Perception and perceptual memory play crucial roles in fear generalization, yet their dynamic interaction remains understudied. This research (N = 80) explored their relationship through a classical differential conditioning experiment. Results revealed that while fear context perception fluctuates over time with a drift effect, perceptual memory…

Perception is driven not only by current stimulation but also by previous sensory experience, which may serve as a perceptual prior for stimulus processing. A possible mechanism underlying this phenomenon is formalized in the internal reference model, which assumes that humans rely on an internal reference that updates continuously by integrating…

Cognitive and behavioral studies ranging from biomechanics to motor functions and neural mirroring explorations have extensively investigated the communication of emotions in music and dance. Recognized for their ability to convey and elicit emotions, various studies aim to validate the extent to which auditory expressive cues and embodied…

Humans have the ability to learn surprisingly complicated statistical information in a variety of modalities and situations, often based on relatively little input. These statistical learning (SL) skills appear to underlie many kinds of learning, but despite their ubiquity, we still do not fully understand precisely what SL is and what individual…

While atypical sensory processes have become central to scientific explanatory models of autism, such models usually do not explicitly address first-person experiences of sensory processes by autistic individuals. Detailed phenomenological research of this subjective domain is nonetheless essential to ground explanatory accounts in the actual…

Generalization of learning can arise from 2 distinct sources: failure to discriminate a novel test stimulus from the trained stimulus and active extrapolation from the trained stimulus to the test stimulus despite them being discriminable. We investigated these 2 processes in a predictive learning task by testing stimulus discriminability…

If a target stimulus is presented together with a response-irrelevant distractor stimulus, both stimuli can be encoded together with the response in an event file (see Hommel, 2004). The repetition of any feature of such an event-file can then retrieve the previously encoded response. This kind of feature-based retrieval is an important mechanism…

The evaluative conditioning (EC) phenomenon is central to the study of preference acquisition and attitude formation. Early studies have reported EC in the absence of awareness, but more recent work has questioned this conclusion. In previous work, using briefly presented and pattern-masked conditioned stimuli (CSs), we found that above-chance…

The role of awareness in evaluative learning has been thoroughly investigated with a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. We investigated evaluative conditioning (EC) without awareness with an approach that conceptually provides optimal conditions for unaware learning - the Continuous Flash Suppression paradigm (CFS). In CFS, a…

The typical trigonometry, precalculus, or calculus student might not agree that logarithms are hot stuff, but we drew motivation from chili peppers to help students get a better taste for logarithms. The Scoville scale, which ranges from 0 to 16,000,000, has been the sole quantitative metric to measure the pungency (spiciness) of peppers since its…

The role of top-down control in divergent creativity remains heavily debated. An outstanding question about the state dynamics of creativity concerns acute shifts between heightened and lowered creative states. Particularly, do transitions between creative states incur a "switch cost" as observed in other domains of cognition? Prior…

Teachers are confronted with multiple stimuli during instruction. To teach responsively, they must be able to identify and address classroom incidents that are critical for student learning. In the literature, the term "noticing" is used to refer to teachers' perception and interpretation of such incidents, as well as the associated…

Conditioned taste aversion (CTA) is an intensively studied single-trial learning paradigm whereby animals are trained to avoid a taste that has been paired with malaise. Many factors influence the strength of aversion learning; prominently studied among these is taste novelty--the fact that preexposure to the taste conditioned stimulus (CS)…

Historically, the body's sensory systems have been presumed to provide the brain with raw information about the external environment, which the brain must interpret to select a behavioral response. Consequently, studies of the neurobiology of learning and memory have focused on circuitry that interfaces between sensory inputs and behavioral…

The field of psychology of time has typically distinguished between prospective timing and retrospective duration estimation: in prospective timing, participants attend to and encode time, whereas in retrospective estimation, estimates are based on the memory of what happened. Prior research on prospective timing has primarily focused on…