When memories of past rewarding experiences are distorted, are relevant decision-making preferences impacted? Although recent research has demonstrated the important role of episodic memory in value-based decision making, very few have examined the role of false memory in guiding novel decision making. The current study combined the pictorial…

Risky decisions are often characterized by (a) imprecision about consequences and their likelihoods that can be reduced by information collection, and by (b) unavoidable background risk. This article addresses both aspects by eliciting risk attitude, prudence, and temperance in decisions from description and decisions from experience. The results…

Social categories are often defined by the boundaries that they form between individuals. However, many social structures describe "complementary" relationships between individuals, defining both the power that we hold over others and our obligations to them and vice versa. In two studies conducted in the U.S., we investigated a sample…

We examined the role of exposure duration and scene complexity on the weapon focus effect (WFE). Memory for the mock crime was affected more by a weapon than an unusual but nonthreatening object. Threat reduced correct identifications when the event was short but not long; duration of the event did not interact with unusualness. Additionally, we…

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference…

Previous research on 4-6-year-olds' interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like "John called Mary before running to the store." Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children's errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by…

This study examined the role of child cognitive abilities for procedural and declarative learning in the earliest stages of second language (L2) exposure. In the context of a computer game, 53 first language Italian monolingual children were aurally trained in a novel miniature language over 3 consecutive days. A mixed effects model analysis of…

Elevation is the emotion elicited by witnessing acts of moral beauty and may be framed as the opposite of disgust. Two studies investigated the role of elevation in moral judgment and its relation to disgust. In Study 1 it was investigated whether elevation can attenuate the effects of disgust on moral transgression judgments. Participants were…

In judgment and categorization, the task is to infer the criterion value of an object based on cues. The cognitive mechanisms underlying such inferences are often distinguished in terms of whether they rely on an abstracted cue-criterion rule or on retrieving exemplars. The use of cue-based and exemplar-based strategies (and the associated…

Time is closely linked to people's representation of spatial experience. Previous research showed that adults primed with positive affect judged that they were approaching the event (ego-moving), whereas those primed with negative affect reported that the event was approaching them (event-moving). The present research investigated the…

Effects of concreteness and grammatical class on lexical-semantic processing are well-documented, but the role of sensory-perceptual and sensory-motor features of concepts in underlying mechanisms producing these effects is relatively unknown. We hypothesized that processing dissimilarities in accuracy and response time performance in nouns versus…

There is evidence that orthographic knowledge can influence on-line spoken-word recognition. Interestingly, when graphic and phonetic codes are not congruent due to the application of phonological alternation processes, people report hearing sounds that are matched to graphic (underlying), not phonetic codes (Hallé et al. in J Mem Lang 43:618-639,…

We explored whether performance differences exist between proficient and poor readers on implicit text information. Next, we explored whether indices of meta-cognitive monitoring predicted reading performance. Finally, we examined whether poor and proficient readers exhibited distinct meta-cognitive profiles with respect to reading comprehension…

This article examines the performance of heritage speakers on a bimodal acceptability judgment task that targeted morphologically complex words. A major goal of the study was to compare participants' acceptance of conventional and creative words. Data were collected from 57 adult heritage speakers of Spanish who were subsequently divided into two…

Two experiments are reported to investigate whether Chinese readers skip a high-frequency preview word without taking the syntax of the sentence context into account. In Experiment 1, we manipulated target word syntactic category, frequency, and preview using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). For high-frequency verb targets, there were…