The presented study examines the question of colour categorization in relation to the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. The study is based on research conducted by Gilbert et al. (2006) and their claim that linguistic colour categorization in a particular language helps colour recognition and speeds the process of colour discrimination for…

The development of visual expertise is accompanied by enhanced visual object recognition memory within an expert domain. We aimed to understand the relationship between expertise and memory by modeling cognitive mechanisms. Participants with a measured range of birding expertise were recruited and tested on memory for birds (expert domain) and…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to memory for future intentions (e.g. remembering to press a button when you see an animal word). Researchers classify PM intentions in the laboratory as focal or nonfocal primarily in two ways. One way, task-appropriateness, refers to how the processing for the intention relates to the processing required for an…

Purpose: Research on language planning in adult stuttering is relatively sparse and offers diverging arguments about a potential causative relationship between semantic and phonological encoding and fluency breakdowns. This study further investigated semantic and phonological encoding efficiency in adults who stutter (AWS) by means of silent…

Posterror slowing (PES) refers to an increased response time following errors. While PES has traditionally been attributed to control adjustments, recent evidence suggested that PES reflects interference. The present study investigated the hypothesis that control and interference represent 2 components of PES that differ with respect to their time…

Transition effects in task-cuing experiments can be partitioned into task switching and cue repetition effects by using multiple cues per task. In the present study, the author shows that cue repetition effects can be partitioned into perceptual and conceptual priming effects. In 2 experiments, letters or numbers in their uppercase/lowercase or…

A classic distinction in perceptual information processing is whether stimuli are composed of separable dimensions, which are highly analyzable, or integral dimensions, which are processed holistically. Previous tests of a set of logical-rule models of classification have shown that separable-dimension stimuli are processed serially if the…

How does cognitive control change with age, and what are the processes underlying these changes? This question has been extensively studied using versions of the task-switching paradigm, which allow participants to actively prepare for the upcoming task (Kray, Eber, & Karbach, 2008). Little is known, however, about age-related changes in this…

Two experiments examined processes underlying cognitive inflexibility in set-shifting tasks typically used to assess the development of executive function in children. Adult participants performed a Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST) that requires shifting from categorizing by one dimension (e.g., color) to categorizing by a second orthogonal…

Two experiments investigated Chinese deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) adolescents' recognition of category names in an innovative task of semantic categorization. In each trial, the category-name target appeared briefly at the screen center followed by two words or two pictures for two basic-level exemplars of high or middle typicality, which…

Cognitive processes and mechanisms underlying different forms of priming were investigated using a diffusion model approach. In a series of 6 experiments, effects of prime-target associations and of a semantic and affective categorical match of prime and target were analyzed for different tasks. Significant associative and categorical priming…

Although functional cerebral asymmetries (FCAs) affect all cognitive domains, their modulation of the efficacy of specific executive functions is largely unexplored. In the present study, we used a lateralized version of the task switching paradigm to investigate the relevance of hemispheric asymmetries for cognitive control processes. Words were…

The presentation of a hand grasp facilitates the recognition of subsequent objects when the grasp is coherent with the object to be identified. This outcome is usually explained as the integration of two different processes: descriptive visual processes in ventral visual areas and processes in charge of the computations of action metrics in dorsal…

Throughout middle-childhood, inhibitory processes, which underlie many higher order cognitive tasks, are developing. Little is known about how inhibitory processes change as a task becomes conceptually more difficult during these important years. In adults, as Go/NoGo tasks become more difficult there is a systematic decrease in the P3 NoGo…

Exemplar-similarity models such as the exemplar-based random walk (EBRW) model (Nosofsky & Palmeri, 1997b) were designed to provide a formal account of multidimensional classification choice probabilities and response times (RTs). At the same time, a recurring theme has been to use exemplar models to account for old-new item recognition and to…