Most experimental preparations demonstrate a role for dorsolateral striatum (DLS) in stimulus-response, but not outcome-based, learning. Here, we assessed DLS involvement in a touchscreen-based reversal task requiring mice to update choice following a change in stimulus-reward contingencies. In vivo single-unit recordings in the DLS showed…

Problem-solving activities have been studied from a diversity of epistemological perspectives. In problem-solving activities, the initial tensions of a problematic situation led to a cognitive dissonance between conflicting motives and instruments to reach the activity goal. We analyze problem-solving in the continuation of Sannino and Laitinen's…

Humans are characterized by an especially highly developed ability to use instructions to prepare toward upcoming events; yet, it is unclear just how powerful instructions can be. Although prior work provides evidence that instructions can be sufficiently powerful to proactively program working memory to execute stimulus-response (S-R)…

The olfactory span task (OST) uses an incrementing non-matching to sample procedure such that the number of stimuli to remember increases during the session. The number of consecutive correct responses (span length) and percent correct as a function of the memory load have been viewed as defining rodent working memory capacity limitations in…

The primary aim of the present research was to determine how "stimulus-set" and "response-set" components of task-set contribute to switch costs and conflict processing. Three experiments are described wherein participants completed an explicitly cued task-switching procedure. Experiment 1 established that task switches requiring a reconfiguration…

Participants performed a 2-choice categorization task on visible word targets that were preceded by novel (unpracticed) prime words. The prime words were presented for 33 ms and followed either immediately (Experiments 1-3) or after a variable delay (Experiments 1 and 4) by a pattern mask. Both subjective and objective measures of prime visibility…

Three experiments assessed the development of children's part and configural (part-relational) processing in object recognition during adolescence. In total, 312 school children aged 7-16 years and 80 adults were tested in 3-alternative forced choice (3-AFC) tasks. They judged the correct appearance of upright and inverted presented familiar…

In this study, we investigate whether multiple digits can be processed at a semantic level without awareness, either serially or in parallel. In two experiments, we presented participants with two successive sets of four simultaneous Arabic digits. The first set was masked and served as a subliminal prime for the second, visible target set.…

In order to be adaptive, cognition requires knowledge about the statistical structure of the environment. We show that decision performance and the selection between cue-based and exemplar-based inference mechanisms can depend critically on how this knowledge is acquired. Two types of learning tasks are distinguished: "learning by comparison", by…

We validate an eye-tracking method applicable for studying memory processes in complex cognitive tasks. The method is tested with a task on probabilistic inferences from memory. It provides valuable data on the time course of processing, thus clarifying previous results on heuristic probabilistic inference. Participants learned cue values of…

The current practice of preference assessment offers a variety of approaches to determine an individual's preference for specific items. However, the majority of the research has been completed on school-age children or individuals with significant cognitive or behavioral deficits. Further, studies on preference assessments have not adequately…

Individuals may prefer contexts with the option to choose between 2 reinforcing stimuli or between 2 tasks relative to contexts in which others select the same events. We evaluated children's preferences for conditions characterized by (a) the opportunity to choose between tasks and (b) the opportunity to choose between putative reinforcers…

Anticipatory emotions precede behavioral outcomes and provide a means to infer interactions between emotional and cognitive processes. A number of theories hold that anticipatory emotions serve as inputs to the decision process and code the value or risk associated with a stimulus. We argue that current data do not unequivocally support this…

Purpose: To examine the behavioral effects and neural activation patterns associated with implicit semantic processing influences on phonological judgments during reading in children and adults. Method: Whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings were obtained from 2 groups, children (9-13 years) and adults, performing a homophone judgment…

In the voluntary task switching procedure, subjects choose the task to perform on a series of bivalent stimuli, requiring top-down control of task switching. Experiments 1-3 contrasted voluntary task switching and explicit task cuing. Choice behavior showed small, inconsistent effects of external stimulus characteristics, supporting the assumption…