Groups of 40 older and 40 younger adults were tested using cue sets of 25 U.S. states and 25 movie stars. No overall differences in total recall appeared. Those who did not study cues had better recall of noncued items. Younger adults performed better on noncued sets, older adults on the cued condition for movie stars. (SK)

When participants use cues to prepare for a likely stimulus or a likely response, reaction times are facilitated by valid cues but prolonged by invalid cues. In studies on combined expectancy effects, two cues give information regarding two dimensions of the forthcoming task. When the two cues consist of two separable stimuli their effects are…

This study consecutively examined the effects of 2 social interventions--peer training and written text treatment--on the social communication of 5 elementary students with pervasive developmental disorder. Each child with autism was paired with 2 peers without disabilities to form 5 triads. In Intervention 1 (peer training), peers were taught to…

The recognition heuristic is a prime example of a boundedly rational mind tool that rests on an evolved capacity, recognition, and exploits environmental structures. When originally proposed, it was conjectured that no other probabilistic cue reverses the recognition-based inference (D. G. Goldstein & G. Gigerenzer, 2002). More recent studies…

Nonhuman animals, like humans, appear sensitive to the structure of the elements of sequences, perhaps even when the structure relates nonadjacent elements. In the present study, we examined the contribution of chunking, rule learning, and item memory when rats learned serial patterns composed of two interleaved subpatterns. In one group, the…

This paper examines the use of gaze as one of a number of connected compensatory adaptations to linguistic impairment by a patient with Broca's aphasia. The examination of the import of gaze withdrawal and return of gaze in the context of self cuing by the patient shows how the patient exploits the complex multifaceted nature of meaning making.…

In a between-subjects design, 4-to 6-year-olds were asked to draw from three-dimensional (3D) models, two-and-a-half-dimensional (212D) models with or without depth cues, or two-dimensional (2D) models of a familiar object (a saucepan) in noncanonical orientations (handle at the back or at the front). Results showed that canonical errors were…

Although word stress has been hailed as a powerful speech-segmentation cue, the results of 5 cross-modal fragment priming experiments revealed limitations to stress-based segmentation. Specifically, the stress pattern of auditory primes failed to have any effect on the lexical decision latencies to related visual targets. A determining factor was…

Human listeners can keep track of statistical regularities among temporally adjacent elements in both speech and musical streams. However, for speech streams, when statistical regularities occur among nonadjacent elements, only certain types of patterns are acquired. Here, using musical tone sequences, the authors investigate nonadjacent learning.…

In two experiments, the authors sought to distinguish between the claim that recognition of an object is treated simply as a cue among others for the purposes of decision making in a cue-learning task from the claim that recognition is attributed a special status with fundamental, noncompensatory properties. Results of both experiments supported…

This study investigated the mind-reading abilities of 19 adults with Asperger syndrome and 19 typically developing adults. Two static mind-reading tests and a more naturalistic empathic accuracy task were used. In the empathic accuracy task, participants attempted to infer the thoughts and feelings of target persons, while viewing a videotape of…

When survey respondents' answers include pauses, stammers, and hedges, does this indicate that they are in danger of misinterpreting the survey question? Or are disfluencies so common in ordinary discourse that they are nondiagnostic? We analyzed respondents' first utterances after survey questions in a corpus of 42 laboratory-based telephone…

In four experiments using albino rats in an ABA fear renewal paradigm, we studied conditioned fear in the A test context following extinction in Context B. Conditioned suppression of operant responding was the index of fear. In Experiments 1-3, we found that extinguishing a feared cue in compound with a putative conditioned inhibitor of fear led…

The authors investigated whether a Simon effect could be observed in an accessory-stimulus Simon task when participants were unaware of the task-irrelevant accessory cue. In Experiment 1A a central visual target was accompanied by a suprathreshold visual lateral cue. A regular Simon effect (i.e., faster cue-response corresponding reaction times…

Women suffer a variety of detrimental effects from exposure to violent pornography. This study examined the role of specific situational cues embedded within a violent pornographic story, as well as alcohol consumption and alcohol expectancies, to determine potential mechanisms through which these effects occur. Female social drinkers (N=123),…