C. L. Folk, R. W. Remington, and J. C. Johnston's (1992) contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis states that a salient visual feature will involuntarily capture attention only when the observer's attentional set includes similar features. In four experiments, when the target's relevant feature was its being an abruptly onset singleton,…

The authors examined the relation between infants' motor skills and attention to objects features in events in which a hand acted on an object (e.g., squeezed it) that then produced a sound (e.g., squeaking). In this study, 6- to 7-month-old infants (N = 41) were habituated to a single event and then tested with changes in appearance and action.…

This study investigated the influence of informational complexity and working memory capacity on problem-solving efficiency. We examined two predictions of the "situational efficiency hypothesis," which states that the efficiency of problem solving varies as a function of situational constraints. One prediction is that informational complexity…

Metonymic verbs like "start" or "enjoy" often occur with artifact-denoting complements (e.g., "The artist started the picture") although semantically they require event-denoting complements (e.g., "The artist started painting the picture"). In case of artifact-denoting objects, the complement is assumed to be type shifted (or "coerced") into an…

Children are selective and flexible imitators. They combine their own prior experiences and the perceived causal efficacy of the model to determine whether and what to imitate. In Experiment 1, children were randomly assigned to have either a difficult or an easy experience achieving a goal. They then saw an adult use novel means to achieve the…

What does mass-count syntax contribute to the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs), and how much of NP meaning is contributed by lexical items alone? Many have argued that count syntax specifies reference to countable individuals (e.g., "cats") while mass syntax specifies reference to unindividuated entities (e.g., "water"). We evaluated this…

Although often described as temperamentally "easy" and sociable, children with Down syndrome also exhibit behavior problems. Affective development is important for social and behavioral competence. We examined negative affective expressions and a range of emotion regulation/coping strategies during a frustrating task in a sample of children with…

Time course estimates from eye tracking during spoken language processing (the "visual world paradigm", or VWP) have enabled progress on debates regarding fine-grained details of activation and competition over time. There are, however, three gaps in current analyses of VWP data: consideration of time in a statistically rigorous manner,…

Attention bias towards threat faces is examined for a large sample of anxiety-disordered youths using visual probe task. The results showed that anxious individuals showed a selective bias towards threat due to perturbation in neural mechanisms that control vigilance.

Previous studies examining explicit semantic processing have consistently shown activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). In contrast, implicit semantic processing tasks have shown activation in posterior areas including the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and the middle temporal gyrus (MTG) with less consistent activation in the IFG.…

Learning styles in capuchin monkeys were assessed with a computerized reversal-learning task called the mediational paradigm. First, monkeys were trained to respond with 90% accuracy on a two-choice discrimination (A+B-). Then the authors examined differences in performance on three different types of reversal trials (A-B+, A-C+, B+C-), each of…

In four carefully selected samples of 8- to 10-year old children with dyslexia (but age adequate arithmetic skills), dyscalculia (but age adequate reading skills), dyslexia/dyscalculia and controls a domain-general deficit in rapid automatized naming (RAN) was found for both dyslexia groups. Dyscalculic children exhibited a domain-specific deficit…

An influential series of studies have argued that young children are unable to use landmark information to reorient. However, these studies have used artificial experimental environments that may lead to an underestimation of the children's ability. We tested whether young children could reorient using landmarks in an ecologically valid setting.…

The nature and scope of available documents are changing significantly in many areas of document analysis and retrieval as complex, heterogeneous collections become accessible to virtually everyone via the web. The increasing level of diversity presents a great challenge for document image content categorization, indexing, and retrieval.…

Purpose. The first purpose of this study was to determine to what extent task and relationship conflict occurred in school district cabinets during budget development in a state budget crisis. The second purpose was to determine which cabinet member task and relationship conflict behaviors were demonstrated during budget development in a state…