Humans have the ability to learn surprisingly complicated statistical information in a variety of modalities and situations, often based on relatively little input. These statistical learning (SL) skills appear to underlie many kinds of learning, but despite their ubiquity, we still do not fully understand precisely what SL is and what individual…

The Elicited Imitation Task (EIT) is a popular technique for efficiently measuring global proficiency in multiple languages, and accumulated evidence indicates high reliability and strong relationships with other proficiency measures. Nevertheless, several dimensions of EIT design remain open to investigation, including the assumption that a pause…

Eyeblink conditioning is used in many species to study motor learning and make inferences about cerebellar function. However, the discrepancies in performance between humans and other species combined with evidence that volition and awareness can modulate learning suggest that eyeblink conditioning is not merely a passive form of learning that…

The role of relative salience in processing of hierarchical stimuli in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was examined in this study. Participants with ASD and typically developing controls performed a Navon letters task under conditions of global salience, local salience or equal salience of both levels. Results revealed no group…

The immediate extinction deficit describes a higher return of fear when extinction takes place immediately after fear acquisition compared to a delayed extinction design. One explanation for this phenomenon encompasses the remaining emotional arousal evoked by fear acquisition to be still present during immediate, but not delayed extinction. In…

It has been suggested that the Stroop task gives rise to 2 conflicts: the information conflict (color vs. word meaning) and the task conflict (name the color vs. read the word). However, behavioral indications for task conflict (reaction time [RT] congruent condition longer than RT neutral condition) appear under very restricted conditions. We…

Infants' representations of physical events are surprisingly flexible. Brief exposure to one event can immediately enhance infants' representations of another event. The present experiments tested two potential mechanisms underlying this priming: enhanced encoding or improved retrieval. Five-month-olds saw a target block become hidden inside a…

Stimuli conditioned with a substance can generate drug-approach behaviors due to their acquired motivational properties. According to implicit theories of addiction, these stimuli can decrease cognitive control automatically. The present study (n = 49) examined whether reward-associated stimuli can interfere with cognitive processes in the absence…

Familiar stimuli are typically accompanied by decreases in neural response relative to the presentation of novel items, but these studies often include explicit instructions to discriminate old and new items; this creates difficulties in partialling out the contribution of top-down intentional orientation to the items based on recognition goals.…

Humans are characterized by an especially highly developed ability to use instructions to prepare toward upcoming events; yet, it is unclear just how powerful instructions can be. Although prior work provides evidence that instructions can be sufficiently powerful to proactively program working memory to execute stimulus-response (S-R)…

We report two picture-word interference experiments investigating conceptual and lexical activation, and response selection, in speaking. We varied stimulus onset asynchrony to investigate potential fine-grained activation and competition effects. Morphologically related existing and pseudoword adjectives, as well as associatively related…

Numerous studies have attributed the face inversion effect (FIE) to configural processing of internal facial features in upright but not inverted faces. Recent findings suggest that face mechanisms can be activated by faceless stimuli presented in the context of a body. Here we asked whether faceless stimuli with or without body context may induce…

This study investigated how to teach perceptual tasks, that is, classifying fish locomotion, through eye movement modeling examples (EMME). EMME consisted of a replay of eye movements of a didactically behaving domain expert (model), which had been recorded while he executed the task, superimposed onto the video stimulus. Seventy-five students…

Performing 2 highly similar tasks at the same time requires an adaptive regulation of cognitive control to shield prioritized primary task processing from between-task (cross-talk) interference caused by secondary task processing. In the present study, the authors investigated how implicitly and explicitly delivered information promotes the…

Prospective memory (PM) involves forming intentions, retaining those intentions, and later executing those intended responses at the appropriate time. Few studies have investigated this capacity in animals. Monkeys performed a computerized task that assessed their ability to remember to make a particular response if they observed a PM cue embedded…