We propose a linear ballistic accumulator (LBA) model of decision making and reaction time. The LBA is simpler than other models of choice response time, with independent accumulators that race towards a common response threshold. Activity in the accumulators increases in a linear and deterministic manner. The simplicity of the model allows…

In two studies, the regulatory function of approach-avoidance cues in activating cognitive control processes was investigated. It was hypothesized that avoidance motor actions, relative to approach motor actions, increase the recruitment of cognitive resources, resulting in better performance on tasks that draw on these capacities. In Study 1,…

Objective: The study investigates behavioural, academic, cognitive, and motivational aspects of functioning in school-age children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with and without an executive function deficit (EFD). Method: Children with ADHD - EFD (n = 22) and children with ADHD + EFD (n = 26) were compared on aspects of…

The aims of this research were to develop guidelines for designing interaction tasks for learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) and to investigate the attitudes of CFL learners toward a full CFL class in Second Life (SL). Three research questions were addressed in this research: (1) what are the attitudes of CFL learners toward the…

This study employed Bachman and Palmer's (2010) Assessment Use Argument framework to investigate to what extent the use of a second language oral test as an exit test in a Hong Kong university can be justified. It also aimed to help test developers of this oral test identify the most critical areas in the current test design that might need…

Bilinguals must focus their attention to control competing languages. In bilingual aphasia, damage to the fronto-subcortical loop may lead to pathological language switching and mixing and the attrition of the more automatic language (usually L1). We present the case of JZ, a bilingual Basque-Spanish 53-year-old man who, after haematoma in the…

A neural model is developed to explain how humans can approach a goal object on foot while steering around obstacles to avoid collisions in a cluttered environment. The model uses optic flow from a 3-dimensional virtual reality environment to determine the position of objects on the basis of motion discontinuities and computes heading direction,…

Repetition blindness (RB) was investigated in a new paradigm in which effects could stem from items preceding or following a target. Speeded-response tasks in which 3 critical items (C1, C2, and C3) were sequentially presented on each trial. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were asked to judge whether C2 (the target) was present on each trial.…

Mammillary body atrophy is present in a number of neurological conditions and recent clinical findings highlight the importance of these nuclei for memory. While most accounts of diencephalic amnesia emphasize the functional importance of the hippocampal projections to the mammillary bodies, the present study tested the importance of the other…

Using a forced-choice question-answering paradigm, K. Christianson, A. Hollingworth, J. F. Halliwell, and F. Ferreira (2001) showed that the original misinterpretation built during the analysis of a garden-path sentence lingers even after reanalysis has occurred. However, their methodology has been questioned (R. P. G. van Gompel, M. J. Pickering,…

Since M. M. Chun and Y. Jiang's (1998) original study, a large body of research based on the contextual cuing paradigm has shown that the visuocognitive system is capable of capturing certain regularities in the environment in an implicit way. The present study investigated whether regularities based on the semantic category membership of the…

The extent to which unconscious information can influence behavior has been a topic of considerable debate throughout the history of psychology. A frequently used method for studying subliminal processing is the masked priming paradigm. The authors focused on studies in which this paradigm was used. Their aim was twofold: first, to assess the…

In this study, we investigate the relevance of inflectional paradigms and inflectional classes for lexical processing. We provide an information-theoretical measure of the divergence in the frequency distributions of two of the paradigms to which a word simultaneously belongs: the paradigm of the stem and the more general paradigm of the nominal…

This study investigated the construction of a spatial model in relation to working memory (WM) and visuospatial abilities. Participants were trained to use either imagery or verbal strategies to process route spatial texts. Results obtained on a free recall task, a verification test and a graphic representation task showed the beneficial effect of…

This study explores how student-generated questions can support argumentation in science. Students were asked to discuss which of two graphs showing the change in temperature with time when ice is heated to steam was correct. Four classes of students, aged 12-14 years, from two countries, first wrote questions about the phenomenon. Then, working…