Over the last 50 years, cue competition phenomena have shaped theoretical developments in animal and human learning. However, recent failures to observe competition effects in standard conditioning procedures, as well as the lengthy and ongoing debate surrounding cue competition in the spatial learning literature, have cast doubts on the…

We tested theories of links between musical expertise and language ability in a sample of 6- to 9-year-old children. Language ability was measured with tests of speech perception and grammar. Musical expertise was measured with a test of musical ability that had 3 subtests (melody discrimination, rhythm discrimination, and long-term memory for…

We sought to clarify whether the positive association between music lessons and reading ability is explained better by shared resources for processing pitch and temporal information, or by general cognitive abilities. Participants were native and nonnative speakers of English with varying levels of music training. We measured reading ability…

Spatial memory research has attributed systematic bias in location estimates to a combination of a noisy memory trace with a prior structure that people impose on the space. Little is known about intraindividual stability and interindividual variation in these patterns of bias. In the current work, we align recent empirical and theoretical work on…

The present study examines both properties of the language and properties of the learner to better understand variability at the earliest stages of second language (L2) acquisition. We used event-related potentials, an oral production task, and a battery of individual differences measures to examine the processing of number and gender agreement in…

The ability to learn visual-phonological associations is a unique predictor of word reading, and individuals with developmental dyslexia show impaired ability in learning these associations. In this study, we compared developmentally dyslexic and nondyslexic adults on their ability to form cross-modal associations (or "bindings") based…

Many studies have demonstrated that listeners use information extracted from verbs to guide anticipatory eye movements to objects in the visual context that satisfy the selection restrictions of the verb. An important question is what underlies such verb-mediated anticipatory eye gaze. Based on empirical and theoretical suggestions, we…

Many studies have examined how people recall the locations of objects in spatial layouts. However, little is known about how people monitor the accuracy of judgments based on those memories. The goal of the present experiments was to examine the effect of reference frame characteristics on metacognitive accuracy for spatial judgments. Reference…

Source memory has consistently been associated with prefrontal function in both normal and clinical populations. Nevertheless, the exact contribution of this brain region to source memory remains uncertain, and evidence suggests that processes used by young and older adults may differ. The authors explored the extent to which scores on composite…