Children's ability to refer is underpinned by their developing cognitive skills. Using a production task (n = 57), we examined pre-articulatory visual fixations to contrast objects (e.g., to a large apple when the target was a small one) to investigate how visual scanning drives informativeness across development. Eye-movements reveal that…

This research examined an important applied question: whether viewing ambient green (relative to red) on the wall of a workspace would facilitate creativity. A methodologically sound experiment revealed no influence of green on creativity. Care must be taken when interpreting a null result, but these data do not provide support for the presence of…

Typically developing adults with low and high Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores made rapid social evaluations of neutral faces when these were primed by briefly presented emotional faces. High AQ participants rated neutral faces as more threatening than low AQ participants, regardless of the prime condition. Both groups rated target neutral…

The present study examined cross-linguistic differences in morphological processing in the visual and auditory modality. French and German adults performed a visual and auditory lexical decision task that involved the same translation-equivalent items. The focus of the study was on nonwords, which were constructed in a way that made it possible to…

Taken together, the Coherence Principle of Multimedia Learning Theory and the Integrated Systems Hypothesis propose that co-occurring and semantically congruent verbal and visual information should be integrated into one mental representation that enhances memory. The purpose of this paper was to examine how learning pseudowords with matching…

It is well established in studies of two-party conversation that conversational partners jointly establish brief labels for repeatedly mentioned entities. When speaking to a new partner who is unfamiliar with the labels, speakers use longer expressions to facilitate understanding. How this process of audience design scales up to multiparty…

Actions aim to produce effects in the environment. To accomplish this properly, we not only have to recruit the appropriate motor patterns, but also we must be able to monitor whether an intended effect has ultimately been realized. Here, we investigated the impact of such effect monitoring on performance in multitasking situations: Multitasking…

This study compares the experts and the novices to investigate their information processing in dealing with the different degrees of recognition of shape-match stimulus by measuring the event-related potentials (ERPs). ERPs were recorded while 20 designers and 20 novices made shape-match judgments for table and chair sets. All of the tables were…

Previous research findings indicate that young children from East Asia outperform their counterparts from Europe and North America on executive function (EF) tasks. However, very few cross-national studies have focused on EF development during middle childhood. The current study assessed the EF performance of 170 children in grades 2 and 4 from…

Prior behavioral experiments across a variety of tasks have typically shown that the go/no-go procedure produces not only shorter response times and/or fewer errors than the two-choice procedure, but also yields a higher sensitivity to experimental manipulations. To uncover the time course of information processing in the go/no-go versus the…

Provided stimuli are highly distinct, the detection of changes between two briefly separated arrays appears to be achieved by an all-or-none process where either the relevant information is in working memory or observers guess. This observation suggests that it is possible to estimate the average number of items an observer was able to retain…

Previous research suggests that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) might be associated with impairments on implicit but not explicit mentalizing tasks. However, such comparisons are made difficult by the heterogeneity of stimuli and the techniques used to measure mentalizing capabilities. We tested the abilities of 34 individuals (17 with ASD) to…

Perceptual narrowing occurs in human infants for other-race faces. A paired-comparison task measuring infant looking time was used to investigate the hypothesis that adding emotional expressiveness to other-race faces would help infants break through narrowing and reinstate other-race face recognition. Experiment 1 demonstrated narrowing for White…

According to the executive framework of prospective memory (PM), age-related differences in PM performance are mediated by age-related differences in executive functioning (EF). The present study further explored this framework by examining which specific components of EF are associated with PM differences between and within three age groups. A…

Eye movements can reflect memory. For example, participants make fewer fixations and sample fewer regions when viewing old versus new scenes (the repetition effect). It is unclear whether the repetition effect requires that participants have knowledge (awareness) of the old-new status of the scenes or if it can occur independent of knowledge about…