Dynamic Visual Acuity (DVA) can be measured from two types of equivalently considered movement referred to as drifting-motion and displacement-motion. Displacement motion can be best described as the horizontal displacement of a stimulus, thus implying pursuit eye movements, and involves moving the stimulus from the fixation point of gaze towards…

In tone languages, the identity of a word depends on its tone pattern as well as its phonetic structure. The primary cue to tone identity is the fundamental frequency (F0) contour. Two experiments explore how listeners perceive Mandarin monosyllables in which all or part of the F0 information has been neutralized. In Experiment 1, supposedly…

Operant and classical conditioning are major processes shaping behavioral responses in all animals. Although the understanding of the mechanisms of classical conditioning has expanded significantly, the understanding of the mechanisms of operant conditioning is more limited. Recent developments in "Aplysia" are helping to narrow the gap in the…

Research in diachronic linguistics has shown that homonyms are often dispreferred in language. This study proposes that this trend is mirrored in the difficulties that children encounter in mapping homonyms. Two experiments are presented in support of this proposition. In Experiment 1, 16 preschool children (mean age = 4;6) are shown to perform…

Forty Polish children aged between 1;8 and 2;3 were trained over two training sessions in the comprehension of the preposition POD [UNDER]. In the experiment, two variables were manipulated: a within subjects variable of SITUATION and a between subjects variable of LINGUISTIC INPUT. The effect of situation could be found in all trained groups,…

There is often strong interference if a second target stimulus (T2) is presented before processing of a prior target stimulus (T1) is complete. In the "Psychological Refractory Period" (PRP) paradigm, responses are speeded and interference manifests as increased response time for T2. In the "Attentional Blink" (AB) paradigm, stimuli are masked and…

Two experiments tested the ability of 4- and 8-year-old children to encode the extent of a target dowel and later discriminate between the target and a foil having a novel extent. By manipulating the heights of containers in which we presented the stimuli we tested whether children used the relation between the dowels and containers for encoding…

Many recent studies have explored young children's ability to use information from physical representations of space to guide search within the real world. In one commonly used procedure, children are asked to find a hidden toy in a room after observing a smaller toy being hidden in the analogous location in a scale model of the room.…

Two-year-olds' appreciation of the shared nature of object labels versus object preferences was examined in 2 studies. A total of 128 24- to 27-month-olds played a finding game with an experimenter during which they were taught a piece of information about a target object in a nonostensive learning context. In Experiment 1, children were presented…

This study explores how infants encode an object's spatial extent. We habituated 6.5-month-old infants to a dowel inside a container and then tested whether they dishabituate to a change in absolute size when the relation between dowel and container is held constant (by altering the size of both container and dowel) and when the relation changes…

The effect of element density on selective orienting was examined in 2 experiments with 2- and 4.5-month-old infants. Selective visual orienting to a singleton oscillating target that appeared with other static bars was used to study the effects of element density. Increasing the set size and density of the static bars decreased selective…

A classic observation in neurology is that aphasics can sing words they cannot pronounce otherwise. To further assess this claim, we investigated the production of sung and spoken utterances in eight brain-damaged patients suffering from a variety of speech disorders as a consequence of a left-hemisphere lesion. In Experiment 1, the patients were…

An electrochemical synthesis of copper(II) carboxylates has been developed and used in the general chemistry laboratory course for chemistry majors. This synthesis, using nonaqueous solutions, supplements the strategy of providing experiences in synthetic chemistry described by Yoder et al. ("J. Chem. Educ." 1995, 72, 267). (Contains 1 table.)

Predictions derived from the interactive activation (IA) model were tested in 3 experiments using the masked priming technique in the lexical decision task. Experiment 1 showed a strong effect of prime lexicality: Classifications of target words were facilitated by orthographically related nonword primes (relative to unrelated nonword primes) but…

This paper traces the sophisticated negotiations to re-inscribe the authority of Nature when a school science experiment fails during the enactment of a highly rated science curriculum unit. Drawing on transcriptions from classroom videotapes, we identify and describe four primary patterns of interaction that characterize this process, arguing…