Mounting evidence suggests that monetary reward induces an incidentally learned selection bias toward highly rewarded features. It remains controversial, however, whether learning of reward regularities has similar effects on spatial attention. Here we ask whether spatial biases toward highly rewarded locations are learned implicitly, or are…

Children show a bias toward information about shape when labeling or determining category membership for novel objects. The body of work with human children suggests that the shape bias is not restricted to linguistic contexts but is highly contingent on task demands. Testing nonhumans could provide additional information about the salience of…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine the Stroop effects of verbal and nonverbal cues and their relative impacts on gender differences in unisensory and multisensory emotion perception. Method: Experiment 1 investigated how well 88 normal Chinese adults (43 women and 45 men) could identify emotions conveyed through face, prosody and semantics as…

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…

Although domain-specificity is prevalent in models of human cognition, its presence is not always easy to verify. For example, according to one prominent model, experiencing conflict from an incongruent distractor in a Stroop-like task triggers an upregulation of domain-specific control that facilitates the resolution of the same, but not a…

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…

Previous studies using artificial languages suggest that sentence production can be guided by verb-specific as well as verb-general statistics present in the language input. Here we investigated whether the statistical properties of ongoing input in the speakers' native language systematically affected their sentence production. Three experiments…

The likelihood of teaching a student with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has steadily increased over the past two decades. However, the practical information about working with students with ASD has not increased at a similar rate. Teachers may therefore be unaware of simple modifications they can make to their classrooms to meet the needs of…

Visual input enhancement (VIE) increases the salience of grammatical forms, potentially facilitating acquisition through attention mechanisms. Native English speakers were exposed to an artificial language containing four linguistic cues (verb agreement, case marking, animacy, word order), with morphological cues either unmarked, marked in the…

How does the concurrent use of language affect perception and memory for exemplars? Labels cue more general category information than a specific exemplar. Applying labels can affect the resulting memory for an exemplar. Here 3 alternative hypotheses are proposed for the role of labeling an exemplar at encoding: (a) labels distort memory toward the…

This study investigated whether language control during language production in bilinguals generalizes across modalities, and to what extent the language control system is shaped by competition for the same articulators. Using a cued language-switching paradigm, we investigated whether switch costs are observed when hearing signers switch between a…

Results from a number of studies indicate that the use of drafting models can positively influence the spatial visualization ability for engineering technology students. However, additional variables such as light, temperature, motion and color can play an important role but research provides inconsistent results. Considering this, a set of 5…

Several theorists believe that different types of visual cues influence cognition and behavior through learned associations; however, research provides inconsistent results. Considering this, a quasi-experimental study was done to determine if there are significant positive effects of visual cues (color blue) and to identify if a positive increase…

In this article, we demonstrate limitations of accessibility of information in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, cued-recall has been used to estimate the fidelity of information in VWM, where the feature of a cued object is reproduced from memory (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009; Wilken & Ma, 2004; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Response…

The lack of early identification, suboptimal language stimulation and limited remedial services in Sri Lanka for children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing place them at-risk of language delay. The reality for many preschool and primary school children entering formal education in Sri Lanka is a language delay in spoken language and/or sign language…