This study provides evidence connecting two aspects of visual-orthographic skills (orthographic awareness and delayed copying) to the common variance shared by Chinese word reading and arithmetic calculation, as well as in identifying positional knowledge of numbers as a potential mediator of these connections in Chinese primary school students (N…

The typical pattern of results in divided attention experiments is that subjects in a full attention (FA) condition perform markedly better on tests of memory than subjects in a divided attention (DA) condition which forces subjects to split their attention between studying to-be-remembered stimuli and completing some peripheral task.…

In perception, divided attention refers to conditions in which multiple stimuli are relevant to an observer. To measure the effect of divided attention in terms of perceptual capacity, we introduce an extension of the simultaneous-sequential paradigm. The extension makes predictions for fixed-capacity models as well as for unlimited-capacity…

The effect of cognitive load (CL) on speech recognition has received little attention despite the prevalence of CL in everyday life, e.g., dual-tasking. To assess the effect of CL on the interaction between lexically-mediated and acoustically-mediated processes, we measured the magnitude of the "Ganong effect" (i.e., lexical bias on phoneme…

Repeated observations of a colored form results in slower reaction-time responses to the familiarized stimulus than to a comparable novel stimulus due to alertness decrement and encoding facilitation. This two-factor theory of repetition was found to hold for words as well as for colors. (Author/BW)

Familiar letter sequences in noncued portions of a tachistoscopic display were shown to reduce accuracy of partial report. Findings suggest that familiarity may automatically direct attentional resources to a particular spatial region. Such attentional capture may be disruptive if the material is presented at another location. (Author/RD)