This pilot study with an n-of-1 design examined whether children with a specific language impairment without working memory impairment (SLI), a specific working memory impairment without language impairment (SWMI), or mixed language and working memory impairments (L&WMI) may respond differently to treatment targeting verbal or visuospatial…

College students in a psychology research-methods course learned concepts related to inferential statistics and hypothesis decision making. One group received equivalence-based instruction on conditional discriminations that were expected to promote the emergence of many untaught, academically useful abilities (i.e., stimulus equivalence group). A…

The fact that visual aids such as pictures or graphs can lead to greater comprehension by language learners has been well established. Nonetheless, the order of presenting visuals to listeners is left unattended. This study examined listening comprehension from a strategy of introducing visual information, either prior to or during an audio…

Two experiments investigated preschoolers' interference control in variants of the day-night task. The day-night task involves instructing children across 16 trials to say the word "day" when viewing a card depicting a nighttime sky and to say "night" when shown a picture of the daytime sky. The purpose of the experiments was to investigate…

Psychologists have long been intrigued with the rationales that underlie our decisions. Similarly, the concept of conditioned reinforcement has a venerable history, particularly in accounting for behavior not obviously maintained by primary reinforcers. The studies of choice and of conditioned reinforcement have often developed in lockstep. Many…

The topic of stimulus control is too broad and complex to be traceable here. It would probably take a two-semester course to cover just the highlights of that field's evolution. The more restricted topic of equivalence relations has itself become so broad that even an introductory summary requires more time than we have available. An examination…

When a target is enclosed by a 4-dot mask that persists after the target disappears, target identification is worse than it is when the mask terminates with the target. This masking effect is attributed to object substitution masking (OSM). Previewing the mask, however, attenuates OSM. This study investigated specific conditions under which mask…

In 5 experiments, the authors examined the development of automatic response inhibition in the go/no-go paradigm and a modified version of the stop-signal paradigm. They hypothesized that automatic response inhibition may develop over practice when stimuli are consistently associated with stopping. All 5 experiments consisted of a training phase…

Adults assess precisely the center of mass (CM) of single-bodied objects and choose grasping points that span an axis through or close to the center of mass when lifting them. The present study examined how children and adults assess the CM when lifting two-bodied objects (barbells) and how this ability develops. Four- to five-year olds, 6- to…

The dependence of the Simon effect on the correspondence of the previous trial can be explained by the conflict-monitoring theory, which holds that a control system adjusts automatic activation from irrelevant stimulus information (conflict adaptation) on the basis of the congruency of the previous trial. The authors report on 4 experiments…

Research has not systematically assessed and validated preferences for staff in adults with developmental disabilities. Three adults with developmental disabilities (aged 32 to 43 years) identified preferred and nonpreferred staff using verbal and pictorial preference assessments. During break-point analyses with progressive-ratio schedules, all 3…

Dynamic adjustments of cognitive control in response to interference from irrelevant stimulus attributes have repeatedly been shown. The purpose of the current research was to investigate how these control adjustments are modulated by the processing demands of a primary task. To this end, the authors combined a primary task (a number comparison…

When participants control the horizontal movements of a stimulus and indicate its vanishing point after it unexpectedly vanishes, the perceived vanishing point is displaced beyond the actual vanishing point, and the size of the displacement is directly related to the action-effect anticipation one has to generate to successfully control the…

Tachistoscopically presented bilateral stimulus pairs not parallel to the meridian produced significantly longer RTs on a task requiring discrimination of shapes (Go/no-Go) than pairs emplaced symmetrically on each side of the meridian in Desjardins and Braun [Desjardins, S., & Braun, C. M. J. (2006). Homotopy and heterotopy and the bilateral…

The pioneering work by Kirk-Smith, Van Toller, and Dodd [Kirk-Smith, M. D., Van Toller, C., & Dodd, G. H. (1983). "Unconscious odour conditioning in human subjects." "Biological Psychology," 17, 221-231], established that an unnoticed odorant paired with an emotionally meaningful task can influence mood and attitudes when the odorant alone is…