The term speed-accuracy tradeoff is used when an increase in response speed comes at the expense of response accuracy. Although originally a concept from experimental psychology, the speed-accuracy tradeoff has been a topic in psychological assessment, too. In the first part of the manuscript, we discuss motivational factors that may be…

It has been argued that metacognition and mindreading rely on the same cognitive processes (Carruthers in The opacity of mind: an integrative theory of self-knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011). It is widely accepted that mindreading is diminished among individuals diagnosed with autism (Brunsdon and Happé in Autism 18(1):17-30,…

Self-rated mental effort has been and continues to be the most widely used measure of cognitive load. This single-item measure is often used as a predictor variable in linear models for predicting performance or some other response variable. While an advantage of linear models is that they are fairly easy to understand, they fall short when the…

A consistent finding in the Stroop literature is that congruency effects (i.e., the color-naming latency difference between words presented in incongruent vs. congruent colors) are larger for mostly-congruent items (e.g., the word RED presented most often in red) than for mostly-incongruent items (e.g., the word GREEN presented most often in…

Purpose: The aim of the current study was to investigate whether dual language experience modulates processing speed in typically developing (TD) children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). We also examined whether processing speed predicted vocabulary and sentence-level abilities in receptive and expressive modalities.…

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) have less experience accessing spoken language. Mandarin Chinese uses pitch information to contrast word meaning, and the signal that the CI devices provide is degraded. Thus, Mandarin-speaking children with CIs may face more challenges in the development of language skills. This study examines…

In three experiments, we used a masked prime in a verification task to investigate the processing stages occurring during multiplication fact retrieval. We aimed to investigate the retrieval process by overlapping its execution with the processing of a masked prime consisting of a number. Participants evaluated the correctness of multiplication…

Purpose: We investigated developmental differences in a dual task involving rhyming and tone judgment/decisions and the effects of varying cognitive demands on task performance. Method: Participants were 7- to 11-year-olds, 12- to 15-year-olds, and adults between 18 and 40 years (n = 19 per group). The rhyming task consisted of three stimuli…

Understanding individual differences in cognitive performance is an important part of understanding how variations in underlying cognitive processes can result in variations in task performance. However, the exploration of individual differences in the components of the decision process--such as cognitive processing speed, response caution, and…

This study investigates how academic disciplines impact second language (L2) lexical competencies. Prior L2 research has often overlooked the broader effects of disciplinary backgrounds on lexical development. To address this gap, this study utilized lexical decision, memory, and semantic fluency tasks to examine lexicon recognition, memory, and…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate superior performances on visuo-spatial tasks emphasizing local information processing; however, findings from studies involving hierarchical stimuli are inconsistent. Wide age ranges and group means complicate their interpretability. Children and adolescents with and without ASD completed…

Face recognition is a fundamental function that requires holistic processing. Differences in face processing have been consistently identified in autistic children, but it is unknown whether these differences persist across the adult lifespan. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured holistic face processing with a…

In a series of experiments, Bott and Noveck (2004) found that the computation of scalar inferences, a variety of conversational implicature, caused a delay in response times. In order to determine what aspect of the inferential process that underlies scalar inferences caused this delay, we extended their paradigm to three other kinds of…

Only one previous developmental study of Stroop task performance (Schiller, 1966) has controlled for differences in processing speed that exist both within and between age groups. Therefore, the question of whether the early developmental change in the magnitude of Stroop interference actually persists after controlling for processing speed needs…

There is much evidence showing that the prospect of performance-contingent reward increases the usage of cuing information and cognitive stability. In a recent study, we showed that participants under reward conditions even continued using cues even when they were no longer predictive of the required response rule, even at the expense of higher…