In any visual search task in the lab or in the world, observers will make errors. Those errors can be categorized as "deterministic": If you miss this target in this display once, you will definitely miss it again. Alternatively, errors can be "stochastic", occurring randomly with some probability from trial to trial.…

This article reports on an empirical study that investigates the way students' performance in solving arithmetical tasks may be related to their performance in solving algebraic tasks. The sample consisted of 203 Grade 6 students. The arithmetical tasks involved arithmetical expressions with known quantities, whereas the algebraic tasks involved…

The Hebb repetition effect shows improvement in serial recall of repeated lists compared to random nonrepeated lists. Previous research using simple span tasks found that the Hebb repetition effect is limited to constant uninterrupted lists, suggesting chunking as the mechanism of list learning. However, the Hebb repetition effect has been found…

In the search for mechanisms that contribute to dyslexia, the term "attention" has been invoked to explain performance in a variety of tasks, creating confusion since all tasks do, indeed, demand "attention." Many studies lack an experimental manipulation of attention that would be necessary to determine its influence on task…

Background: Verbal fluency tasks are routinely used in clinical assessment and research studies of aphasia. People with aphasia produce fewer items in verbal fluency tasks. It remains unclear if their output is limited solely by their lexical difficulties and/or has a basis in their executive control abilities. Recent research has illustrated that…

The "recycling hypothesis" posits that the word recognition system is built upon minimal modifications to the neural architecture used in object recognition. In two masked priming lexical decision studies, we examined whether "mirror generalization," a phenomenon in object recognition, occurs in word recognition. In Study 1, we…

The current study highlights the importance of inhibitory ability in facilitating performance in mathematics. To understand the role of inhibition in mathematical knowledge, this study tested 102 college students on a series of standardized complex math exercises. Inhibition tasks varied by task and stimuli (letters, numbers, and arrows). The…

The objective for beginning writers is to learn how to generate alphabet-letters which are recognisable and easy to read. This study investigated the accuracy of Year 1 and 2 children's alphabet-letter-writing by evaluating their alphabet and orthographic knowledge, following evidence which identifies these skills as important for correctly…

It is common to see mirror errors in letters in early stages of reading due to the mirror-generalization process that allows a visual stimulus to be identified independently of its orientation. To avoid such errors, this process must be inhibited. A special case would be children with dyslexia since their difficulties with the alphabetic code may…

It has long been understood that associations can form between items that are paired (Ebbinghaus, 1885), but it is commonly assumed that previously retrieved items are not used when remembering items in serial order. We present a series of experiments that test this assumption, using a serial learning procedure inspired by Ebenholtz (1963). In…

Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we used a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer's memory for a search…

Background: Letter knowledge is crucial in the first stages of reading development. It supports learning letter-sound mappings and the identification of the letters that make up words. Previous studies have investigated the longitudinal impact of early letter knowledge on children's further word reading abilities. This study employed an artificial…

In this study, we compared children's and adults' ability to accurately identify target words in written minimal pairs (WMPs) with graphemically similar letters while accounting for factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, mono- versus dimorphemic WMPs, number of syllable, homography, and imageability. Fifty children and…

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

The orthographic choice (OC) task--requiring individuals to choose the correct spelling between a word and a pseudohomophone foil (e.g., "goat" vs. "gote")--has been used as an outcome measure of orthographic learning and as a predictor of individual differences in word reading development. Some consider the OC task a measure…