These studies investigate the influence of adults' explicit attention to commonalities of appearance on children's preference for individuals resembling themselves. Three findings emerged: (1) An adult's identification of two dolls' respective similarity to and difference from the child led 3-year-olds to prefer the similar doll (study 1, n = 32).…

How do people learn about things that they have never perceived or inferred--like molecules, miracles or Marie-Antoinette? For many thinkers, trust is the answer. Humans rely on communicated information, sometimes even when it contradicts blatantly their firsthand experience. We investigate the early ontogeny of this trust using a non-verbal…

Children often interpret first noun phrases (NP1s) as agents, which improves comprehension of actives but hinders passives. While children sometimes withhold the agent-first bias, the reasons remain unclear. The current study tests the hypothesis that children default to the agent-first bias as a "best guess" of role assignment when they…

When seeking to explain social regularities (such as gender differences in the labor market) people often rely on internal features of the targets, frequently neglecting structural and systemic factors external to the targets. For example, people might think women leave the job market after childbirth because they are less competent or are better…

We aim to understand the impact of scaffolds within a digital workbook to facilitate self-directed learning for learners completing a final project within a community and task-based MOOC. Optional reflection and articulation prompts were embedded in the tool support assignment development. Workbook use was prevalent, with 65% of learners using it…

Predictive coding theories of autism suggest that symptoms could result from an atypical learning of expectations. We assessed whether adults with autism could learn expectations in an uncertain context. Twenty-nine neurotypicals and 25 autistic adults participated in an associative learning task. After hearing a tone, participants had to predict…

This review was designed to characterize current intervention research for increasing imitation for young children with disabilities. We identified 34 unique sources including assessments of different types of massed trial and embedded trial interventions. Across intervention types, when evaluated via the Single Case Analysis and Review Framework…

Although syntactic priming has been well studied and is commonly assumed to involve implicit learning, the mechanisms behind this phenomenon are still under debate. Recent studies have suggested that exposure to nonlinguistic statistical patterns may influence language users' relative clause attachment biases, but whether the priming effect comes…

Sketching while narrating involves describing an event while sketching on a blank paper (self-generated sketch) or on a printed map. We compared the effects of self-generated sketches and printed maps on information elicitation and lie detection. Participants (N = 211) carried out a mock mission and were instructed to tell the truth or to lie…

Cultural routines, such as reading and writing direction (script direction), channel attention orientation. Depending on one's native language habit, attention is biased from left-to-right (LR) or from right-to-left (RL). Here, we further document this bias, as it interacts with the spatial directionality that grounds time concepts. We used a…

Acting upon target stimuli from the environment becomes faster when the targets are preceded by a warning (alerting) cue. Accordingly, alerting is often used to support action in safety-critical contexts (e.g., honking to alert others of a traffic situation). Crucially, however, the benefits of alerting for action have been established using…

Fluency confound (FC) has been a widely studied issue in divergent thinking (DT) tasks. In this study, the impact of DT task structure on FC was examined by focusing on activity level data from Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)-Figural. The TTCT-Figural involves two different task structures. Prompts in Activities 1 and 2 are designed for…

An ongoing debate in the literature on human reasoning concerns whether or not the logical status (valid vs. invalid) of an argument can be intuitively detected. The finding that conclusions of logically valid inferences are liked more compared to conclusions of logically invalid ones--called the logic-liking effect--is one of the most prominent…

Pedagogical agents were found to enhance learning but studies on the emotional effects of such agents are still missing. While first results show that pedagogical agents with an emotionally positive design might especially foster learning, these findings might depend on the gender of the agent and the learner. This study investigated whether…

We present one of the first detailed studies on hesitation marking in a sign language. Based on the analysis of a set of monologues and dialogues from the "Corpus NGT" (Crasborn and Zwitserlood 2008; Crasborn, Zwitserlood, and Ros 2008), we describe the form and position of manual and nonmanual markers of hesitation in Sign Language of…