Purpose: This study aimed to investigate challenges in speech-in-noise (SiN) processing faced by school-age children with autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) and their impact on listening effort. Method: Participants, including 23 Mandarin-speaking children with ASCs and 19 age-matched neurotypical (NT) peers, underwent sentence recognition tests in…

Though individual categorization or decision processes have been studied separately in many previous investigations, few studies have investigated how they interact by using a two-stage task of first categorizing and then deciding. To address this issue, we investigated a categorization-decision task in two experiments. In both, participants were…

The relation between perceptual and conceptual knowledge is a longstanding research question in developmental psychology. Here we tested children's dependence on figurative information with a reaction time/accuracy task. A sample of 151 children from 5 to 10 years were assessed from two multicultural and multiracial schools in the London (UK)…

While visual working memory has a short lifetime, residual representations can persist and disrupt currently maintained information. This phenomenon is known as proactive interference (PI), and the present study investigated whether the representations underpinning item-specific PI lose details over time. This would be expected if the memories…

Working memory has been shown to rely on theta oscillations' phase synchronicity for item encoding and recall. At the same time, saccadic eye movements during visual exploration have been observed to trigger theta-phase resets, raising the question of whether the neuronal substrates of mnemonic processing rely on motor-evoked responses. To…

Background: Circumscribed interests (CIs) are regarded as one of the common symptoms for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Although some studies have found attentional bias toward CI-related stimuli for individuals with ASD, few studies have directly explored the reasons for these findings. Method: Children with ASD (n = 15) and…

Increasing evidence has shown that implicit learning shapes visuospatial attention, yet how such learning interacts with top-down, goal-driven attention remains unclear. This study investigated the relationship between task goals and selection history using a location probability learning (LPL) paradigm. We tested whether a top-down spatial cue…

Research on working memory (WM) has followed two largely independent traditions: One concerned with memory for sequentially presented lists of discrete items, and the other with short-term maintenance of simultaneously presented arrays of objects with simple, continuously varying features. Here we present a formal model of WM, the interference…

Observers' memory for a person's appearance can be compromised by the presence of a weapon, a phenomenon known as the weapon-focus effect (WFE). According to the unusual-item hypothesis, attention shifts from the perpetrator to the weapon because a weapon is an unusual object in many contexts. To test this assumption, we monitored participants'…

Distraction embedded in working memory tasks leads to impaired performance. This impairment is mitigated when targets and distractors that follow them share common features--a signature effect of interference by superposition. Here we propose that target-distractor similarity modulates not only forgetting from working memory but also encoding into…

For nearly half a century now, Garner interference has been serving as the gold standard measure of dimensional interaction and selective attention. But the mechanisms that generate Garner interference are still not well understood. The current study proposes a novel theory that ascribes the interference (and dimensional interaction in general) to…

We report an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment that tests whether autistic adults are able to maintain and switch between counterfactual and factual worlds. Participants (N = 48) read scenarios that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, then either maintained the counterfactual world or switched back to the factual world. When…

Interruptions are already ubiquitous throughout society, and the attention-driven economy may be training us to constantly switch tasks and refocus our attention without ever lingering on one activity. Previous studies of interruptions during work have found many negative outcomes (e.g., more errors, higher workload, slower task time) and some…

Studies of reconsolidation interference posit that reactivation of a previously consolidated memory via a reminder brings it into an active, labile state, leaving it open for potential manipulation. If interfered with, this may disrupt the original memory trace. While evidence for pharmacological reconsolidation interference is widespread, it…

Functional fixedness involves difficulty with conceptualizing creative object uses. When it obstructs problem-solving, individuals must reframe their approach. We examined how different training techniques--chunk decomposition (i.e., considering an object's basic parts and physical properties) and constraint relaxation (i.e., considering an…