Complex sequences are ubiquitous in human mental life, structuring representations within many different cognitive domains--natural language, music, mathematics, and logic, to name a few. However, the representational and computational machinery used to learn abstract grammars and process complex sequences is unknown. Here, we used an artificial…

Some theories have proposed that autistic individuals have difficulty learning predictive relationships. We tested this hypothesis using a serial reaction time task in which participants learned to predict the locations of a repeating sequence of target locations. We conducted a large-sample online study with 61 autistic and 71 neurotypical…

This paper is an attempt to show what parameters come into play when dealing with the problem of difficulty in foreign language learning. After subjecting the hierarchy of difficulty set up by R.P. Stockwell and J.D. Bowen to a critical examination, the author discusses various parameters such as individual and national difficulties, the…