Twenty-four adults (aged 19-35) and 27 adolescents (aged 13-14) played as "Trustee" in an iterated Trust Game against a pre-programmed set of "Investor" moves, said to belong to an unknown co-player. Trustee behaviour was examined first in response to normative Investor cooperation, and then in response to a period of social rupture caused by…

Most everyday tasks involve multiple modalities, which raises the question of how the processing of these modalities is coordinated by the cognitive system. In this paper, we focus on the coordination of visual attention and linguistic processing during speaking. Previous research has shown that objects in a visual scene are fixated before they…

Latent class regression models relate covariates and latent constructs such as psychiatric disorders. Though full maximum likelihood estimation is available, estimation is often in three steps: (i) a latent class model is fitted without covariates; (ii) latent class scores are predicted; and (iii) the scores are regressed on covariates. We propose…

Same-race (SR) faces are recognized better than other-race (OR) faces, and this other-race effect (ORE) is correlated with experience. SR faces are also processed more holistically than OR faces, suggesting one possible mechanism for poorer performance on OR faces. Studies of object expertise have shown that individuating experiences are necessary…

Speech recognition is an active process that involves some form of predictive coding. This statement is relatively uncontroversial. What is less clear is the source of the prediction. The dual-stream model of speech processing suggests that there are two possible sources of predictive coding in speech perception: the motor speech system and the…

Understanding energy usage is crucial to understanding modern civilization, as well as many of the challenges it faces. Energy-related issues also offer real-world examples of important physical concepts, and as such have been the focus of several articles in "The Physics Teacher" in the past few decades (e.g., Refs. 1-5, noted further below).…

Previous studies have indicated cross cultural differences in conscious processes, such that Asians have a global preference and Westerners a more analytical one. We investigated whether these biases also apply to unconscious knowledge. In Experiment 1, Japanese and UK participants memorized strings of large (global) letters made out of small…

Despite growing evidence of young adults neurally pre-activating word features during sentence comprehension, less clear is the degree to which this generalizes to older adults. Using ERPs, we tested for linguistic prediction in younger and older readers by means of indefinite articles (a's and an's) preceding more and less probable noun…

We tested two explanations for why the slope of the z-transformed receiver operating characteristic (zROC) is less than 1 in recognition memory: the unequal-variance account (target evidence is more variable than lure evidence) and the dual-process account (responding reflects both a continuous familiarity process and a threshold recollection…

The mental model theory postulates that the meanings of assertions, and knowledge about their context can "modulate" the logical meaning of sentential connectives, such as "if" and "or". One known effect of modulation is to block the representation of possibilities to which a proposition refers. But, modulation should also add relational…

This paper defines the terms "hypothesis," "prediction," and "conclusion" and shows how to use the terms correctly in scientific investigations in both the school and science education research contexts. The scientific method, or hypothetico-deductive (HD) approach, is described and it is argued that an understanding of the scientific method,…

The purpose of this study was to consider the relationships of prediction, measurement, and scaling invariance when these invariances were simultaneously evaluated in psychometric test data. An approach was developed to evaluate prediction, measurement, and scaling invariance based on linear and nonlinear prediction, measurement, and scaling…

Despite decades of research, the prediction of suicidal behavior remains limited. As a result, searching for more specific risk factors and testing their predictive power are central in suicidology. This strategy may be of limited value because it assumes linearity to the suicidal process that is most likely nonlinear by nature and which can be…

Generics are statements such as "tigers are striped" and "ducks lay eggs". They express general, though not universal or exceptionless, claims about kinds (Carlson & Pelletier, 1995). For example, the generic "ducks lay eggs" seems true even though many ducks (e.g. the males) do not lay eggs. The universally quantified version of the statement…

Predicting the near future is important for survival and plays a central role in theories of perception, language processing, and learning. Prediction failures may be particularly important for initiating the updating of perceptual and memory systems and, thus, for the subjective experience of events. Here, we asked observers to make predictions…