Contextual cueing refers to the guidance of search by associative learning of the location of task-relevant target items in relation to the consistent arrangement of distractor ("context") items in the search display. The present study investigated whether such target-distractor associations could also be formed in a cross-modal search…

For skill learning processes to be effective, they must encode associations that are inherent to the current task and avoid those that are spurious or particular to training conditions so that learning can transfer to novel situations. Some everyday contexts even require grouped responding to simultaneously presented stimuli. Here we test whether…

Participants performed a 2-choice categorization task on visible word targets that were preceded by novel (unpracticed) prime words. The prime words were presented for 33 ms and followed either immediately (Experiments 1-3) or after a variable delay (Experiments 1 and 4) by a pattern mask. Both subjective and objective measures of prime visibility…

The item-specific proportion congruency (ISPC) effect is the finding of attenuated interference for mostly incongruent as compared to mostly congruent items. A debate in the Stroop literature concerns the mechanisms underlying this effect. Noting a confound between proportion congruency and contingency, Schmidt and Besner (2008) suggested that…

Perruchet, Cleeremans, and Destrebecqz (2006) reported a striking dissociation between trends in the conscious expectancy of an event and the speed of a response that is cued by that event. They argued that this indicates the operation of independent processes in human associative learning. However, there remains a strong possibility that this…

Despite its avowed goal of understanding individual behavior, the field of behavior analysis has largely ignored the determinants of consistent differences in level of performance among individuals. The present article discusses major findings in the study of individual differences in intelligence from the conceptual framework of a functional…

When subjects switch between a pair of stimulus-response tasks, reaction time is slower on trial N if a different task was performed on trial N--1. We present a parallel distributed processing (PDP) model that simulates this effect when subjects switch between word reading and color naming in response to Stroop stimuli. Reaction time on "switch…

Great controversy exists on whether associative learning occurs without awareness. In Experiment 1, 31 participants received discrimination training by repeated presentations of two stimulus sequences (S1[subscript A] right arrow S2[subscript A], and S1[subscript B] right arrow S2[subscript B]), S1 being a masked stimulus. S2 were imperative…

Three experiments explored the effect of affectively congruent or incongruent primes on evaluation responses to positive or negative valenced targets (the "affective priming" effect). Experiment 1 replicated the basic affective priming effect with Spanish nouns: reaction time for evaluative responses (pleasant/unpleasant) were slower on…