Three experiments are reported that investigate the extent to which an authority figure influences the level of persuasion undergraduate students and research-active mathematicians invest in mathematical arguments. We demonstrate that, in some situations, both students and researchers rate arguments as being more persuasive when they are…

Associations between corresponding stimulus-response locations are often characterized as over learned, producing automatic activation. However, 84 practice trials with an incompatible mapping eliminate the benefit for spatial correspondence in a transfer Simon task, where stimulus location is irrelevant. The authors examined whether transfer…

Discrimination and recognition are often poorer for other-race than own-race faces. These other-race effects (OREs) have traditionally been attributed to reduced perceptual expertise, resulting from more limited experience, with other-race faces. However, recent findings suggest that sociocognitive factors, such as reduced motivation to…

Early olfactory identification deficits have been associated with neurodevelopmental arrest of limbic-prefrontal networks. These same networks are implicated in development of autistic-spectrum disorders. We aimed to investigate olfactory identification ability in children with high functioning autism (HFA). Fifteen children with HFA (aged 5-9…

A testing effect occurs when a learner performs better on a retention test after studying the material and taking a practice-retention test than after studying the material twice. In the present study, 282 participants watched a narrated animation about lightning formation and then watched the presentation again (restudy), took a…

Intermolecular forces and surface tension gradients in solutions lead to remarkable flows, known as Marangoni flows, where liquid flows from a region of low surface tension towards higher surface tension. Details of these flows, not visible to the naked eye, are made visible on an overhead projector owing to variation in the index of refraction.…

Humans have an extremely flexible ability to categorize regularities in their environment, in part because of attentional systems that allow them to focus on important perceptual information. In formal theories of categorization, attention is typically modeled with weights that selectively bias the processing of stimulus features. These theories…

The authors examined priming within the test sequence in 3 recognition memory experiments. A probe primed its successor whenever both probes shared a feature with the same studied item ("interjacent priming"), indicating that the study item like the probe is central to the decision. Interjacent priming occurred even when the 2 probes did…

The type of visual information needed for categorizing faces and nonface objects was investigated by manipulating spatial frequency scales available in the image during a category verification task addressing basic and subordinate levels. Spatial filtering had opposite effects on faces and airplanes that were modulated by categorization level. The…

We investigated the roles of top-down task set and bottom-up stimulus salience for feature-specific attentional capture. Spatially nonpredictive cues preceded search arrays that included a color-defined target. For target-color singleton cues, behavioral spatial cueing effects were accompanied by cue-induced N2pc components, indicative of…

The present study investigated the existence of a Japanese mental syllabary and units stored therein for speech production. Experiment 1 compared naming latencies between high and low initial mora frequencies using CVCVCV nonwords, indicating that nonwords with a high initial mora frequency were named faster than those with a low frequency initial…

Young and nondemented older adults were tested on a continuous recognition memory task requiring visual pattern separation. During the task, some objects were repeated across trials and some objects, referred to as lures, were presented that were similar to previously presented objects. The lures resulted in increased interference and an increased…

Can readers exert control (albeit unconsciously) over activation at particular loci in the reading system? The authors addressed this issue in 4 experiments in which participants read target words aloud and the factors of prime-target relation (semantic, repetition), context (related, unrelated), stimulus quality (bright, dim), and relatedness…

The information that individuals can hold in working memory is quite limited, but researchers have typically studied this capacity using simple objects or letter strings with no associations between them. However, in the real world there are strong associations and regularities in the input. In an information theoretic sense, regularities…

This paper presents an assessment of how students perceive a typical classroom representation of center-of-mass. Participants were shown figures consisting of two filled black circles; they were told that these figures represented spheres or balls. They were then asked to indicate with a mark the point where the spheres would balance, i. e., they…