College students frequently experience inattentive and hyperactive concerns. In multiple independent samples and three randomised experiments, we examined multiple versions of a short performance-based measure translated from basic research on how organisms learn sequential stimuli patterns when such patterns are interleaved with information that…

This paper reports use of sample stimulus control shaping procedures to teach arbitrary matching-to-sample to 2 capuchin monkeys ("Cebus apella"). The procedures started with identity matching-to-sample. During shaping, stimulus features of the sample were altered gradually, rendering samples and comparisons increasingly physically dissimilar. The…

This study takes inventory of available evidence on response repetition (RR) effects in task switching, in particular the evidence for RR cost when the task switches. The review reveals that relatively few task-switching studies in which RR effects were addressed have shown statistical support for RR cost, and that almost all are affected by 1 of…

This study examined the capability of the left hemisphere (LH) and the right hemisphere (RH) to perform a visual recognition task independently as formulated by the Direct Access Model (Fernandino, Iacoboni, & Zaidel, 2007). Healthy native Hebrew speakers were asked to categorize nouns and non-words (created from nouns by transposing two middle…

We examined processing of verbal irony in three groups of children: (1) 18 children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD), (2) 18 typically-developing children, matched to the first group for verbal ability, and (3) 18 typically-developing children matched to the first group for chronological age. We utilized an irony…

The present study examined the relationship between individual differences in dichotic listening (DL) and the susceptibility to left-right confusion (LRC). Thirty-six men and 59 women completed a consonant-vowel DL test, a behavioral LRC task, and an LRC self-rating questionnaire. Significant negative correlations between overall DL accuracy and…

The concept of "monitoring" refers to our ability to control our actions on-line. Monitoring involved in speech production is often described in psycholinguistic models as an inherent part of the language system. We probed the specificity of speech monitoring in two psycholinguistic experiments where electroencephalographic activities were…

Metamemory refers to the ability of individuals to monitor and control their own memory performance. Although little theoretical consideration of the possible differences between the monitoring of episodic and of semantic knowledge has been published, results from patient and drug studies that used the "feeling of knowing" (FOK) paradigm show a…

Observation of another person executing an action primes the same action in the observer's motor system. Recent evidence has shown that these priming effects are flexible, where training of new associations, such as making a foot response when viewing a moving hand, can reduce standard action priming effects (Gillmeister, Catmur, Liepelt, Brass,…

The quantifier "dou" (roughly corresponding to English "all") in Mandarin Chinese has been the topic of much discussion in the theoretical literature. This study investigated children's knowledge of this quantifier using a new methodological technique, which we dubbed the Question-Statement Task. Three questions were addressed: (i) whether young…

This study examined the semantic processing difference between decomposable idioms and novel predicative metaphors. It was hypothesized that idiom comprehension results from the retrieval of a figurative meaning stored in memory, that metaphor comprehension requires a sense creation process and that this process difference affects the processing…

The goal of the present study was to elucidate the role of the human striatum in learning via reward and punishment during an associative learning task. Previous studies have identified the striatum as a critical component in the neural circuitry of reward-related learning. It remains unclear, however, under what task conditions, and to what…

Recent work in adult psycholinguistics has demonstrated that activation of semantic representations begins long before phonological processing is complete. This incremental propagation of information across multiple levels of analysis is a hallmark of adult language processing but how does this ability develop? In two experiments, we elicit…

Social discounting rates were compared between Japanese and American college students. In a series of psychophysical questionnaire tasks, participants chose between a hypothetical unshared monetary reward and a hypothetical monetary reward to be shared with other people (relatives or strangers), to determine amounts of the unshared reward…

The present study compares the relative effect of inherent lexical aspect and discursive grounding on the use of L2 Spanish Preterit and Imperfect. The study is based on the analysis of responses to a written 40-item discourse-based forced-choice task among 286 English-speaking learners of Spanish. The analysis of data (repeated measures ANOVA)…