This article traces the history of obedience experiments that have used the Milgram paradigm. It begins with Stanley Milgram's graduate education, showing how some aspects of that experience laid the groundwork for the obedience experiments. It then identifies three factors that led Milgram to study obedience. The underlying principles or messages…

Books I and III of Newton's "Principia" develop Newton's dynamical theory and show how it explains a number of celestial phenomena. Book II has received little attention from historians or educators because it does not play a major role in Newton's argument. However, it is in Book II that we see most clearly Newton both as a theoretician and an…

Research has found that children possess a broad bias in favor of teleological--or purpose-based--explanations of natural phenomena. The current two experiments explored whether adults implicitly possess a similar bias. In Study 1, undergraduates judged a series of statements as "good" (i.e., correct) or "bad" (i.e., incorrect) explanations for…

Four experiments familiarized 6-, 9-, 12-, and 16-month-old infants to a solid block that was repeatedly lowered into a semitransparent container. In test trials the end state, containment, was either compatible or incompatible with the objects' size and position. In Experiment 1, infants saw the block and box successively before they observed the…

When observers try to identify successive targets in a visual stream at a rate of 100 ms per item, accuracy for the 2nd target is impaired for intertarget lags of 100-500 ms. Yet, when the same stream is presented more rapidly (e.g., 50 ms per item), this pattern reverses and a 1st-target deficit is obtained. M. C. Potter, A. Staub, and D. H.…

Recognition without identification (RWI) is a common day-to-day experience (as when recognizing a face or a tune as familiar without being able to identify the person or the song). It is also a well-established laboratory-based empirical phenomenon: When identification of recognition test items is prevented, participants can discriminate between…

In the interest of improving their decision making, individuals revise their opinions on the basis of samples of opinions obtained from others. However, such a revision process may lead decision makers to experience greater confidence in their less accurate judgments. The authors theorize that people tend to underestimate the informative value of…

Five experiments investigated whether observer locomotion provides specialized information facilitating novel-view scene recognition. Participants detected a position change after briefly viewing a desktop scene when the table stayed stationary or was rotated and when the observer stayed stationary or locomoted. The results showed that 49[degrees]…

Nearly every memory retrieval episode ends with a decision to terminate memory search. Yet, no research has investigated whether these search termination decisions are systematic, let alone whether they are made consistent with a particular rule. In the present paper, we used a modified free-recall paradigm to examine the decision to terminate…

Two studies examined whether nonreinforcement of a stimulus in multiple contexts, instead of a single context, would decrease renewal of conditioned fear in rats (as assessed by conditioned suppression of lever pressing). In Experiment 1, renewal was measured after 36 nonreinforced CS trials delivered during six extinction sessions in a single…

Several recent studies report that neurotransmitters that are critically involved in extinction in adult rats are not important for extinction in young rats. Specifically, pretest injection of the [gamma]-aminobutryic acid (GABA) receptor inverse agonist FG7142 has no effect on extinction in postnatal day (P)17 rats, although it reverses…

An influential theory posits that the syntactic properties of idioms are idiosyncratic and encoded in the mental lexicon in "superlemmas". It follows that experience with an idiom is necessary in order to judge the acceptability of syntactic operations on that idiom. To test these claims, Experiment 1 explored the acceptability of sentences…

We argue that the semantic analysis of task-irrelevant stimuli is modulated by feature-specific attention allocation. In line with this hypothesis, we found semantic priming of pronunciation responses to depend upon the extent to which participants focused their attention upon specific semantic stimulus dimensions. In Experiment 1, we examined the…

When readers experience narratives they often encounter small mysteries--questions that a text raises that are not immediately settled. In our experiments, participants read stories that introduced characters by proper names (e.g., "It's just that Brandon hasn't called in so long"). "Resolved" versions of the stories specified the functions those…

Human observers are able to rapidly and accurately categorize natural scenes, but the representation mediating this feat is still unknown. Here we propose a framework of rapid scene categorization that does not segment a scene into objects and instead uses a vocabulary of global, ecological properties that describe spatial and functional aspects…