Commonly used in research settings, noncontingent reinforcement (NCR) is a function-based intervention for decreasing challenging behaviors (Carr, Severtson, & Lepper, 2009). Function-based interventions effectively change behavior through detailed analysis of why the behavior occurs (Lane, Kalberg, & Shepcaro, 2009). Practitioners…

There has been a shift in college classrooms from students recording lecture notes using a longhand pencil-paper medium to using laptops. The present study investigated whether note-taking medium (laptop, longhand) influenced note taking and achievement when notes were recorded but not reviewed (note taking's process function) and when notes were…

Reward-prediction errors track the extent to which rewards deviate from expectations, and aid in learning. How do such errors in prediction interact with memory for the rewarding episode? Existing findings point to both cooperative and competitive interactions between learning and memory mechanisms. Here, we investigated whether learning about…

Purpose: A central question about auditory perception concerns how acoustic information is represented at different stages of processing. The auditory brainstem response (ABR) provides a potentially useful index of the earliest stages of this process. However, it is unclear how basic acoustic characteristics (e.g., differences in tones spanning a…

Purpose: Human auditory nerve (AN) activity estimated from the amplitude of the first prominent negative peak (N1) of the compound action potential (CAP) is typically quantified using either a peak-to-peak measurement or a baseline-corrected measurement. However, the reliability of these 2 common measurement techniques has not been evaluated but…

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…

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,…

Purpose: Musical training is often linked to enhanced auditory discrimination, but the relative roles of pitch and time in music and speech are unclear. Moreover, it is unclear whether pitch and time processing are correlated across individuals and how they may be affected by attention. This study aimed to examine pitch and time processing in…

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…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

This study compared Spanish-English bilinguals' and English monolinguals' VOT values for /b, d, g/ in cognates and non-cognates. Twenty-six young adult participants (fourteen bilinguals and twelve monolinguals, mean age 24 years) were administered a picture-naming task, balanced for cognate and non-cognate forms. VOT values of 30 target words per…

Visual culture affects the way people understand the world and themselves, contributing to the creation of certain roles and stereotypes, some of which are related to body image. This study focused on interrogating future physical education teachers' beliefs about the body and physical activity to understand the construction of bodily…

Background & aims: The study assessed the efficacy of a novel, child-friendly, socio-culturally sensitive, icon-based Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) system called Jellow Communicator, in teaching requesting skills to young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in a special school in Mumbai, India. Jellow is a…

This study explored how the first language (L1) influences discourse marker use in second language (L2) speech. Some studies (e.g., Liu, 2013; Sankoff et al., 1997) have addressed the issue of L1 transfer of discourse markers in L2 speech, suggesting that non-native speakers' L1 use may influence the frequency and usage of English discourse…

Purpose: At rest, the central nervous system combines and integrates multisensory cues to yield an optimal percept. When engaging in action, the relative weighing of sensory modalities has been shown to be altered. Because the timing of peak velocity is the critical moment in some goal-directed movements (e.g., overarm throwing), the current study…