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…

To develop theories of how comprehenders extract the message from a linguistic stream, it is critical to understand how they conceptually represent referents. The experiments reported here focus on singular collective nouns (e.g., "committee," "team"), which introduce a single group into the discourse and test whether they…

Since Gisela Granena's influential work, LLAMA D v2, a sound recognition subtest of LLAMA aptitude tests, has been used as a measure of implicit learning aptitude in second language acquisition research. The validity of this test, however, is little known and the results of studies with this instrument have been somewhat inconsistent. In this…

Visual comparisons are pervasive in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) instruction and practice. In previous work, adults' visual comparisons of simple stimuli were faster and more accurate when the layout of a display facilitated alignment of corresponding elements--the "spatial alignment principle" (Matlen et al.,…

Purpose: Recent research on perception of emotionally charged material has found both an "emotionality effect" in which participants respond differently to emotionally charged stimuli relative to neutral stimuli in some cognitive-linguistic tasks and a "negativity bias" in which participants respond differently to negatively…

Previous research has hypothesized that human sequential processing may be dependent upon hearing experience (the "auditory scaffolding hypothesis"), predicting that sequential rule learning abilities should be hindered by congenital deafness. To test this hypothesis, we compared deaf signer and hearing individuals' ability to acquire…

Individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) are less susceptible to multisensory delusions, such as rubber hand illusion (RHI). Here, we investigate whether a monochannel variant of RHI is more effective in inducing an illusory feeling of ownership in ASC. To this aim, we exploit a non-visual variant of the RHI that, excluding vision,…

We explored a two-stage recognition memory paradigm in which people first make single-item "studied"/"not studied" decisions and then have a chance to correct their errors in forced-choice trials. Each forced-choice trial included one studied word ("target") and one nonstudied word ("lure") that received the…

A classic issue in the cognitive psychology of human category learning has involved the contrast between exemplar and prototype models. However, experimental tests to distinguish the models have relied almost solely on use of artificially-constructed categories composed of simplified stimuli. Here we contrast the predictions from the models in a…

This present study examines the psycho-emotional and psychophysiological effects that variations in the tempo of background music have on learners who are completing reading comprehension tests while being monitored used multi-modal computer technology. Results of seventy-four (N = 74) participants indicated that listening to fast tempo music…

Recommendations for achieving generalized instructional outcomes often overlook the capacity for generative learning. We sought to demonstrate how decontextualized and logically organized instruction would lead to derived and contextually appropriate recombinative generalization and arbitrarily applicable relational responding (AARRing) in…

One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed that iconicity in the early lexicon may serve to help children learn how to learn words, supporting the acquisition of even noniconic, or "arbitrary," word-referent associations. However,…

An adaptive memory system should prioritize information surrounding a powerful learning event that may prove useful for predicting future meaningful events. The behavioral tagging hypothesis provides a mechanistic framework to interpret how weak experiences persist as durable memories through temporal association with a strong experience. Memories…

Perceptual experts have learned to rapidly and accurately perceive the structural regularities that define categories and identities within a domain. They extract important features and their relations more efficiently than novices. We used fingerprint examination to investigate expert-novice differences in feature choice. On each fingerprint…

Cognitive control theories describe the active maintenance of goal representations over temporal delays as central for adaptive behavior. Dynamic adaptations of goal representations are often measured as the congruency sequence effect (CSE), which describes a reduced congruency effect in trials following incongruent trials compared to congruent…