Successful action anticipation in dynamic social environments, such as sports, requires the integration of prior expectations with observed kinematic cues. However, little is known about how temporal constraints modulate this integration process. In this EEG study, thirty-five expert basketball players completed a sport-specific prediction task in…

Syntactic movement is central to mainstream generative theories of syntax (Chomsky, 1957; 1981; 1995; 2001). Under this view, sentences contain words that have moved and words that have not. Children only ever hear words in their moved positions so it is unclear how they could determine the ways these constituents must be merged and moved from…

Objective: Self-reported memory difficulties are common among older adults, but few studies have examined memory problems among autistic middle-aged and older people. The current study examines self-rated prospective (PM) and retrospective (RM) memory difficulties and their associations with age in middle-aged and older autistic and non-autistic…

Holding conversations about setting, character, and plot are important conversations in a book club, but just as important are conversations about book features. This classroom practice article describes our experience teaching about peritextual features during a book club with children with learning difficulties.

Recent studies have established that even preverbal infants can monitor and regulate their mental states, raising the question of the variables involved in this early metacognitive development. Here, the metacognition of fifty-five 18-month-old (27 females; mostly White; data collection: 2023) was assessed using an eye-tracking paradigm designed…

Sleep is instrumental in the formation of long-lasting memories, including social evaluations and social knowledge. The modification of social evaluations holds profound significance for understanding and shaping societal dynamics. Here, we investigated how sleep could contribute to updating the social evaluation of a person generally perceived as…

Mandarin is a tone language that is spoken by billions of people in the world. Despite huge demand, there is a lack of assessment and treatment tools targeting Mandarin speakers with communication disorders. To better understand the speech profile of Mandarin speakers with communication disorders, this dissertation first examined contrastive…

There is growing consensus that selection history strongly guides spatial attention and is distinct from current goals and physical salience. Here, we focused on target-location probability cueing: when the target is more likely to appear in one region, search performance gradually improves for targets appearing in that region. Probability cueing…

When memories are reactivated during sleep, they are potentially transformed and strengthened. However, disturbed sleep may make this process ineffective. In a prior study, memories formed shortly before sleep were weakened by auditory stimulation when that stimulation provoked memory reactivation while also disrupting sleep -- a procedure known…

Social learning is a fundamental mechanism for efficiently transferring and coordinating norms, skills, and sophisticated cultural information to individuals. However, the psychological mechanisms underlying social learning remain unclear. To investigate this, we recruited adult participants (N = 103), who observed a model's performance in a…

The improvements in attention by mindfulness training have been proved. However, the effects of mindfulness training on attention to emotional stimuli were mixed. We employed a randomized, controlled design to investigate the effects of mindfulness training on attention to emotional expressions, and investigated whether baseline levels of…

Attention allows us to focus on relevant information while ignoring distractions. Effective suppression of distracting information is crucial for efficient visual search. Recent studies have developed two paradigms to investigate attentional suppression: cued-suppression which is based on top-down control, and learned-suppression which is based on…

Motivational (i.e., appetitive or aversive) cues can bias value-based decisions by affecting either direction and intensity of instrumental actions. Despite several findings describing important interindividual differences in these biases, whether biological sex can also play a role is still up to debate. By comparing females and males in both…

This dissertation examines the associations between pragmatic meaning categories in English and specific realizations of prosodic prominence. It has been well-established that in Mainstream American English (MAE), prominence is often used to convey contrast. A more limited set of studies suggests that prosodic prominence may also be capable of…

This paper undertakes a thorough evaluation of ChatGPT's code generation capabilities, contrasting them with those of human programmers from both educational and software engineering standpoints. The emphasis is placed on elucidating its importance in these intertwined domains. To facilitate a robust analysis, we curated a novel dataset comprising…