Here, we present a strong test of the hypothesis that sacrificial moral dilemmas are solved using the same value-based decision mechanism that operates on decisions concerning economic goods. To test this hypothesis, we developed Psychological Value Theory. Psychological Value Theory is an expansion and generalization of Cohen and Ahn's (2016)…

We investigated age-related differences in syntactic comprehension in young and older adults. Most previous research found no evidence of age-related decline in syntactic processing. We investigated elementary syntactic comprehension of minimal sentences (e.g., I cook), minimizing the influence of working memory. We also investigated the…

Speech is more difficult to understand when it is presented concurrently with a distractor speech stream. One source of this difficulty is that competing speech can act as an attentional lure, requiring listeners to exert attentional control to ensure that attention does not drift away from the target. Stronger attentional control may enable…

Inhibition is often conceptualized as a unitary construct reflecting the ability to ignore and suppress irrelevant information. At the same time, it has been subdivided into inhibition of prepotent responses (i.e., the ability to stop dominant responses) and resistance to distracter interference (i.e., the ability to ignore distracting…

The developmental trajectory of the use of morphemes is still unclear. We investigated the emergence of morphological effects on visual word recognition in German in a large sample across the complete course of reading acquisition in elementary school. To this end, we analyzed lexical decision data on a total of 1,152 words and pseudowords from a…

The effects of psycholinguistic variables are critical to the evaluation of theories about the cognitive reading system. However, reading research has tended to focus on the impact of key variables on average performance. We report the first investigation examining variation in psycholinguistic effects across the life span, from childhood into old…

Several judgment and decision-making tasks are assumed to involve memory functions, but significant knowledge gaps on the memory processes underlying these tasks remain. In a study on 568 adults between 25 and 80 years of age, hypotheses were tested on the specific relationships between individual differences in working memory, episodic memory,…

The retention of the conditioned response was tested in a retroactive interference paradigm. Results suggested that what is learned by children in simple conditioning paradigms is different than what is learned by adults in the same paradigms. (Author/PN)