The purpose of this meta-analytic review is to investigate the relation between statistical learning (SL) and language-related outcomes, and between SL and reading-related outcomes. A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed published research resulted in 42 articles with 53 independent samples and 201 reported effect sizes (Pearson's r). Results of…

This article concerns the effect of context on people's judgments about sequences of chance outcomes. In Experiment 1, participants judged whether sequences were produced by random, mechanical processes (such as a roulette wheel) or skilled human action (such as basketball shots). Sequences with lower alternation rates were judged more likely to…

The finding that participants leave a pause between groups when attempting serial recall of temporally grouped lists has been taken to indicate access to a hierarchical representation of the list in working memory. An alternative explanation is that the dynamics of serial recall solely reflect output (rather than memorial) processes, with the…

Several studies on free recall suggest that processes responsible for recall are analogous to processes responsible for rehearsal. In children, the relationship between cumulative rehearsal and recall performance has been proven to be critical; however, the locus of the effect of rehearsal is not yet fully understood. To unfold the mechanisms that…

Presents a postscript to the current authors' response to the comments by J. S. Bowers, M. F. Damian, and C. J. Davis on the current authors' original article, "Short-term memory for serial order: A recurrent neural network model,". Here, Botvinick and Plaut address Bowers et al's assertions that neurophysiological studies that have reported…

J. S. Bowers, M. F. Damian, and C. J. Davis (2009) critiqued the computational model of serial order memory put forth in M. Botvinick and D. C. Plaut (2006), purporting to show that the model does not generalize in a way that people do. They attributed this supposed failure to the model's dependence on context-dependent representations,…

Presents a postscript to the current authors' comment on the original article, "Short-term memory for serial order: A recurrent neural network model," by M. M. Botvinick and D. C. Plaut. In their commentary, the current authors demonstrated that Botvinick and Plaut's (2006) model of immediate serial recall catastrophically fails when familiar…

In six experiments with English-learning infants, we examined the effects of variability in voice and foreign accent on word recognition. We found that 9-month-old infants successfully recognized words when two native English talkers with dissimilar voices produced test and familiarization items (Experiment 1). When the domain of variability was…

People are especially efficient in processing certain visual stimuli such as human faces or good configurations. It has been suggested that topology and geometry play important roles in configural perception. Visual search is one area in which configurality seems to matter. When either of 2 target features leads to a correct response and the…

An item that stands out (is isolated) from its context is better remembered than an item consistent with the context. This isolation effect cannot be accounted for by increased attention, because it occurs when the isolated item is presented as the first item, or by impoverished memory of nonisolated items, because the isolated item is better…

People categorized pairs of perceptual stimuli that varied in both category membership and pairwise similarity. Experiments 1 and 2 showed categorization of 1 color of a pair to be reliably contrasted from that of the other. This similarity-based contrast effect occurred only when the context stimulus was relevant for the categorization of the…