Adolescent sleep deprivation is a pressing public health issue in the United States as well as other countries. The contexts of adolescents' lives are changing rapidly, but little is known about the factors that adolescents themselves believe affect their sleep. This study uses a social-ecological framework to investigate multiple levels of…

This study examines attentional biases in the presence of angry, happy and neutral faces using a modified eye tracking version of the dot probe task (DPT). Participants were 111 young children between 9 and 48 months. Children passively viewed an affective attention bias task that consisted of a face pairing (neutral paired with either neutral,…

It is often assumed that recollection is necessary to support memory for novel associations, whereas familiarity supports memory for single items. However, the levels of unitization framework assumes that familiarity can support associative memory under conditions in which the components of an association are unitized (i.e., treated as a single…

The provision of reinforcement to increase desired behaviors is a crucial element of behavior analytic intervention for individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Formal preference assessments, like the multiple stimulus without replacement procedure (MSWO), are often used to determine reinforcers used during intervention. While…

Background: Whereas research has indicated that children with Down syndrome (DS) imitate demonstrated actions over short delays, it is presently unknown whether children with DS recall information over lengthy delays at levels comparable with typically developing (TD) children matched on developmental age. Method: In the present research, 10…

Children's understanding of numbers is often assessed using a number-line task, where the child is shown a line labeled with 0 at one end and a higher number (e.g., 100) at the other end. The child is then asked where on the line some intermediate number (e.g., 70) should go. Performance on this task changes predictably during childhood, and this…

One hypothesis raised by Newport and Aslin to explain how speakers learn dependencies between nonadjacent phonemes is that speakers track bigram probabilities between two segments that are adjacent to each other within a tier of their own. The hypothesis predicts that a dependency between segments separated from each other at the tier level cannot…

The development of spatial navigation in children depends not only on remembering which landmarks lead to a goal location but also on developing strategies to deal with changes in the environment or imperfections in memory. Using cue combination methods, the authors examined 3- and 4-year-old children's memory for different types of spatial cues…

Teachers and trainers often try to prevent learners from making errors, but recent findings (e.g., Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009) have demonstrated that tests can potentiate subsequent learning even when the correct answer is difficult or impossible to generate (e.g., "What is Nate Kornell's middle name?"). In 3 experiments, we…

Gutierrez (2006) experimentally demonstrated the effects of joint control and particularly the role of response mediation in the sequencing behavior of adults using an unfamiliar language. The purpose of the current study was to replicate and extend the procedures used by Gutierrez by comparing the effects of joint control training with the…

Whether recollection is a threshold or signal detection process is highly controversial, and the controversy has centered in part on the shape of receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) and z-transformed ROCs (zROCs). U-shaped zROCs observed in tests thought to rely heavily on recollection, such as source memory tests, have provided evidence in…

Variability of repeated measurements in human performances exhibits fractal 1/f noise. Yet the relative strength of this fractal pattern varies widely across conditions, tasks, and individuals. Four experiments illustrate how subtle details of the conditions of measurement change the fractal patterns observed across task conditions. The results…

The Creative Solution Diagnosis Scale (CSDS) is a 30-item scale based on a core of four criteria: Relevance & Effectiveness, Novelty, Elegance, and Genesis. The CSDS offers potential for the consensual assessment of functional product creativity. This article describes an empirical study in which non-expert judges rated a series of mousetrap…

This study examined attention and memory processes assumed by the social information-processing model to be biased in aggressive children. We also explored whether similar biases were associated with overt and relational aggression. A total of 96 fourth through sixth graders saw videos of overtly and relationally aggressive child actors and…

College students ("n" = 846) enrolled in a general education course were randomly assigned to either an arousal (experimental) or no-arousal (control) group. The experimental group was exposed to a topic-relevant, 90-second external stimulus (a technique used to elevate arousal and focus attention). The control group listened to the…