Neighborhood frequency is a crucial variable to know the nature of word recognition. Different from alphabetic scripts, neighborhood frequency in Chinese is usually confounded by component character frequency and neighborhood size. Three experiments were designed to explore the role of the neighborhood frequency effect in Chinese and the stimuli…

Research into psychological mindedness (PM) has focuses on its beneficial role in improving physical and mental well-being. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of two PM measures and personality in predicting creative cognition performance. Following the completion of a battery of questionnaires, 176 participants from the general…

Long-term fear memory formation in the hippocampus and neocortex depends upon brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) signaling after acquisition. Incremental, appetitive odor discrimination learning is thought to depend substantially on the differentiation of adult-born neurons within the olfactory bulb (OB)--a process that is closely associated…

Sleep fosters the generation of explicit knowledge. Whether sleep also benefits implicit intuitive decisions about underlying patterns is unclear. We examined sleep's role in explicit and intuitive semantic coherence judgments. Participants encoded sets of three words and after a sleep or wake period were required to judge the potential…

The present study explores the independent and interactive effects of task complexity and task modality on linguistic dimensions of second language (L2) performance and investigates how these effects are modulated by individual differences in working memory capacity. Thirty-two intermediate learners of L2 Spanish completed less and more complex…

In studies of visual object recognition, strong inversion effects accompany the acquisition of expertise and imply the involvement of configural processing. Chinese literacy results in sensitivity to the orthography of Chinese characters. While there is some evidence that this orthographic sensitivity results in an inversion effect, and thus…

The present study investigates the processes by which essentialist beliefs about religious categories develop. Children (ages 5 and 10) and adults (n = 350) from 2 religious groups (Jewish and Christian), with a range of levels of religiosity, completed switched-at-birth tasks in which they were told that a baby had been born to parents of 1…

Two main mechanisms, articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing, are argued to be involved in the maintenance of verbal information in working memory (WM). Whereas converging research has suggested that rehearsal promotes the phonological representations of memoranda in working memory, little is known about the representations that…

We tested the theoretically driven hypotheses that children's orthographic and semantic learning are associated with their word reading and reading comprehension skills, even when orthographic and semantic knowledge are taken into account. A sample of 139 English-speaking Grade 3 children completed a learning task in which they read stories about…

Emotional expressions have been proposed to be important for regulating social interaction as they can serve as cues for behavioral intentions. The issue has been mainly addressed analyzing the effects of facial emotional expressions in cooperation behavior, but there are contradictory results regarding the impact of emotional expressions on that…

Children acquiring a range of languages have difficulties in the interpretation of personal pronouns. Ongoing debates in the relevant literature concern the extent to which different pronoun types are subject to this phenomenon, as well as the role of methodology in relevant research. In this study, we use two different experimental tasks to…

This dissertation explores why grammatical structures are better learned implicitly or explicitly by investigating differential object marking (DOM) in Spanish. To address the effectiveness of implicit versus explicit instruction in the classroom, the researcher focused on two of the main features that constrain DOM in Spanish: animacy and…

Aging is accompanied by declines in both working memory and long-term episodic memory processes. Specifically, important age-related memory deficits are characterized by performance impairments exhibited by older relative to younger adults when binding distinct components into a single integrated representation, despite relatively intact memory…

Sensory judgments improve with practice. Such perceptual learning is often thought to reflect an increase in perceptual sensitivity. However, it may also represent a decrease in response bias, with unpracticed observers acting in part on a priori hunches rather than sensory evidence. To examine whether this is the case, 55 observers practiced…

Studies of learner-learner interactions have reported varying degrees of pronunciation-focused discourse, ranging from 1% (Bowles, Toth, & Adams, 2014) to 40% (Bueno-Alastuey, 2013). Including first language (L1) background, modality, and task as variables, this study investigates the role of pronunciation in learner-learner interactions.…