Monitoring refers to online awareness and self-evaluation of one's goal-directed actions, while Control refers to the generation and selection of goal-directed actions (Osman, 2010a). The present study examines the extent to which external estimations of performance influence monitoring and control behaviors. To achieve this, a complex dynamic…

There is extensive evidence that emotional--especially threatening--stimuli rapidly capture attention. These findings are often explained in terms of a hard-wired and relatively inflexible fear module. We propose an alternative, more flexible mechanism, arguing that motivational relevance is the crucial factor driving rapid attentional orienting.…

Natural language often contains dependencies that span words, phrases, or even sentences. Thus, language comprehension relies on recovering recently processed information from memory for subsequent interpretation. This dissertation investigates the memory operations that subserve dependency resolution through the lens of "verb-phrase ellipsis"…

A central question in online human sentence comprehension is, "How are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence?" Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. This article argues that dependency…

An online demonstration, designed to enhance comprehension of Sternberg's (1966) short-term memory scanning task, involved rapidly searching under virtual cups for a ball. We randomly assigned students to 1 of 3 groups, all of whom read the same textbook description of Sternberg's work: A demonstration group used 3 search methods to look for balls…