Word association responses in first-language (L1) Spanish and second-language (L2) English were investigated by means of response latencies and types of associative response produced. The primary aims were to establish whether (a) some response types are produced more often or faster than others, (b) participants' L2 response time profiles mirror…

This study is part of an ongoing research project examining middle school girls' attention to and interpretation of visual representations of DNA replication. Specifically, this research examined differences between two different versions of a multimedia presentation on DNA, where the second version of the presentation was redesigned as a result…

Given the amount of visual information in a scene, how do speakers determine what to talk about first? One hypothesis is that speakers start talking about what has attentional priority, while another is that speakers first extract the scene gist, using the obtained relational information to generate a rudimentary sentence plan before retrieving…

Research has highlighted the role of emotion regulation as a common factor underlying emotional disorders. The current study examined the relationship of emotion regulation skills to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms. Seven participants with a principal diagnosis of OCD in a multiple-baseline across subjects design were taught the skill…

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a delay in response time (RT) to targets appearing at a previously cued location. The prevailing view is that IOR reflects visual-motor inhibition. The "attentional momentum" account rejects this idea, and instead proposes that IOR reflects an automatic shift of attention away from the cued location…

Social Stories[TM] are a common intervention for addressing the social skills deficits individuals with autism often demonstrate. In this study, a Social Story intervention was used to increase acceptable verbal greeting initiations with an 11-year-old boy who had a diagnosis of high functioning autism. A withdrawal design with a comparison…

We tested 7-month-old infants' sensitivity to others' goals in an imitation task, and assessed whether infants are as likely to imitate the goals of nonhuman agents as they are to imitate human goals. In the current studies, we used the paradigm developed by Hamlin et. al (in press) to test infants' responses to human actions versus closely…

Two event-related potential experiments investigated the effects of syntactic and semantic context information on the processing of noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., park). Experiment 1 embedded NV-homographs and matched unambiguous words in contexts that provided only syntactic cues or both syntactic and semantic constraints. Replicating prior…

Task-cueing studies suggest that the updating of sensory and task representations both contribute to behavioral task-switch costs [Forstmann, B. U., Brass, M., & Koch, I. (2007). "Methodological and empirical issues when dissociating cue-related from task-related processes in the explicit task-cuing procedure." "Psychological Research, 71"(4),…

The authors examined how the structural attributes of tonality and meter influence musical pitch-time relations. Listeners heard a musical context followed by probe events that varied in pitch class and temporal position. Tonal and metric hierarchies contributed additively to the goodness-of-fit of probes, with pitch class exerting a stronger…

We conducted three experiments to study the role of instrumental (e.g. "knife-bread") and categorical (e.g. "cake-bread") relations in the development of conceptual organization with a priming paradigm, by varying the nature of the task (naming--Experiment 1--or categorical decision--Experiments 2 and 3). The participants were 5-, 7- and…

The goal of the present investigation was to assess semantic learning in Korsakoff patients (KS), compared with uncomplicated alcoholics (AL) and control subjects (CS), taking the nature of the information to-be-learned and the episodic memory profiles of the three groups into account. Ten new complex concepts, each illustrated by a photo and…

The present project is a case study of 68 Kuwaiti children (aged between 4 and 8) who acted out their interpretation of verbal stimuli involving three word orders in Kuwaiti Arabic Subject Verb Object (SVO), Verb Subject Object (VSO) and Topic-Comment (T-C) by using a set of props. The purpose is to investigate the way Kuwaiti children comprehend…

There is general agreement that predictive inferences are activated when there is strong contextual support in the discourse model; however, there has been debate concerning the specificity of these inferences. In a series of 3 experiments, the specificity of context was manipulated to test the effects of contextual support on inference…

Objectives: To explore perceived benefits, barriers, and cues to action of yoga practice among adults. Methods: Focus groups were conducted with persons who had never practiced yoga, practitioners of one year or less, and practitioners for more than one year. The Health Belief Model was the theoretical foundation of inquiry. Results: All…