When teaching infants new actions, parents tend to modify their movements. Infants prefer these infant-directed actions (IDAs) over adult-directed actions and learn well from them. Yet, it remains unclear "how" parents' action modulations capture infants' attention. Typically, making movements larger than usual is thought to draw…

Computer-mediated social learning contexts have become increasingly popular over the last few years; yet existing models of students' cognitive-affective states have been slower to adopt dyadic interaction data for predictions. Here, we explore the possibility of capitalizing on the inherently social component of collaborative learning by using…

Studies of switching between tasks and studies of error commission have both provided solid behavioral measures of executive control. Nonetheless, a gap remains between these strands of research. In three experiments we sought to reduce this gap by assessing the impact of task errors on N-2 repetition costs, an effect supposedly related to…

This study investigates the processing of "wh"-dependencies in English by native speakers and advanced Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners. We examined processing at a filled gap site that was in a licit position (non-island) or located inside an island, a grammatically unlicensed position. Natives showed N400 in the non-island condition,…

Two experiments critically examined a predictive-coding based account of the vulnerability of short-term memory (STM) to auditory distraction, particularly the disruptive effect of changing-state sound on verbal serial recall. Experiment 1 showed that providing participants with the opportunity to predict the contents of an imminent spoken…

Frequent forced switching between tasks has been shown to reduce switch costs and increase voluntary switch rates. So far, however, the boundary conditions of the influence of forced task switching on voluntary task switching are unknown. Thus, the present study was aimed to test different aspects of generalizability (across items, tasks, and…

How does viewers' knowledge guide their attention while they watch everyday events, how does it affect their memory, and does it change with age? Older adults have diminished episodic memory for everyday events, but intact semantic knowledge. Indeed, research suggests that older adults may rely on their semantic memory to offset impairments in…

It has been demonstrated that the Simon effect may be increased or reversed due to proportion congruency manipulation, suggesting that learned spatial irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations are used to guide responses. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that learning spatial irrelevant S-R associations by rewards may show a similar…

Efficient attention control is fundamental for infant cognitive development, but its early precursors are not well understood. This study investigated whether dyadic visual attention during parent-infant interactions at 5 months of age predicts the ability to control attention at 11 months of age (N = 55). Total duration of mutual gaze (MG) was…

Over the last 2 centuries there has been a rapid increase in the proportion of children who grow up in cities. However, relatively little work has explored in detail the physiological and cognitive pathways through which city life may affect early development. To assess this, we observed a cohort of infants growing up in diverse settings across…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the relationship between nonverbal cognitive functions and language processing of people with aphasia (PWA) by taking a data-driven approach, as well as multiple cognitive components and multilevel linguistic perspectives. It is hypothesized that language performance is differentially associated with…

Cognitive factors have been recognised as important in the interpreting process, but whether they could serve as valid components of interpreting aptitude still awaits further investigation. This study explores the predictive value of cognitive fluency in the simultaneous interpreting (SI) performance of trainee interpreters. Cognitive fluency…

Behavioral self-regulation supports young children's learning and is a strong predictor of later academic achievement. The capacity to manage one's attention and control one's behavior is commonly measured via direct assessments of executive function (EF). However, to understand how EF skills contribute to academic achievement, it is helpful to…

Behavioral self-regulation supports young children's learning and is a strong predictor of later academic achievement. The capacity to manage one's attention and control one's behavior is commonly measured via direct assessments of executive function (EF). However, to understand how EF skills contribute to academic achievement, it is helpful to…

Higher working memory capacity (WMC) improves performance on a range of cognitive and academic tasks. However, a greater ability to control attention sometimes leads individuals with higher WMC to persist in using complex, attention-demanding approaches that are suboptimal for a given task. We examined whether higher WMC would hinder insight…