Contrary to the received view that reading aloud reflects processes that are "automatic," recent evidence suggests that some of these processes require a form of attention. This issue was investigated further by examining the effect of a prior presentation of exception words (words whose spelling-sound translation are atypical, such as pint as…

Although it is intuitive that familiarity with complex visual objects should aid their preservation in visual working memory (WM), empirical evidence for this is lacking. This study used a conventional change-detection procedure to assess visual WM for unfamiliar and famous faces in healthy adults. Across experiments, faces were upright or…

The effects of moving task-irrelevant objects on time-to-contact (TTC) judgments were examined in 5 experiments. Observers viewed a directly approaching target in the presence of a distractor object moving in parallel with the target. In Experiments 1 to 4, observers decided whether the target would have collided with them earlier or later than a…

The grouping of list items is known to improve serial memory accuracy and constrain the nature of temporal errors. A recent study (M. T. Maybery, F. B. R. Parmentier, & D. M. Jones, 2002) showed that grouping results in a temporal organization of the participants' responses that mimics the list structure but not the timing of its presentation.…

A pervasive hypothesis in the timing literature is that temporal processing in the milliseconds and seconds range engages the basal ganglia and is modulated by dopamine. This hypothesis was investigated by testing 12 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), both "on" and "off" dopaminergic medication, and 20 healthy controls on three timing tasks.…

Research on incidental sequence learning typically is concerned with the characteristics of implicit or nonconscious learning. In this article, the authors aim to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms that contribute to the generation of explicit, reportable sequence knowledge. According to the unexpected-event hypothesis (P. A. Frensch, H. Haider,…

The study aims to investigate the influence of inhibitory performance, response speed, intraindividual variability and response accuracy in distinguishing children from those with Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity (ADHD) syndrome from normal healthy children. The results conclude that there exist large number of differences in the symptoms between…

This study compares the performances of students with typical hearing, students who are deaf and hard of hearing, students with typical hearing who were low-achieving, and students with typical hearing who were institutionally raised by testing with a newly constructed tool of metacognition that also measured reaction time. Results revealed no…

J. S. Adelman and G. D. A. Brown (2008) provided an extensive analysis of the form of word frequency and contextual diversity effects on lexical decision time. In this reply, the current authors suggest that their analysis provides a valuable tool for the evaluation of models of lexical access and that the results they report are broadly…

The study explores whether the naive concepts of "solid" and "liquid" persist in adolescence. Accuracy of responses and reaction times where measured while 41 ninth graders classified different solids (rigid, non-rigid and powders) and different liquids (runny, dense) into solid or liquid. The results show that these naive conceptions affect…

There are numerous reports in the visual word recognition literature that the joint effects of various factors are additive on reaction time. A central claim by D. C. Plaut and J. R. Booth (2000, 2006) is that their parallel distributed processing model simulates additive effects of stimulus quality and word frequency in the context of lexical…

The purpose of this study was to use the picture format to examine in depth the metacognitive performances and reaction time in general education, low-achieving, and institutionally raised students. Results revealed that institutionally raised students, unlike low-achieving students, took significantly the longest reaction time to finish the test…

The present study examined the degree to which slot machine near-miss trials, or trials that displayed 2 of 3 winning symbols on the payoff line, affected response times and win estimations of 12 recreational slot machine players. Participants played a commercial slot machine in a casino-like laboratory for course extra-credit points. Videotaped…

Reaction times are usually faster when stimulus and response occur at the same location than when they do not, even if stimulus location is irrelevant to the task (Simon effect). This effect was found with both horizontal and vertical stimulus-response arrangements. The same mechanisms have been proposed to be involved in either case. Here, we…

The stop-signal task has been used to study normal cognitive control and clinical dysfunction. Its utility is derived from a race model that accounts for performance and provides an estimate of the time it takes to stop a movement. This model posits a race between go and stop processes with stochastically independent finish times. However,…