Noise is a common impedance to easy and accurate speech understanding. In the presence of noise, speech processing mechanisms proceed with partial or ambiguous inputs, and listeners will engage additional cognitive resources to make sense of what they hear. The extent to which this is situation is affected by diminished exposure to a language is…

There is growing consensus that selection history strongly guides spatial attention and is distinct from current goals and physical salience. Here, we focused on target-location probability cueing: when the target is more likely to appear in one region, search performance gradually improves for targets appearing in that region. Probability cueing…

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…

Motor performance has been shown to be superior when focusing on a physically farther environmental cue (external focus-far, EF-far) instead of a cue proximal to the body (EF-near). However, little is known about whether these foci affect bimanual tasks. Further, the effect of visual information on attentional focus is unclear. In the present…

Two questions regarding text signals' influence on second language (L2) science expository text comprehension were examined. First, the contextual relationship between verbal headings and non-verbal underlining signals (i.e., related or unrelated) was manipulated to investigate how these verbal and nonverbal text signals influence L2 text…

Impairments in joint attention are considered core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and are crucial for early assessment and intervention. However, existing information about visual attention during joint attention and its relation to developmental functioning is limited. The current study investigated the visual attention differences…

Prior research suggests most students do not glean valid cues from provided visuals, resulting in reduced metacomprehension accuracy. Across 4 experiments, we explored how the presence of instructional visuals affects students' metacomprehension accuracy and cue-use for different types of metacognitive judgments. Undergraduates read texts on…

We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7-month-old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the…

Attention, the mechanism that prioritizes stimuli in the environment for further processing, plays an important role in behavioral choice. In the present study, we investigated the automatic orienting of attention to cues that signal reward. Such attentional capture occurs despite negative consequences, and we investigated whether this…

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…

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…

Adults and children easily distinguish between fine-grained variations in trustworthiness intensity based on facial appearance, but the developmental origins of this fundamental social skill are still debated. Using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) oddball paradigm coupled with electroencephalographic (EEG) recording, we investigated…

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological…

Emotion recognition research in autism has provided conflicting results and has ignored the role of context. We examined if autistic adolescents use context to identify displayed and felt emotion. Twenty adolescents with autism and 20 age-matched neurotypical adolescents identified emotions from a standardised set of images. The groups also viewed…

The "Star Trek" franchise presents a hopeful vision of the future that is free from many of the social issues that plague our current society. This research explores "Star Trek's" utopian vision through a disabled lens, presenting a critical content analysis examining the representation of mobility disability in the "Star…