A fundamental aspect of decision making is the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT): slower decisions tend to be more accurate, but because time is a scarce resource people prefer to conclude decisions more quickly. The current research adds to the SAT literature by documenting two previously unrecognized influences on the SAT: perception shifts and goal…

The purpose of the study is to determine the visual and auditory reaction time, perception, attention and memory levels of PE teacher candidates and computer teacher candidates. For this purpose, after giving necessary information to the teacher candidates of the Department of Physical Education and Sports and the candidates of Computer Teaching…

Dopamine plays a critical role in behavioral tasks requiring interval timing (time perception in a seconds-to-minutes range). Although some studies demonstrate the role of dopamine receptors as a controller of the speed of the internal clock, other studies demonstrate their role as a controller of motivation. Both D1 dopamine receptors (D1DRs) and…

Although the correlation between general cognitive ability ("g") and performance on speeded cognitive tasks is well-established, there is need for a better understanding of how successive stages of processing contribute to this relationship. Previous research suggests that "g" is primarily associated with the rapidity of…

Children tend to make more last-minute locomotor adjustments than adults when avoiding stationary obstacles. The purpose of this study was to compare avoidance behaviors of middle-aged children (10-12 years old) with young adults during a head-on collision course with an approaching virtual pedestrian. Participants were immersed in a virtual…

In this study, we investigated whether the difficulties in body motion (BM) perception may led to deficit in emotion recognition in Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To this aim, individuals with high-functioning ASD were asked to recognise fearful, happy, and neutral BM depicted as static images or dynamic point-light and full-light displays.…

Background: Recent research suggested fluent processing as an explanation on why number sense contributes to simple arithmetic tasks--'Fluency hypothesis'. Aims: The current study investigates whether number sense contributes to such arithmetic tasks when other cognitive factors are controlled for (including those that mediate the link); and…

The gun embodiment effect is the consequence caused by wielding a gun on judgments of whether others are also holding a gun. This effect could be responsible for real-world instances when police officers shoot an unarmed person because of the misperception that the person had a gun. The gun embodiment effect is an instance of embodied cognition…

Two experiments are presented that use tasks common in research in numerical cognition with young adults and older adults as subjects. In these tasks, one or two arrays of dots are displayed, and subjects decide whether there are more or fewer dots of one kind than another. Results show that older adults, relative to young adults, tend to rely…

In a signal detection theory (SDT) approach to multiple choice exams, examinees are viewed as choosing, for each item, the alternative that is perceived as being the most plausible, with perceived plausibility depending in part on whether or not an item is known. The SDT model is a process model and provides measures of item difficulty, item…

In absolute identification, the extended generalized context model (EGCM; Kent & Lamberts, 2005, 2016) proposes that perceptual processing determines systematic response time (RT) variability; all other models of RT emphasize response selection processes. In the EGCM-RT the bow effect in RTs (longer responses for stimuli in the middle of the…

Theories of perceptual decision making have been dominated by the idea that evidence accumulates in favor of different alternatives until some fixed threshold amount is reached, which triggers a decision. Recent theories have suggested that these thresholds may not be fixed during each decision but change as time passes. These collapsing…

Does a visual mask need to be perceptually present to disrupt processing? In the present research, we proposed to explore the link between perceptual and memory mechanisms by demonstrating that a typical sensory phenomenon (visual masking) can be replicated at a memory level. Experiment 1 highlighted an interference effect of a visual mask on the…

Perceptual simulations are unconscious and automatic, whereas perceptual imagery is conscious and deliberate, but it is unclear how easily one can transfer perceptual information from unconscious to conscious awareness. We investigated whether it is possible to be aware of what one is mentally representing; that is, whether it is possible to…

The roles of visual sonority and handshape markedness in sign language acquisition and production were investigated. In Experiment 1, learners were taught sign-nonobject correspondences that varied in sign movement sonority and handshape markedness. Results from a sign-picture matching task revealed that high sonority signs were more accurately…