Positive shyness is a universal emotion with the specific social function of regulating our interactions by improving trust and liking, and showing politeness. The present study examined early infant production of coy smiles during social interactions as a measure of positive shy behavior. Eighty 4-month-olds were experimentally observed during…

Spatial reasoning, which involves "building and manipulating mental representations of two-and three-dimensional objects and perceiving an object from different perspectives" is a critical aspect of geometric thinking and reasoning. Through building, drawing, and analyzing two-and three-dimensional shapes, students develop a foundation…

Previous research suggests that multilinguals' languages are constantly co-activated and that experience managing this co-activation changes inhibitory control function. The present study examined language interaction and inhibitory control using a colour-word Stroop task. Multilingual participants were tested in their three most proficient…

Adolescent cannabis use is associated with working memory impairment. The present randomized controlled trial assigned adolescents ages 14 to 21 enrolled in cannabis use treatment to receive either working memory training (experimental group) or a control training (control group) as an adjunctive treatment. Cognitive function, drug use, and other…

It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier "every" and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking…

This study aimed to examine the relations among property strategies, working memory, and multiplication tasks with 101 Chinese fourth-grade students. Two multiplication property strategies (associative and distributive) were compared with no strategy and demonstrated differentiated effects on students' accuracy and reaction time. Associative…

A research study conducted in an urban district middle school setting applies cognitive science principles to science vocabulary. Within the context of a personal story told by the lead investigator, the results of the study are shared and suggest that more active, engaging strategies with complex core curriculum may improve retention and…

Subitizing is the immediate apprehension of the exact number of items in small sets. Despite more than a 100 years of research around this phenomenon, its nature and origin are still unknown. One view posits that it reflects a number estimation process common for small and large sets, which precision decreases as the number of items increases,…

Decades of research on visual perception has uncovered many phenomena, such as binocular rivalry, backward masking, and the attentional blink, that reflect "failures of consciousness". Although stimuli do not reach awareness in these paradigms, there is evidence that they nevertheless undergo semantic processing. Object substitution masking (OSM),…

Integration of simultaneous auditory and visual information about an event can enhance our ability to detect that event. This is particularly evident in the perception of speech, where the articulatory gestures of the speaker's lips and face can significantly improve the listener's detection and identification of the message, especially when that…

Gestalt phenomena are often so powerful that mere demonstrations can confirm their existence, but Gestalts have proven hard to define and measure. Here we outline a theory of basic Gestalts (TBG) that defines Gestalts as emergent features (EFs). The logic relies on discovering wholes that are more discriminable than are the parts from which they…

Over 350 years ago, Descartes proposed that the neural basis of consciousness must be a brain region in which sensory inputs are combined. Using fMRI, we identified at least one such area for working memory, the limited information held in mind, described by William James as the trailing edge of consciousness. Specifically, a region in the left…

Manual responses can be primed by viewing an image of a hand. The left-right identity of the viewed hand reflexively facilitates responses of the hand that corresponds to the identity. Previous research also suggests that when the response activation is triggered by an arrow, which is backward-masked and presented briefly, the activation manifests…

We examined whether view combination mechanisms shown to underlie object and scene recognition can integrate visual information across views that have little or no three-dimensional information at either the object or scene level. In three experiments, people learned four "views" of a two dimensional visual array derived from a three-dimensional…

This research investigated the source of an ostensible reflexivity effect in pigeons reported by Sweeney and Urcuioli (2010). In Experiment 1, pigeons learned two symmetrically reinforced symbolic successive matching tasks (hue-form and form-hue) using red-green and triangle-horizontal line stimuli. They differed in their third concurrently…