In 2 variants of the color-word Stroop task, we compared 5 types of color-neutral distractors--real words (e.g., "HAT"), pseudowords (e.g., "HIX"), consonant strings (e.g., "HDK"), symbol strings (e.g., #$%), and a row of Xs (e.g., "XXX")--as well as incongruent color words (e.g., "GREEN" displayed…

Novel phonotactic constraints can be acquired by hearing or speaking syllables that follow a novel constraint. When learned from hearing syllables, these newly learned constraints generalize to syllables that were not experienced during training. However, generalization of phonotactic learning to novel syllables has never been persuasively…

Determining adults' and children's strategies in mental arithmetic constitutes a central issue in the domain of numerical cognition. However, despite the considerable amount of research on this topic, the conclusions in the literature are not always coherent. Therefore, there is a need to carry on the investigation, and this is the reason why we…

Congruency effects were examined using a manual response version of the Stroop task in which the relationship between the colour word and its hue on incongruent trials was either kept constant or varied randomly across different pairings within the stimulus set. Congruency effects were increased in the condition where the incongruent hue-word…

Perez-Gonzalez, Herszlikowicz, and Williams (2008) demonstrated the emergence of novel intraverbal responses following the training of several intraverbals. The present study replicated and extended that study by separating two training conditions that were combined in the previous study. Nine typically developing children ages 6-7 years were…

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…

Errors in detecting randomness are often explained in terms of biases and misconceptions. We propose and provide evidence for an account that characterizes the contribution of the inherent statistical difficulty of the task. Our account is based on a Bayesian statistical analysis, focusing on the fact that a random process is a special case of…

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…

In order to examine metacognitive accuracy (i.e., the relationship between metacognitive judgment and memory performance), researchers often rely on by-participant analysis, where metacognitive accuracy (e.g., resolution, as measured by the gamma coefficient or signal detection measures) is computed for each participant and the computed values are…