Pigeons trained on successive AB symbolic matching show emergent BA antisymmetry if they are also trained on successive AA oddity and BB identity (Urcuioli, 2008, Experiment 4). In other words, when tested on BA probe trials following training, they respond more to the comparisons on the reverse of the nonreinforced AB baseline trials than on the…

This study examined the effect of attention in young infants on the saccadic localization of dynamic peripheral stimuli presented on complex and interesting backgrounds. Infants at 14, 20, and 26 weeks of age were presented with scenes from a Sesame Street movie until fixation on a moving character occurred and then presented with a second segment…

Humans have the ability to attentionally select the most relevant visual information from their extrapersonal world and to retain it in a temporary buffer, known as visual short-term memory (VSTM). Research suggests that at least two non-contiguous items can be selected simultaneously when they are distributed across the two visual hemifields. In…

In many psychological research domains stimulus-response profiles are explained by conjecturing a sequential process in which some variables mediate between stimuli and responses. Charting sequential processes is often a complex task because (1) many possible mediating variables may exist, and (2) interindividual differences may occur in the…

Conceptual representations are at the heart of our mental lives, involved in every aspect of cognitive functioning. Despite their centrality, a long-standing debate persists as to how the meanings of concepts are represented and processed. Many accounts agree that the meanings of concrete concepts are represented by their individual features, but…

Purpose: Auditory perception of vowels in background noise is enhanced when combined with visually perceived speech features. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the influence of visual cues on vowel perception extends to incongruent vowels, in a manner similar to the McGurk effect observed with consonants. Method:…

Research on the functional independence of verbal operants (Skinner, 1957) has demonstrated inconsistent findings. One explanation may be that these studies have not manipulated the motivating operation (MO) to facilitate the emergence of mands (Hall & Sundberg, 1987; Lamarre & Holland, 1985). In the current study, 1 participant, diagnosed with…

The current study investigated attentional control through active inhibition of the identity of the distractor. Adapting a Stroop paradigm, the distractor word was presented in advance and made to disappear, followed by the presentation of a Stroop stimulus. Participants were instructed to inhibit the distractor in order to reduce its…

Two groups of 8-year-old children who were monolingual or bilingual completed a complex classification task in which they made semantic judgments on stimuli that were presented either visually or auditorily. The task requires coordinating a variety of executive control components, specifically working memory, inhibition, and shifting. When each of…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can process both interpretations of an ambiguous figure (e.g. rabbit/duck) when told about the ambiguity, however they tend not to do so spontaneously. Here we show that although adolescents with ASD can explicitly experience such "reversals", implicit measures suggest they are conceptually…

Inversion disproportionately impairs recognition of face stimuli compared to nonface stimuli arguably due to the holistic manner in which faces are processed. A qualification is put forward in which the first point fixated on is different for upright and inverted faces and this carries some of the face-inversion effect. Three experiments explored…

Working memory, inhibition and naming speed was assessed in 22 children with mathematical learning disorders (MD), 17 children with a reading learning disorder (RD), and 45 children without any learning problems between 8 and 12 years old. All subjects with learning disorders performed poorly on working memory tasks, providing evidence that they…

Since their formulation by the Gestalt movement more than a century ago, the principles of perceptual grouping have primarily been investigated in the visual modality and, to a lesser extent, in the auditory modality. The present review addresses the question of whether the same grouping principles also affect the perception of tactile stimuli.…

In object substitution masking (OSM) a sparse, temporally trailing 4-dot mask impairs target identification, even though it has different contours from, and does not spatially overlap with the target. Here, we demonstrate a previously unknown characteristic of OSM: Observers show reduced masking at prolonged (e.g., 640 ms) relative to intermediate…

An infrequent physical increase in the intensity of an auditory stimulus relative to an already loud frequently occurring "standard" is processed differently than an equally perceptible physical decrease in intensity. This may be because a physical increment results in increased activation in two different systems, a transient and a change…