Conditioned taste aversion (CTA) is an intensively studied single-trial learning paradigm whereby animals are trained to avoid a taste that has been paired with malaise. Many factors influence the strength of aversion learning; prominently studied among these is taste novelty--the fact that preexposure to the taste conditioned stimulus (CS)…

Two visual world experiments investigated the processing of the implicature associated with "some" using a "gumball paradigm." On each trial, participants saw an image of a gumball machine with an upper chamber with orange and blue gumballs and an empty lower chamber. Gumballs dropped to the lower chamber, creating a contrast…

Purpose: Visual attention is essential in many areas ranging from everyday life situations to the workplace. Different circumstances such as driving in traffic or participating in sports require immediate adaptation to constantly changing situations and frequently the conscious perception of 2 objects or scenes at the same time. Method: The…

Teaching complex intraverbal responding to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be challenging and often requires careful programming. Divergent and convergent multiple control are particularly important elements to incorporate into intraverbal training programs, as well as procedures to ensure responding is under control of both…

Toddlers performed a spatial mapping task in which they were required to learn the location of a hidden object in a vertical array and then transpose this location information 90° to a horizontal array. During the vertical training, they were given (a) no labels, (b) alphabetical labels, or (c) numerical labels for each potential spatial location.…

How we make sense of what we see and where best to look is shaped by our experience, our current task goals and how we first perceive our environment. An established way of demonstrating these factors work together is to study how eye movement patterns change as a function of expertise and to observe how experts can solve complex tasks after only…

Purpose: Although there is evidence that emotional valence of stimuli impacts lexical processes, there is limited work investigating its specific impact on lexical retrieval. The current study aimed to determine the degree to which emotional valence of pictured stimuli impacts naming latencies in healthy younger and older adults. Method: Eighteen…

One experiment determined the relationship between renewed associative strength and attention. Following cue1-outcome pairings in Context A, cue1 was extinguished in Context B while cue2 was conditioned. On test cue2 was chosen as a predictor of the outcome in Context B. Both cues were chosen equally often as predictors in Context A. Consistent…

Infants are precocious word learners, and seem to possess systematic expectations about how words refer to object kinds. For example, while monolingual infants show a one-to-one mapping bias (e.g. mutual exclusivity), expecting each object to have only one basic level label, previous research has shown that this is less robust in bi- and…

Purpose: The aim of this article is to summarize recent published and unpublished research from our 2 laboratories on improving speech understanding in complex listening environments by listeners fit with cochlear implants (CIs). Method: CI listeners were tested in 2 listening environments. One was a simulation of a restaurant with multiple,…

The go/no-go with compound stimuli is an alternative to matching-to-sample to produce conditional and emergent relations in adults. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of this procedure with two children diagnosed with autism. We trained and tested participants to respond to conditional relations among arbitrary stimuli using…

Responding to stimuli as same and different can be considered a critical component of a variety of language and academic repertoires. Whereas responding to "sameness" and generalized identity matching (i.e., coordination) have been studied extensively, there appears to be a significant gap in behavior analytic research and educational…

Purpose: The reading deficit for people with dyslexia is typically associated with linguistic, memory, and perceptual-discrimination difficulties, whose relation to reading impairment is disputed. We proposed that automatic detection and usage of serial sound regularities for individuals with dyslexia is impaired (anchoring deficit hypothesis),…

Research Findings: Although work across developmental and educational psychology reveals that trust impacts children's acceptance of claims and that teacher-student relationships impact learning outcomes, little work has integrated these literatures to better understand how students' trust in their teacher facilitates learning. In the present…

The current study examined the extent to which cognitive fluency (CF) contributes to utterance fluency (UF) at the level of constructs. A total of 128 Japanese-speaking learners of English completed four speaking tasks--argumentative task, picture narrative task, reading-to-speaking task, and reading-while-listening-to-speaking task--and a battery…