Adults commonly conceptualize intentional harms as worse than accidental harms. We probed the developmental trajectory of this pattern and asked whether U.S. children (4 - to 7-year-olds) and adults expected other agents -- including another person and God -- to share their views. In contrast with some prior work, even the youngest children in the…

Sensory processing differences measured by self- or parent-report co-segregate with quantitative autistic traits and have potential endophenotypic properties. It is not known to what extent this reflects generalized sensory dysfunction versus more specific associations involving individual senses or autistic trait domains. We combined Bayesian…

We examined whether attained socioeconomic status (SES) moderated genetic and environmental sources of individual differences in cognitive performance using pooled data from 9 adult twin studies. Prior work concerning SES moderation of cognitive performance has focused on rearing SES. The current adult sample of 12,196 individuals (aged 27-98…

We examined the hypothesis that interpolated testing in a multiple list paradigm protects against proactive interference by sustaining test expectancy during encoding. In both experiments, recall on the last of 5 word lists was compared between 4 conditions: a tested group who had taken tests on all previous lists, an untested group who had not…

Employing the complex adaptive systems (CAS) model, the present case study provides a self-report description of the attitudes, perceptions and experiences of an advanced adult L2 English learner with respect to his L2 phonological attainment. CAS is predicated on the notion that an individual's cognitive processes are intricately related to his…

The authors examined the evolution of cognitive and emotional responses to terror risks for a nationally representative sample of Americans between late 2001 and late 2002. Respondents' risk judgments changed in ways consistent with their reported personal experiences. However, they did not recognize these changes, producing hindsight bias in…

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the link between age and proficiency in information-processing skills, based on information drawn from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The data reveal significant age-related differences in proficiencies, strongly suggesting that proficiency tends to "naturally" decline with age. Age…

It is well known that languages differ in how they encode motion. Languages such as English use verbs that communicate the manner of motion (e.g., "slide", "skip"), while languages such as Greek regularly encode motion paths in verbs (e.g., "enter", "ascend"). Here we ask how such cross-linguistic encoding…

Motor vehicle accidents (MVAs) are fairly common occurrences in all developed countries. Although only a small percentage of total MVAs result in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the high base rate in the population has resulted in the estimation that MVAs are the leading cause of PTSD in the United States. Occupations that require…

This study demonstrates that experience and development interact to influence the ''cross-race effect.'' In a multination study (n=245), Caucasian children and adults of European ancestry living in the United States, Norway, or South Africa, as well as biracial (Caucasian-African American) children and adults living in the United States, were…

Three experiments conducted with normal adults in both Israel and the United States show that the answers people give to questions vary with the category of the target and its distance. (FL)

The Piagetian perspective of adult cognitive development and adult education could have implications for how work and formal reasoning can be related to adult education programs and policy. During adolescence and adulthood, many individuals enter the cognitive period of formal operations (the last of three stages in Piaget's conceptual framework…

Noting that register and cohesion are two concepts that define a text, this paper describes register as the variety of language that is appropriate for the situation of the speech event and cohesion as the semantic relations in a text that make it coherent. The first part of the paper discusses three cross-cultural studies of comprehension…

Three experiments focused on the function relating children's response time to adults' response time in corresponding conditions. In all experiments, children's response times increased in a linear manner as a function of adults' response times. (BB)

The effect of cultural background knowledge on comprehension and on the language of recall was investigated using an oral presentation. Fifteen Aboriginal women in northern Australia and 15 American women in an adult education class in Illinois were matched in age and educational level. Two stories were read aloud to the subjects, each based on…