Probability matching is a suboptimal behavior that often plagues human decision-making in simple repeated choice tasks. Despite decades of research, recent studies cannot find agreement on what choice strategies lead to probability matching. We propose a solution, showing that two distinct local choice strategies--which make different demands on…

This study addressed the role of goal representation in preschoolers' inhibition and flexibility performance. A total of 56 4- and 5-year-olds were tested in an adapted version of the Shape School task where the difficulty of goal representation was manipulated by varying the degree of transparency of task cues. The findings showed that both age…

The goal of the presented experiments was to investigate the dynamic interplay of task shielding and its relaxation during task switching. Task shielding refers to the finding that single task sets in terms of 2-choice categorization rules help shielding against distraction from irrelevant stimulus attributes. During task switching, this shielding…

Drawing on various theoretical approaches to creativity and the emergentist perspectives, this study examines the opportunities for creative language use and emergence of complex language in creative writing tasks with high formal constraints (acrostics) and those with looser formal constraints (similes). It indicates that formal constraints lead…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the hemispheric effect of creative insight. This study used high-density ERPs to record participants' brain activity while they performed an insight task. Results showed that both insight solutions and incomprehension solutions elicited a more negative ERP deflection (N320~550) than noninsight solutions…

The author reprises "The Man in the Principal's Office," by Harry Wolcott (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973) to tell a story of how the principalship and thus principals have changed since the late 1960s, when the book closely examined day-to-day tasks of a principal. The differences are stark and many. Parent, community, and…

Research examining the importance of surface-level information to familiarity in recognition memory tasks is mixed: Sometimes it affects recognition and sometimes it does not. One potential explanation of the inconsistent findings comes from the ideas of dual process theory of recognition and the transfer-appropriate processing framework, which…

Background: Children at family risk of dyslexia have been reported to show phonological deficits as well as broader language delays in the preschool years. Method: The preschool language skills of 112 children at family risk of dyslexia (FR) at ages 3½ and 4½ were compared with those of children with SLI and typically developing (TD) controls.…

This study tested whether bilingual children show a lag in semantic development (the schematic-categorical shift) relative to monolingual children due to smaller vocabularies within a language. Twenty French-English bilingual and twenty English monolingual children (seven to ten years old) participated in a picture-naming task in English. Their…

Pienemann's Processability Theory (PT) predicts an order of emergence of morphosyntactic elements in second language (L2) production data. This research investigates whether the same order of emergence can be detected in L2 reception data, specifically, data from a timed audio grammaticality judgment task (GJT). The results from three related…

Warning others is a paradigm case of communicative helping and prospective action understanding. The current study addressed the ontogeny of warning in infants' gestural communication. We found that 12- and 18-month-olds ("n" = 84) spontaneously warned an adult by pointing out to her an aversive object hidden in her way…

The aim of this study is to analyse resilience displayed by young children in dyadic task performance situations. Data were collected by videotaping children (aged six to seven years; N?=?40) during a geometrical task performance. Results describe ways in which children confronted the challenges during task performance, and the order in which the…

This essay contributes to the research on the emergence of tense/aspect morphology by reviewing the results and task conditions of studies supporting either the Aspect Hypothesis (AH) or the Default Past Tense Hypothesis (DPTH) for second language (L2) learners of Spanish. The AH has found that past marking emerges based on inherent aspectual…

This study explores oscillatory brain activity by means of event-related synchronization and desynchronization (%ERS/ERD) of EEG activity during the use of phonological and orthographic-morphological spelling strategies in L2 (English) and L1 (German) in native German speaking children. EEG was recorded while 33 children worked on a task requiring…

Most of the mechanisms involved in neural plasticity support cognition, and aging has a considerable effect on some of these processes. The neural cell adhesion molecule (NCAM) of the immunoglobulin superfamily plays a pivotal role in structural and functional plasticity and is required to modulate cognitive and emotional behaviors. However,…