Stimulus-response (S-R) episodes are formed whenever a response is executed in close temporal proximity to a stimulus. Subsequent stimulus repetition will retrieve the episode from memory, reactivating the previous response. Whereas many research findings attest to the flexibility of representing stimulus features, only little is known about the…

This study examined the effects of task demand and familiarity on students' perception and processing of spatial information upon viewing visuospatial representations. Participants in South Korea were told that they would travel through an area, either drawing a map or observing the scenery depicted in photographs. The level of familiarity in the…

Deaf individuals have been found to score lower than hearing individuals across a variety of memory tasks involving both verbal and nonverbal stimuli, particularly those requiring retention of serial order. Deaf individuals who are native signers, meanwhile, have been found to score higher on visual-spatial memory tasks than on verbal-sequential…

In this study, we examined the effects of emotional experience, a relatively new dimension of emotional knowledge that gauges the ease with which words evoke emotional experience, on abstract word processing in the Stroop task. In order to test the context-dependency of these effects, we accentuated the saliency of this dimension in Experiment 1A…

Twenty-first century literacy requires students to analyze and create images for communication across and within academic disciplines. Thus, literacy teachers are now responsible for supporting students as they engage with visual texts. We must carefully and intentionally choose images for teaching practice and consider the reader, instructional…

Background: Chromosome 22q11.2 microdeletion syndrome (22q11.2DS) is a genetic syndrome characterised by a unique cognitive profile. Individuals with the syndrome present several non-verbal deficits, including visual memory impairments and atypical exploration of visual information. In this study, we seek to understand how visual attention may…

I conducted 2 experiments in which I tested the effects of a reader immersion procedure on the technical reading comprehension responses to print stimuli for 4 kindergarten students and 3 first grade students. The participants selected for this study textually responded to words at a rate of 80 words correct per minute with 0 incorrect words per…

An important problem verb learners must solve is how to extend verbs. Children could use cross-situational information to guide their extensions; however, comparing events is difficult. In 2 studies, researchers tested whether children benefit from initially seeing a pair of similar events ("progressive alignment") while learning new…

The ability to track moving objects is a crucial skill for performance in everyday spatial tasks. The tracking mechanism depends on representation of moving items as coherent entities, which follow the spatiotemporal constraints of objects in the world. In the present experiment, participants tracked 1 to 4 targets in a display of 8 identical…

This study examined the temporal dynamics of spoken word recognition in noise and background speech. In two visual-world experiments, English participants listened to target words while looking at four pictures on the screen: a target (e.g. "candle"), an onset competitor (e.g. "candy"), a rhyme competitor (e.g.…

Two recent lines of research suggest that explicitly naming objects at study influences subsequent memory for those objects at test. Lupyan (2008) suggested that naming "impairs" memory by a representational shift of stored representations of named objects toward the prototype (labeling effect). MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, and Ozubko (2010)…

The current study examined the robustness, stability, reliability, and isolability of the attention network scores (alerting, orienting, and executive control) when young children experienced repeated administrations of the child version of the Attention Network Test (ANT; Rueda et al., 2004). Ten test sessions of the ANT were administered to 12…

Comparisons of cognitive processing in monolinguals and bilinguals have revealed a bilingual advantage in inhibitory control. Recent studies have demonstrated advantages associated with exposure to two languages in infancy. However, the domain specificity and scope of the infant bilingual advantage in infancy remains unclear. In the present study,…

Recent work has demonstrated that the addition of multiple talkers during habituation improves 14-month-olds' performance in the switch task (Rost & McMurray, 2009). While the authors suggest that this boost in performance is due to the increase in acoustic variability (Rost & McMurray, 2010), it is also possible that there is…

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…