We explored the role of parental testimony in children's developing beliefs about the ontological status of typically unobservable phenomena. US parents and their 5- to 7-year-old children (N = 25 dyads) separately rated their confidence in the existence of scientific and religious unobservable entities (e.g., germs, angels), and were invited to…

Children learn words in environments where there is considerable variability, both in terms of the number of possible referents for novel words, and the availability of cues to support word-referent mappings. How caregivers adapt their gestural cues to referential uncertainty has not yet been explored. We tested a computational model of…

This paper investigates whether typical stress patterns in English nouns and verbs are available as a prosodic cue for categorisation and accelerated word learning during first language acquisition. The stress typicality hypothesis states that left-stressed nouns and right-stressed verbs should be acquired earlier than the reverse configurations…

While driving, dangerous situations can occur quickly, and giving drivers extra time to respond may make the road safer for everyone. Extensive research on attentional cueing in cognitive psychology has shown that targets are detected faster when preceded by a spatially valid cue, and slower when preceded by an invalid cue. However, it is unknown…

This present study was designed to investigate whether face-type (stereotypical or nonstereotypical) facilitates stereotype-consistent categorization and decision-making. Previous literature suggests an associative link between adults' stereotypically Black facial features and assumed criminality. The question addressed here is whether the…

It has been well documented in adults that compared to verbal learning, learning while the subject performs an action is far more effective. However, the results of previous studies involving children have not reached a consensus. The present study examined the action memory of 4- to 6-year-old children under various encoding conditions (i.e.,…

Working memory (WM) improves dramatically during childhood but what drives this improvement is not well understood. One influential account thus far has proposed a simple increase in storage capacity. However, recent findings have shown that multiple factors, such as differences in the ability to use attention to enhance the maintenance of…

Objective: College students may not view sexual consent communication while under the influence of substances (i.e., alcohol and drugs) as problematic if media models the co-occurrence of these behaviors. The purpose of this study was to assess the types of consent cues used by characters who are and are not under the influence of substances in…

Jurors often have to make decisions about whether they believe a complainant's or defendant's account of an event. However, the relative ambiguity of cues in testimony creates a situation where juror evaluations can vary significantly. As a result, in cases heavily reliant on testimony there is a particular likelihood that juror characteristics…

Judgments of learning (JOL) are often used to assess memory monitoring at encoding. Participants study a cue-target word pair (e.g., mouse-cheese) and are asked to rate the probability of correctly recalling the target in the presence of the cue at test (e.g., mouse -?). Prior research has shown that JOL accuracy is sensitive to perceptual cues.…

Metacomprehension refers to the ability to monitor and control reading comprehension. It is important for individuals to be accurate in their judgments of comprehension, as this can affect academic performance. One type of accuracy, relative accuracy, tends to be low, meaning individuals cannot adequately differentiate well-known from less…

Corrective feedback is often touted as a critical benefit to learning, boosting testing effects when retrieval is poor and reducing negative testing effects. Here, we explore the dark side of corrective feedback. In three experiments, we found that corrective feedback on multiple-choice (MC) practice questions is later endorsed as the answer to…

Purpose: Some speech recognition data suggest that children rely less on voice pitch and harmonicity to support auditory scene analysis than adults. Two experiments evaluated development of speech-in-speech recognition using voiced speech and whispered speech, which lacks the harmonic structure of voiced speech. Method: Listeners were 5- to…

Previous research has shown that orthographic marking may have a function beyond identifying orthographic word forms. In two visual priming experiments with native speakers and advanced learners of German (Czech natives) we tested the hypothesis that orthography can convey word-class cues comparable to morphological marking. We examined the effect…

Several studies have investigated the effect of induced mood state on conceptual breadth (breadth and flexibility of thought). Early studies concluded that inducing a positive mood state broadened cognition, while inducing a negative mood state narrowed cognition. However, recent reports have suggested that valence and arousal can each influence…