Stimulus-response binding and retrieval (SRBR) is a fundamental mechanism driving behavior automatization. In five experiments, we investigated the modulatory role of affective consequences (AC) on SRBR effects to test whether binding/retrieval can explain instrumental learning (i.e., the "law of effect"). SRBR effects were assessed in a…

Previous work has shown that infants as young as 8 months of age can use certain features of the environment, such as the shape or color of visual stimuli, as cues to organize simple inputs into hierarchical rule structures, a robust form of reinforcement learning that supports generalization of prior learning to new contexts. However, especially…

Functional communication training (FCT) is an effective intervention for teaching communication responses and reducing challenging behavior. One limitation of FCT is that frequent reinforcement may be impractical or impossible in many situations. Recently, Mitteer et al. published a tutorial in the journal "AAC" that provided video…

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…

Evidence shows that visual working memory (VWM) is strongly served by attentional mechanisms, whereas other evidence shows that VWM representations readily survive when attention is being taken away. To reconcile these findings, we tested the hypothesis that directing attention away makes a memory representation vulnerable to interference from the…

Perception and action are closely related. Responses are assumed to be represented in terms of their perceptual effects, allowing direct links between action and perception. In this regard, the integration of features of stimuli (S) and responses (R) into S-R bindings is a key mechanism for action control. Previous research focused on the…

The hypothesis that brain activity may differ during varied types of video game play was investigated in two studies of event-related potentials exhibited by children age 7 to 12 when processing game-based stimuli requiring correct/incorrect responses or choices between two imaginative alternative responses. The first study had 22 children of…

The genetic diversity contained in a population can be used to engage the audience in an understanding of human genotypes and phenotypes. With a series of simple examples of well-documented sensory phenotypes related to the perception of colour, aromas or food preference, the diversity of the audience can be easily explored. The collecting of…

The current study examined color constancy in infants using a familiarization paradigm. We first obtained isoluminance in each infant as defined by the minimum motion paradigm and used these data to control the luminance of stimuli in the main experiments. In the familiarization phase of the main experiment, two identical smiling face patterns…

Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined…

We examined categorical effects in color appearance in two tasks, which in part differed in the extent to which color naming was explicitly required for the response. In one, we measured the effects of color differences on perceptual grouping for hues that spanned the blue-green boundary, to test whether chromatic differences across the boundary…

Binary-choice reactions are typically faster when the stimulus location corresponds with that of the response than when it does not. This advantage of spatial correspondence is known as the "stimulus-response compatibility" (SRC) effect when the mapping of stimulus location, as the relevant stimulus dimension, is varied to be compatible or…

Prior studies have shown that cognitive control is implemented at the list and context levels in the color-word Stroop task. At first blush, the finding that Stroop interference is reduced for mostly incongruent items as compared with mostly congruent items (i.e., the item-specific proportion congruence [ISPC] effect) appears to provide evidence…

To avoid sensory overload, people are able to selectively attend to a particular color or direction of motion while ignoring irrelevant stimuli that differ from the desired one. We show here for the first time that it is also possible to selectively attend to a specific line orientation--but with an important caveat: orientations that are…

It has been shown that the left and right cerebral hemispheres (LH and RH) respectively process qualitative or "categorical" spatial relations and metric or "coordinate" spatial relations. However, categorical spatial information could be thought as divided into two types: semantically-coded and visuospatially-coded categorical information. We…