The effects of fluency-based instruction and accuracy-based instruction on contingency adduction were assessed using an alternating treatments design. Stimulus equivalence tasks were used to measure contingency adduction. Stimulus classes were composed of arbitrary visual forms. One treatment condition consisted of teaching fast, fluent responding…

The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible…

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

There are two lines of discussion regarding the function of the Approximate Number System (ANS). The first line focuses on the extent to which visual cues affect the estimation of numerosity. The second line investigates the extent to which ANS precision is associated with symbolic math performance. The current study combined these two lines of…

It was suggested that 2 preconditions promote proactive control: a pending plan to control performance and availability of working memory (WM) storage resources. In 4 experiments, we applied these preconditions to the Stroop task. Using a new approach, we focused on task conflict while manipulating not only the different stimuli proportions, but…

The present study investigated whether adult learners of second language (L2) can automatically activate emotional connotation during emotional word recognition as compared native (L1) users and whether L2 use plays a significant role in it. The automaticity of activation was measured through the emotional Stroop task. In this task, emotional…

Previous experimental work shows that negation processing can be direct in bipolar contexts where positive/negative states of affairs can be expressed by available lexical opposites (remember/forget) in monolingual speakers. However, in a unipolar context where such opposites are not available (sing/not sing), the processing first proceeds through…

In four experiments, we investigated the impact of letter case (lower case vs. UPPER CASE) on the processing of sequences of written words. Experiment 1 used the rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP) paradigm with postcued identification of one word in a five-word sequence. The sequence could be grammatically correct (e.g., "the boy likes…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

Existing approaches in the literature on cognitive control in conflict tasks almost exclusively target the outcome of control (by comparing mean congruency effects) and not the processes that shape control. These approaches are limited in addressing a current theoretical issue--what contribution does learning make to adjustments in cognitive…

The same-different task is a classic paradigm that requires participants to judge whether two successively presented stimuli are the same or different. While this task is simple, with results that have been replicated many times, response times (RTs) and accuracy for both same and different decisions remain difficult to model. The biggest obstacle…

The development of the ability to anticipate--as manifested by preparatory actions and neural activation related to the expectation of an upcoming stimulus--may play a key role in the ontogeny of cognitive skills more broadly. This preregistered study examined anticipatory brain potentials and behavioral responses (reaction time; RT) to…

This study aimed to determine whether attentional prioritization of stimuli associated with reward transfers across conceptual knowledge independently of physical features. Participants successively performed two color-word Stroop tasks. In the learning phase, neutral words were associated with high, low, or no monetary reward. In the…

The findings are evidence that persons with ASD benefit more than typically developing (TD) persons from spatial framing cues in focusing their attention on a visual target. Participants were administered a forced-choice task to assess visual filtering. A target stimulus was presented on a screen and flanker stimuli were presented simultaneously…

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…