Research on early physical reasoning has shown surprising discontinuities in developmental trajectories. Infants possess some skills that seem to disappear and then re-emerge in childhood. It has been suggested that prediction skills required in search tasks might cause these discontinuities (Keen, 2003). We tested 3.5- to 5-year-olds'…

We tested the dual process and unequal variance signal detection models by jointly modeling recognition and source confidence ratings. The 2 approaches make unique predictions for the slope of the recognition memory zROC function for items with correct versus incorrect source decisions. The standard bivariate Gaussian version of the unequal…

Same-race (SR) faces are recognized better than other-race (OR) faces, and this other-race effect (ORE) is correlated with experience. SR faces are also processed more holistically than OR faces, suggesting one possible mechanism for poorer performance on OR faces. Studies of object expertise have shown that individuating experiences are necessary…

Previous studies have indicated cross cultural differences in conscious processes, such that Asians have a global preference and Westerners a more analytical one. We investigated whether these biases also apply to unconscious knowledge. In Experiment 1, Japanese and UK participants memorized strings of large (global) letters made out of small…

Generics are statements such as "tigers are striped" and "ducks lay eggs". They express general, though not universal or exceptionless, claims about kinds (Carlson & Pelletier, 1995). For example, the generic "ducks lay eggs" seems true even though many ducks (e.g. the males) do not lay eggs. The universally quantified version of the statement…

Predicting the near future is important for survival and plays a central role in theories of perception, language processing, and learning. Prediction failures may be particularly important for initiating the updating of perceptual and memory systems and, thus, for the subjective experience of events. Here, we asked observers to make predictions…

The neural correlates of "working memory" (WM) in schizophrenia (SZ) have been extensively studied using the multisite fMRI data acquired by the Functional Biomedical Informatics Research Network (fBIRN) consortium. Although univariate and multivariate analysis methods have been variously employed to localize brain responses under differing task…

In many task-switch studies, task sequence and response sequence interact: Response repetitions produce benefits when the task repeats but produce costs when the task switches. Four different theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain these effects: a reconfiguration-based account, association-learning models, an episodic-retrieval…

The facilitation of word processing by sentence context reflects the interaction between the build-up of message-level semantics and lexical processing. Yet, little is known about how this effect varies through adulthood as a function of reading skill. In this study, Participants 18-64 years old with a range of literacy competence read simple…

Expectancy-based localized attention has been shown to promote the formation and retrieval of multisensory memories in adults. Three experiments show that these processes also characterize attention and learning in 16- to 18-month old infants and, moreover, that these processes may play a critical role in supporting early object name learning. The…

Children typically hold very optimistic views of their own skills but so far, only a few studies have investigated possible correlates of the ability to predict performance accurately. Therefore, this study examined the role of individual differences in performance estimation accuracy as a global metacognitive index for different monitoring and…

We conducted a meta-analysis of 28 studies comprising 39 samples to ask the question, "What is the magnitude of the association between various baseline child cognitive characteristics and response to reading intervention?" Studies were located via literature searches, contact with researchers in the field, and review of references from…

Both autism spectrum (ASD) and anxiety disorders are associated with atypical neural and attentional responses to emotional faces, differing in affective face processing from typically developing peers. Within a longitudinal study of children with ASD (23 male, 3 female), we hypothesized that early ERPs to emotional faces would predict concurrent…

Sparse research suggests that children's social information processing has links not just with aggressive behavior but also with children's prosocial behavior (e.g., Nelson & Crick, 1999). However, the past work that has been done has not been longitudinal, so the direction of links between social information processing and prosocial…

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…