pattern task, rats often reduce their running speeds on trial 2 less within the RNR than within the RNN series. Initially, investigators (Capaldi, 1985; Capaldi et al., 1983) considered this trial 2 differential speed effect evidence for rats' anticipation of inter-trial outcomes within each series. Later findings,…

Although object-based attention enhances perceptual processing of information appearing within the boundaries of a selected object, little is known about the consequences for information in the object's surround. The authors show that distance from an attended object's center of mass determines reaction time (RT) to targets in the surround. Of 2…

One of the central themes in the study of language acquisition is the gap between the linguistic knowledge that learners demonstrate, and the apparent inadequacy of linguistic input to support induction of this knowledge. One of the first linguistic abilities in the course of development to exemplify this problem is in speech perception:…

The relative importance of spatial-position as a memory aid in a block pattern reproduction task was investigated by analyzing the object-selection and object-placement strategies of 69 nursery school children. Subjects were given a task modeled on Piaget's assessment of Static Reproductive Images and Action that had been modified into a…

A model of context effects in perception is applied to perception of letters. Perception results from excitatory and inhibitory interactions of detectors for visual features, letters, and words. The model produces facilitation for letters in pronounceable pseudowords as well as words and accounts for rule-governed performance without any rules.…

Five-year-olds learned to associate three- or four-letter abbreviations, or cues, with spoken words, in which one of the letters in the cue corresponded to a phoneme that was articulated similarly or dissimilarly. Children found the phonetic cues easier to learn than control cues, suggesting that children are sensitive to the phonological and…

This paper investigates the processes by which visual mental images--the precept-like short-term memory representations--are created from information stored in long-term memory. It also presents a new method for studying image generation. Three experiments were conducted using college students as subjects. In the first experiment, a Podgorny and…