Recent studies using the diffusion decision model find that performance across many cognitive control tasks can be largely attributed to a task-general efficiency of evidence accumulation (EEA) factor that reflects individuals' ability to selectively gather evidence relevant to task goals. However, estimates of EEA from an n-back "conflict…

Perception is not an independent, in-the-moment event. Instead, perceiving involves integrating prior expectations with current observations. How does this ability develop from infancy through adulthood? We examined how prior visual experience shapes visual perception in infants, children, and adults. Using an identical task across age groups, we…

This study investigates whether listeners' cue weighting predicts their real-time use of asynchronous acoustic information in spoken word recognition at both group and individual levels. By focusing on the time course of cue integration, we seek to distinguish between two theoretical views: the "associated" view (cue weighting is linked…

Perceptual judgments result from a dynamic process, but little is known about the dynamics of number-line estimation. A recent study proposed a computational model that combined a model of trial-to-trial changes with a model for the internal scaling of discrete numbers. Here, we tested a surprising prediction of the model--a situation in which…

We present a longitudinal computational study on the connection between emotional and amodal word representations from a developmental perspective. In this study, children's and adult word representations were generated using the latent semantic analysis (LSA) vector space model and Word Maturity methodology. Some children's word representations…

Recent work asked if visual cues facilitate word segmentation in adults and infants (Thiessen, 2010). While adults showed better word segmentation when presented with a regular visual cue (consistent mapping between words and objects), infants did not. This difference was attributed to infants' lack of understanding that objects have labels.…

Intuitively, the accuracy of initial word-referent mappings should be positively correlated with the outcome of learning. Yet recent evidence suggests an inverse effect of initial accuracy in adults, whereby greater accuracy of initial mappings is associated with poorer outcomes in a cross-situational learning task. Here, we examine the impact of…

The underlying structures that are common to the world's languages bear an intriguing connection with early emerging forms of "core knowledge" (Spelke & Kinzler, 2007), which are frequently studied by infant researchers. In particular, grammatical systems often incorporate distinctions (e.g., the mass/count distinction) that reflect…

Three experiments with preschool- and young school-aged children (N = 75 and 53) explored the kinds of relations children detect in samples of instances (descriptive problem) and how they generalize those relations to new instances (inferential problem). Each experiment initially presented a perfect biconditional relation between two features…

As engineers gain experience and become experts in their domain, the structure and content of their knowledge changes. Two studies are presented that examine differences in knowledge representation among freshman and senior engineering students. The first study examines recall of mechanical devices and chunking of components, and the second…