Categorical perception (CP) is a mechanism whereby non-identical stimuli that have the same underlying meaning become invariantly represented in the brain. Through behavioral identification and discrimination tasks, CP has been demonstrated to occur broadly across the auditory modality, including in perception of speech (e.g. phonemes) and music…

Education is an ever-changing field, yet constants remain: A teacher must be able to motivate students to become lifelong learners. Science has much to offer--the excitement that comes from discovery and learning can carry over into adulthood. Science provides an avenue for students to encounter phenomena in their environment and to discover…

Bilingual and monolingual children's (mean age = 4;10) elicited production of the past tense in both English and French was examined in order to test predictions from Usage-Based theory regarding the sensitivity of children's acquisition rates to input factors such as variation in exposure time and the type/token frequency of morphosyntactic…

In this paper, I discuss the current state of theorising about dual processes in adult performance on reasoning and decision making tasks, in which Type 1 intuitive processing is distinguished from Type 2 reflective thinking. I show that there are many types of theory some of which distinguish modes rather than types of thinking and that…

Responses to threat occur via two known independent processing routes. We propose that early, reflexive processing is predominantly tuned to the detection of congruent combinations of facial cues that signal threat, whereas later, reflective processing is predominantly tuned to incongruent combinations of threat. To test this prediction, we…

In 2 separate self-paced reading experiments, Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) found that the degree to which a word's phonology is typical of other words in its lexical category influences online processing of nouns and verbs in predictive contexts. Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009) failed to find an effect of phonological…

Previous research has illuminated an important connection between stereotypes and the performance of those targeted by a stereotype. This body of work suggests that even implicit (i.e., nonconscious and unintended) math-gender stereotyping is related to poor math performance among women. Our longitudinal study sought to measure students'…

In a sample of 466 Chinese high school students, we examined the relationships between Chinese high school students' stress in the school and their academic achievements. Regression mixture modelling identified two different classes of the effects of Chinese high school students' stress on their academic achievements. One class contained 87% of…

Four experiments explored the role of contexts in information retrieval after different levels of acquisition training in human predictive learning. Participants were trained where cue (X) was followed by an outcome in context A while a different cue (Y) was followed by the absence of the outcome in context B. When 4 training trials with each cue…

Most research on adult attachment is based on the assumption that working models are relatively general and trait-like. Recent research, however, suggests that people develop attachment representations that are relationship-specific, leading people to hold distinct working models in different relationships. The authors report a measure, the…

The purpose of this study is to examine whether learning a known-and-unknown word combination is superior in terms of retention and retrieval of meaning to learning a single unknown word. The term "combination" in this study means a two-word collocation of a familiar word and a word that is new to the participants. Following the results of…

Adolescents take more risks in the presence of their peers, but the mechanism through which peer presence affects risky decision-making is unknown. We propose that the presence of peers increases the salience of the immediate rewards of a risky choice. The current study examined the effect of peer presence on reward sensitivity in a sample of 100…

This study used a cross-lagged twin design to examine reading achievement and independent reading from 10 to 11 years (n = 436 twin pairs). Reading achievement at age 10 significantly predicted independent reading at age 11. The alternative path, from independent reading at age 10 to reading achievement at age 11, was not significant. Individual…

Response to Intervention (RTI) is at a beginning stage in the Saskatchewan province as well as in other parts of Canada. One needs only to enter RTI and the names of any of the Canadian provinces into any widely used search engine to see the marked difference in the availability of information about RTI when the Canadian provinces and individual…

Utility functions, which relate subjective value to physical attributes of experience, are fundamental to most decision theories. Seven experiments were conducted to test predictions of the most widely assumed mathematical forms of utility (power, log, and negative exponential), and a function proposed by Rachlin (1992). For pairs of gambles for…