The increased Simon effect with increasing the ratio of congruent trials may be interpreted by both attention modulation and irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations learning accounts, although the reversed Simon effect with increasing the ratio of incongruent trials provides evidence supporting the latter account. To investigate if…

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A…

Existing approaches in the literature on cognitive control in conflict tasks almost exclusively target the outcome of control (by comparing mean congruency effects) and not the processes that shape control. These approaches are limited in addressing a current theoretical issue--what contribution does learning make to adjustments in cognitive…

Behavioral research has shown that 12- but not 9-month-olds imitate an unusual and inefficient action (turning on a lamp with one's forehead) more when the model's hands are free. Rational-imitation accounts suggest that infants evaluate actions based on the rationality principle, that is, they expect people to choose efficient means to achieve a…

In past decades, researchers have conducted a myriad of masked priming lexical decision experiments aimed at unveiling the early processes underlying lexical access. A relatively overlooked question is whether a masked unrelated wordlike/unwordlike prime influences the processing of the target stimuli. If participants apply to the primes the same…

The automaticity level and attention priority/strategy are two major theories that have attempted to explain the mechanism underlying the Stroop effect. Training is an effective way to manipulate the experience with the two dimensions (ink color and color word) in the Stroop task. In order to distinguish the above two factors (the automaticity or…

Memories for spatial locations often show systematic errors toward the central value of the surrounding region. The Category Adjustment (CA) model suggests that this bias is due to a Bayesian combination of categorical and metric information, which offers an optimal solution under conditions of uncertainty (Huttenlocher, Hedges, & Duncan,…

With the goal to determine the cognitive architecture that underlies flexible changes of control settings, we assessed within-trial and across-trial dynamics of attentional selection by tracking of eye movements in the context of a cued task-switching paradigm. Within-trial dynamics revealed a switch-induced, discrete delay in onset of…

Limits in visual working memory (VWM) strongly constrain human performance across many tasks. However, the nature of these limits is not well understood. In this article we develop an ideal observer analysis of human VWM by deriving the expected behavior of an optimally performing but limited-capacity memory system. This analysis is framed around…

Cognitive load theory (CLT) (Sweller 1988, 1998, 2010) provides us a guiding framework for designing instructional materials. CLT differentiates three subtypes of cognitive load: intrinsic, extraneous, and germane cognitive load. The three cognitive loads are theorized based on the number of simultaneously processed elements in working memory.…

The current study systematically examined the influence of sequential predictability of languages and concepts on language switching. To this end, 2 language switching paradigms were combined. To measure language switching with a random sequence of languages and/or concepts, we used a language switching paradigm that implements visual cues and…

We propose a neural dynamic model that specifies how low-level visual processes can be integrated with higher level cognition to achieve flexible spatial language behaviors. This model uses real-word visual input that is linked to relational spatial descriptions through a neural mechanism for reference frame transformations. We demonstrate that…

Attentional theories of associative learning and categorization propose that learning about the predictiveness of a stimulus influences the amount of attention that is paid to that stimulus. Three experiments tested this idea by looking at the extent to which stimuli that had previously been experienced as predictive or nonpredictive in a…

Dual route models of reading suggest there are 2 pathways for reading words: an orthographic-lexical pathway, used to read familiar regular words and exception words, and a grapheme-to-phoneme-conversion-(GPC)-sublexical pathway, used to read unfamiliar regular words, pseudohomophones (PHs), and nonwords. It is unclear, however, whether PHs…

In this study, we investigated how people deal with irrelevant contextual information during speech production. Two main models have been proposed. WEAVER++ assumes that irrelevant information is removed from the production system by an early blocking mechanism. On the other hand, the response exclusion hypothesis assumes a blocking mechanism that…