The intelligence community uses "structured analytic techniques" to help analysts think critically and avoid cognitive bias. However, little evidence exists of how techniques are applied and whether they are effective. We examined the use of the analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH)--a technique designed to reduce "confirmation…

Navigational and reaching spaces are known to involve different cognitive strategies and brain networks, whose development in humans is still debated. In fact, high-level spatial processing, including allocentric location encoding, is already available to very young children, but navigational strategies are not mature until late childhood. The…

Adult and juvenile offenders exhibit a number of cognitive distortions related to sexually offending behaviors. The latter may be attributed to their developmental deficiencies, the result of operant conditioning, psychological self-defense mechanisms and biases, influence of negative environmental factors or criminal subculture. A group of…

Prospective memory (PM) research typically examines the ability to remember to execute delayed intentions but often ignores the ability to forget finished intentions. We had participants perform (or not perform; control group) a PM task and then instructed them that the PM task was finished. We later (re)presented the PM cue. Approximately 25% of…

We investigated how humans encode large-scale spatial environments using a virtual taxi game. We hypothesized that if 2 connected neighborhoods are explored jointly, people will form a single integrated spatial representation of the town. However, if the neighborhoods are first learned separately and later observed to be connected, people will…

The conflict monitoring account posits that globally high levels of conflict trigger engagement of top-down control; however, recent findings point to the mercurial nature of top-down control in high conflict contexts. The current study examined the potential moderating effect of associative learning on conflict-triggered top-down control…

Learning algebra is difficult for many students in part because of an emphasis on the memorization of abstract rules. Algebraic reasoners across expertise levels often rely on perceptual-motor strategies to make these rules meaningful and memorable. However, in many cases, rules are provided as patterns to be memorized verbally, with little overt…

Background: Down syndrome (DS) has been the focus of much cognitive and developmental research; however, there is a gap in knowledge regarding sustained attention, particularly across different sensory domains. This research examined the hypothesis that children with DS would demonstrate superior visual rather than auditory performance on a…

This study tested the hypothesis that memory is a major source of variance in temporal processing. Participants categorized intervals as short or long. The number of base durations and interval types mixed within blocks of trials varied from 1 session to another. Results revealed that mixing 2 base durations within blocks increased categorization…

Imaginal perspective switches are often considered to be difficult, because they call for additional cognitive transformations of object coordinates (transformation hypothesis). Recent research suggests that problems can also result from conflicts between incompatible sensorimotor and cognitive object location codes during response specification…

This article presents and tests the authors' integration hypothesis of global/local processing, which proposes that at early stages of processing, the identities of global and local units of a hierarchical stimulus are represented separately from information about their respective levels and that, therefore, identity and level information have to…

Focuses on differences occurring with age and reading skill in the use of phonemic codes in short-term retention tasks where stimuli were presented visually. Subjects were groups of average readers in grades two, four, and six; superior readers in grade four; and disabled readers in grades four and six from three public schools. (Author/RH)

The main hypotheses addressed in the research were (1) whether imprecision in the phonological representations of lexical items underlies the impaired expressive naming abilities of disabled readers, and (2) whether weak verbal memory might mediate the relationship between naming and reading skills. From samples of 93 first graders and 67 fourth…

The study examines the rule space model, a probabilistic model capable of measuring cognitive skill acquisition and of diagnosing erroneous rules of operation in a procedural domain. The model involves two important components: (1) determination of a set of bug distributions (bug density functions representing clusters around the rules); and (2)…