Behavioral and neuroimaging findings indicate that distinct cognitive and neural processes underlie solving problems with sudden insight. Moreover, people with less focused attention sometimes perform better on tests of insight and creative problem solving. However, it remains unclear whether different states of attention, within individuals,…

In a variety of conflict paradigms, target and distractor stimuli are defined in terms of perceptual features. Interference evoked by distractor stimuli tends to be reduced when the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials is decreased, suggesting conflict-induced perceptual filtering (i.e., adjusting the processing weights assigned to stimuli…

Reaction time (RT), thought to be important for acquiring a full understanding of the establishment of equivalence classes, has been reported in a number of studies within the area of stimulus equivalence research. In this study, we trained 3 classes of potentially 3 members, with arbitrary stimuli in a one-to-many training structure in 5 adult…

According to the body-specificity hypothesis, people associate positive things with the side of space that corresponds to their dominant hand and negative things with the side corresponding to their nondominant hand. Our aim was to find out whether this association holds also true for a response time study using linguistic stimuli, and whether…

Previous research has shown that words presented on metaphor congruent locations (e.g., positive words "up" on the screen and negative words "down" on the screen) are categorized faster than words presented on metaphor incongruent locations (e.g., positive words "down" and negative words "up"). These…

Automatic imitation--the unintended copying of observed actions--is thought to be a behavioral product of the mirror neuron system (MNS). Evidence that the MNS develops through associative learning comes from previous research showing that automatic imitation is attenuated by countermirror training, in which the observation of one action is paired…

The current study focuses on the relationship between alerting and executive attention. Previous studies reported an increased flanker congruency effect following alerting cues. In the first two experiments, we found that the alertness-congruency interaction did not exist for all executive tasks (it appeared for a flanker task but not for a Stroop…

This study investigates the development of plural adjective agreement in Hebrew, focusing on the consolidation of Hebrew number/gender morphology in children and adolescents across the school years in comparison with adults. A total of 240 Hebrew-speaking participants in seven consecutive grade levels (kindergarten to sixth grade) plus a group of…

Children (n = 130; M[subscript age] = 8.51-15.68 years) and college-aged adults (n = 72; M[subscript age] = 20.50 years) completed numerosity discrimination and lexical decision tasks. Children produced longer response times (RTs) than adults. R. Ratcliff's (1978) diffusion model, which divides processing into components (e.g., quality of…

We investigated the presence and the characteristics of the Simon effect for onset and offset targets when these stimuli are randomly intermixed. In Experiment 1, two possible target locations were occupied by an occluder. On onset trials, a target appeared above an occluder, while on offset trials one of the occluders disappeared, revealing the…

People seem to differ in their conditionability, that is, the ease by which fear associations (neutral stimulus-unconditioned stimulus [CS-US] contingencies) are learned. Recently, the level of trait worry has been proposed as a predictor of heightened conditionability. The current research aimed to (a) further investigate this influence of…

Recent evidence suggests that people are highly efficient at detecting conflicting outputs produced by competing intuitive and analytic reasoning processes. Specifically, De Neys and Glumicic (2008) demonstrated that participants reason longer about problems that are characterized by conflict (as opposed to agreement) between stereotypical…

Purpose: According to the "procedural deficit hypothesis" (PDH), difficulties in the procedural learning (PL) system may contribute to the language difficulties observed in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Fifteen children with SLI and their typically developing (TD) peers were compared on visual PL…

With English-language readers in an experiment requiring pairwise comparative judgments of the sizes of animals, the nature of the association between the magnitudes of the animal pairs and the left or right sides of response (i.e., the SNARC effect) was reversed depending on whether the participants had to choose either the smaller or the larger…

This study reports on the pattern of performance on spoken and written naming, spelling to dictation, and oral reading of single verbs and nouns in a bilingual speaker with aphasia in two first languages that differ in morphological complexity, orthographic transparency, and script: Greek (L1a) and English (L1b). The results reveal no verb/noun…