Individuals regularly experience fluctuations in the ability to perform cognitive operations. Although previous research has focused on predicting cognitive flexibility from persistent individual traits, as well as from spontaneous fluctuations in neural activity, the role of learning in shaping preparatory attentional control remains poorly…

This paper identifies visual communication design as a form of public pedagogy. Communication design practices aim to achieve the successful transmission of a message to a recipient in a visual mode. Understanding the theories and practices of visual communication design can assist in enhancing the reception of the communication, as these…

Eye movements of Chinese readers were recorded for sentences in which high- and low-frequency target words were presented normally or with reduced stimulus quality in two experiments. We found stimulus quality and word frequency produced strong additive effects on fixation durations for target words. The results demonstrate that stimulus quality…

Understanding irrational actions may require the observer to make mental state inferences about why an action was performed. Individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have well documented difficulties with mentalizing; however, the degree to which rationality understanding is impaired in autism is not yet clear. The present study uses…

Using an innovative method, a Single-Target Implicit Association Test (ST-IAT) was created to explore the implicit theories of intelligence among science and liberal arts teachers and their relationships with their gender. The results showed that for science teachers--especially for male teachers--there was a negative implicit association between…

The effects of class-specific compound consequences embedded in an identity-matching task to establish arbitrary emergent relations were evaluated. A 3-year-old child with autism was taught identity relations between lowercase letters (Set 1) and uppercase letters (Set 2). A compound stimulus that consisted of an auditory component (dictated…

Sex is a significant social category, and adults derive information about it from both faces and bodies. Research indicates that young infants process sex category information in faces. However, no prior study has examined whether infants derive sex categories from bodies and match faces and bodies in terms of sex. In the current study,…

Behavioral pattern separation (BPS) paradigms ask participants to discriminate previously encoded (old) stimuli from highly similar (lure) and categorically distinct (novel) stimuli. The lure-old discrimination, thought to uniquely reflect pattern separation in the hippocampal formation, is typically pitted against the traditional novel-old…

It is well established that the ease with which a stimulus is processed affects many different types of evaluative judgments. Recently, it has been proposed that for verbal stimuli the effect of fluency on such judgments is mediated by the muscles that are involved in speech (Topolinski & Strack, 2009, 2010). Evidence for this claim can be…

Conflict processing is assumed to serve two crucial, yet distinct functions: Regarding task performance, control is adjusted to overcome the conflict. Regarding task choice, control is harnessed to bias decision making away from the source of conflict. Despite recent theoretical progress, until now two lines of research addressed these…

Humans are routinely required to coordinate with others. When communication is not possible, adults often achieve this by using salient cues in the environment (e.g. going to the Eiffel Tower, as an obvious meeting point). To explore the development of this capacity, we presented dyads of 3-, 5-, and 8-year-olds (N = 144) with a coordination…

Echoic, tact, and textual transfer procedures have been proven successful in establishing simple intraverbals (Braam and Poling "Applied Research in Mental Retardation," 4, 279-302, 1983; Luciano "Applied Research in Mental Retardation," 102, 346-357, 1986; Watkins et al. "The Analysis of Verbal Behavior," 7, 69-81,…

Associative learning tasks commonly involve an auditory stimulus, which must be projected through the auditory system to the sites of memory induction for learning to occur. The cochlear nucleus (CN) projection to the pontine nuclei has been posited as the necessary auditory pathway for cerebellar learning, including eyeblink conditioning.…

This study used canonical correlation analysis to explore the relation among scores on the Torrance test of figural and verbal creativity and demographic, psychological and physiological measures in Swedish product-development engineers. The first canonical variate included figural and verbal flexibility and originality as dependent measures and…

We explored 12-month-olds' flexibility in accepting phonotactically illegal or ill-formed word forms in a modified associative-learning task. Sixty-four English-learning infants were presented with a training phase that either clarified the purpose of a sound--object association task or left the task ambiguous. Infants were then habituated to sets…