Implicit learning theories suggest that we update syntactic knowledge based on prior experience (e.g., Chang et al., 2006). To determine the limits of the extent to which implicit learning can influence syntactic processing, we investigated whether structural priming effects persist up to 1 month postexposure, and whether they persist less long in…

Recent context-control learning studies have shown that switch costs are reduced in a particular context predicting a high probability of switching as compared to another context predicting a low probability of switching. These context-specific switch probability effects suggest that control of task sets, through experience, can become associated…

Throughout the life span, we are capable of representing quantities in the absence of language, or nonsymbolically. Additionally, over the course of development, we learn many symbolic measurement systems for representing quantities such as time and number. Despite substantial evidence of a relation between the acquisition of symbolic and…

This study investigated the extent to which people can develop a global representation of local environments through across-boundary navigation. Participants learned objects' locations in two misaligned rectangular rooms in an immersive virtual environment. After learning, they adopted a local view in one room and judged directions of objects…

In the Stroop task, congruency effects (i.e., the color-naming latency difference between incongruent stimuli, e.g., the word BLUE written in the color red, and congruent stimuli, e.g., RED in red) are smaller in a list in which incongruent trials are frequent than in a list in which incongruent trials are infrequent. The traditional explanation…

It has been demonstrated that the Simon effect may be increased or reversed due to proportion congruency manipulation, suggesting that learned spatial irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations are used to guide responses. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that learning spatial irrelevant S-R associations by rewards may show a similar…

Preparing for the future during ongoing activities is an essential skill. Yet it is currently unclear to what extent we can prepare for the future in parallel with another task. In two experiments, we investigated how characteristics of a present task influenced whether and when participants prepared for the future, as well as its usefulness. We…

Structural priming refers to the tendency of speakers to repeat syntactic structures across sentences. We investigated the extent to which structural priming persists with age and whether the effect depends upon highly abstract syntactic representations that only encompass the global sentence structure or whether representations are specified for…

Interventions for drug abuse and other maladaptive habitual behaviors may yield temporary success but are often fragile and relapse is common. This implies that current interventions do not erase or substantially modify the representations that support the underlying addictive behavior--that is, they do not cause true unlearning. One example of an…