Mind-wandering (MW) is a universal cognitive process that is estimated to comprise [approximately] 30% of our everyday thoughts. Despite its prevalence, the functional utility of MW remains a scientific blind spot. The present study sought to investigate whether MW serves a functional role in cognition. Specifically, we investigated whether MW…

The process of spoken word recognition is influenced by both bottom-up sensory information and top-down cognitive information. These cues are used to process the phonological and semantic representations of speech. Several studies have used EEG/ERPs to study the neural mechanisms of children's spoken word recognition, but less is known about the…

Previous research has linked working memory capacity (WMC) with enhanced proactive control. However, it remains unclear the extent to which this relationship reflects the influence of WMC on the tendency to engage proactive control, or rather, the ability to implement it. The current study sought to clarify this ambiguity by leveraging the Dual…

People's everyday lives offer plenty of situations where complex processing of information takes place, in which information needs to transfer across modalities to achieve a behavioral goal. The study examined the differential effects on object detection by a visual, verbal, or auditory cue held in working memory (WM), and the role of concurrent…

Purpose: It is generally accepted that adults use visual cues to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments, but findings regarding visual speech benefit in children are mixed. We explored factors that contribute to audiovisual (AV) gain in young children's speech understanding. We examined whether there is an AV benefit to…

Massive studies have explored biological motion (BM) crowds processing for their remarkable social significance, primarily focused on uniformly distributed ones. However, real-world BM crowds often exhibit hierarchical structures rather than uniform arrangements. How such structured BM crowds are processed remains a subject of inquiry. This study…

Multimedia learning scenarios in which a picture is the main focus often use combinations of verbal and visual cueing. Based on models of picture processing and multimedia learning, the present study examined the effect of verbal and visual cueing on two basic aspects of pictorial learning: retention and localization of pictorial elements. Videos…

The FedEx logo makes clever use of figure-ground ambiguity to create an "invisible" arrow in the background space between "E" and "x". Most designers believe the hidden arrow can convey an unconscious impression of speed and precision about the FedEx brand, which may influence subsequent behavior. To test this…

Studies in low-resource settings suggest that multiple aspects of early childhood development are sensitive to the relative poverty of a child's environment. We examined whether direct, quantitative measures of early developing cognitive functions show a similar association with relative poverty. Eye movement latencies were recorded in children at…

This study investigated the involvement of the Social Agency Theory within a multimedia learning environment to improve English language proficiency. The primary aim of this study is to find the effects of designing language learning instructional videos following the embodiment principle on language learners' motivation, cognitive load and…

Background: There are only few guidelines on how instructional videos should be designed to optimize learning. Recently, the effects of social cues on attention allocation and learning in instructional videos have been investigated. Due to inconsistent results, it has been suggested that the visual complexity of a video influences the effect of…

Acting upon target stimuli from the environment becomes faster when the targets are preceded by a warning (alerting) cue. Accordingly, alerting is often used to support action in safety-critical contexts (e.g., honking to alert others of a traffic situation). Crucially, however, the benefits of alerting for action have been established using…

In laboratory symbolic matching-to-sample (MTS) tasks, acquisition commonly proceeds via trial and error, whereas in applied settings, MTS instruction typically includes prompting and prompt-fading strategies. We examined the effects of error-contingent prompts in symbolic MTS under sample-first and comparison-first presentation arrangements.…

This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

Purpose: Armed with the theory of embodied cognition proposing tight interactions between perception, motor, and cognition, this study aimed to test the hypothesis that speech rate-altered Mandarin lexical tone perception in quiet and noisy environments could be affected by the bodily dynamic cross-modal information. Method: Fifty-three adult…