Prior knowledge, represented as a mental schema, has critical impact on how we organize, interpret, and process incoming information. Recent findings indicate that the use of an existing schema is coordinated by the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), communicating with parietal areas. The hippocampus, however, is crucial for encoding…

Recent literature places more emphasis on assessment comments rather than relying solely on scores. Both are variable, however, emanating from assessment judgements. One established source of variability is "contrast effects": scores are shifted away from the depicted level of competence in a preceding encounter. The shift could arise…

The visual context in which an object or face resides can provide useful top-down information for guiding attention orienting, object recognition, and visual search. Although infants have demonstrated sensitivity to covariation in spatial arrays, it is presently unclear whether they can use rapidly acquired contextual knowledge to guide attention…

Several studies have found that, after repeated exposure to new words, children form orthographic representations that allow them to read those words faster and more fluently. However, these studies did not take into account variables related to the words. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of sublexical variables on the…

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and…

Semantically rich learning contexts facilitate semantic, phonological, and articulatory aspects of word learning in children with typical development (TD). However, because children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show differences at each of these processing levels, it is unclear whether they will benefit from semantic cues in the same manner…

Two experiments are present to examine the hypothesis that the ambiguity inherent within concept sketches can assist reasoning between different modes of representation, and engage translation from descriptions to depictions. The unstructured, ambiguous figures used as design cues in the experiments were classified as being at high, moderate, and…

The "Perruchet effect" refers to a dissociation between the conscious expectancy of an outcome and the strength or speed of responding in anticipation of that outcome. This dissociation is considered by some to be the best evidence for multiple learning processes with expectancy governed by participants' explicit beliefs and responding…

Learners' ability to infer unknown words' meanings (lexical inferencing) plays a key role in word knowledge development for second language (L2) learners. It has recently been acknowledged that learners' sensitivity to word-internal structures (morphological awareness) makes an important contribution to L2 lexical inferencing. However, it remains…

We have shown previously that male rats develop a conditioned ejaculatory preference (CEP) for females scented with a neutral odor like almond or lemon that is paired with the male's post-ejaculatory reward state during their first and subsequent early sexual experiences. However, preexposing males to the neutral odor alone prior to its pairing…

Drug-paired cues acquire powerful motivational properties, but only lead to active drug-seeking behavior if they are potent enough to overwhelm the cognitive control processes that serve to suppress such urges. Studies using the Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) task have shown that rats pretreated with cocaine or amphetamine exhibit…

Prolonged use of methamphetamine (meth) has been associated with episodic memory deficits in humans, and preclinical rat models of meth self-administration indicate the memory deficits are a consequence of meth use. Others have suggested that the meth-induced memory deficits may promote a cyclical pattern of drug use, abstinence, and relapse,…

Three experiments examined 4- to 6-year-olds' use of potential cues to geographic background. In Experiment 1 (N = 72), 4- to 5-year-olds used a speaker's foreign accent to infer that they currently live far away, but 6-year-olds did not. In Experiment 2 (N = 72), children at all ages used accent to infer where a speaker was born. In both…

Purpose: Researchers have long noted speech recognition variability that is not explained by the pure-tone audiogram. Previous work (Souza, Wright, Blackburn, Tatman, & Gallun, 2015) demonstrated that a small number of listeners with sensorineural hearing loss utilized different types of acoustic cues to identify speechlike stimuli,…

Memory reactivation is a process whereby cueing or recalling a long-term memory makes it enter a new active and labile state. Substantial evidence suggests that during this state the memory can be updated (e.g., adding information) and can become more vulnerable to disruption (e.g., brain insult). Memory reactivations can also prevent memory decay…