The observation of cueing effects (faster responses for cued than uncued targets) rapidly following centrally-presented arrows has led to the suggestion that arrows trigger rapid automatic shifts of spatial attention. However, these effects have primarily been observed during easy target-detection tasks when both cue and target remain on the…

People are able to use temporal cues to anticipate the timing of an event, enabling them to process that event more efficiently. We conducted two experiments, using the fixed-foreperiod paradigm (Experiment 1) and the temporal-cueing paradigm (Experiment 2), to assess which components of information processing are speeded when subjects use such…

Across 3 experiments, we investigated the factors that dictate when taking a test improves subsequent memory performance (the "testing effect"). In Experiment 1, participants retrieving a set of targets during a retrieval practice phase ultimately recalled fewer of those targets compared with a group of participants who studied the…

Recognition memory accuracy is harmed by prior testing (a.k.a., output interference [OI]; Tulving & Arbuckle, 1966). In several experiments, we interpolated various tasks between recognition test trials. The stimuli and the tasks were more similar (lexical decision [LD] of words and nonwords) or less similar (gender identification of male and…

Previous studies have suggested that both automatic and intentional processes contribute to the learning of grammar and fragment knowledge in artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks. To explore the relative contribution of automatic and intentional processes to knowledge gained in AGL, we utilized dual-task methodology to dissociate automatic and…

We study the contribution of implicit relatedness to associative recognition in two experiments. In the first experiment, we showed an implicit improvement in recognition when the stimulus elements of each word pair shared common letters and they were unpaired at test. Moreover, when asked to study the stimuli under divided attention, recollection…

This research examined the effect of concealment (environmental cues), presence or absence of people recreating (social cues), and gender on individuals' fear of crime in a community park setting. Using a 7-point single-item indicator, 732 participants from two samples (540 park visitors and 192 college students) rated their estimates of fear of…

Purpose: In this study, the authors assessed the influence of masking level (29% or 71% sentence perception) and test modality on the processing load during language perception as reflected by the pupil response. In addition, the authors administered a delayed cued stimulus recall test to examine whether processing load affected the encoding of…

This paper presents a user study that investigates the factors affecting student attention to user-adaptive hints during interaction with an educational computer game. The study focuses on Prime Climb, an educational game designed to provide individualized support for learning number factorization skills in the form of textual hints based on a…

The present study (a) extended the assessment of an orientation program involving auditory cues (i.e., verbal messages automatically presented from the destinations) with five patients with Alzheimer's disease, (b) compared the effects of this program with those of a program with light cues (i.e., a program in which strobe lights were used instead…

The present study was designed to investigate the impact of familiarity and audience age on children's self-presentation in self-drawings of happy, sad and neutral figures. Two hundred children (100 girls and 100 boys) with the average age of 8 years 2 months, ranging from 6 years 3 months to 10 years 1 month, formed two age groups and five…

Children's epistemic vigilance was examined for their reasoning about the intentions and outcomes of informants' past testimony. In a 2 x 2 factorial design, 5- and 6-year-olds witnessed informants offering advice based on the intent to help or deceive others about the location of hidden prizes, with the advice leading to positive or negative…

Language is rife with ambiguity. Do children and adults meet this challenge in similar ways? Recent work suggests that while adults resolve syntactic ambiguities by integrating a variety of cues, children are less sensitive to top-down evidence. We test whether this top-down insensitivity is specific to syntax or a general feature of children's…

Interest in and research on disgust has surged over the past few decades. The field, however, still lacks a coherent theoretical framework for understanding the evolved function or functions of disgust. Here we present such a framework, emphasizing 2 levels of analysis: that of evolved function and that of information processing. Although there is…

Theories of eating regulation often attribute overweight to a malfunction of homeostatic regulation of body weight. With the goal conflict model of eating, we present a new perspective that attributes the difficulty of chronic dieters (i.e., restrained eaters) in regulating their food intake to a conflict between 2 incompatible goals--namely,…