Research on sequence effects on learning "visual" categories has shown that interleaving (i.e., studying the categories in a mixed manner) facilitates category induction as compared to blocking (i.e., studying the categories one by one), but learners are unaware of the interleaving effect and prefer blocking. However, little attention…

In the current research, we aimed to investigate whether there are significant differences in participants' attitudes towards adults with disabilities (AWD) and children with disabilities (CWD). We also explored a series of demographical factors (i.e. gender, age, educational level, parental status, contact with a friend or a family member with a…

Top performers create stage magic through their command of nonverbal communication. While students aspire to the highest levels of performance, they may be unprepared for the intricacies of professional stagecraft. This study trials an experiential learning workshop about optimising nonverbal communication on the concert stage. Five emerging music…

Enabled by technological innovations and evolving theories of cognition, embodied learning designs have proliferated over the last few decades. Collaborative tasks in particular offer rich learning opportunities as learners overtly coordinate and negotiate their work. However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which social relationships…

Listeners have been shown to judge second language (L2) users more negatively than L1 speakers on measures of language proficiency and even on personal qualities. However, less is known about what factors affect listener judgment which this study seeks to explore. In the study, one first language (L1) English speaker recorded her spontaneous…

These studies investigate the influence of adults' explicit attention to commonalities of appearance on children's preference for individuals resembling themselves. Three findings emerged: (1) An adult's identification of two dolls' respective similarity to and difference from the child led 3-year-olds to prefer the similar doll (study 1, n = 32).…

How do people learn about things that they have never perceived or inferred--like molecules, miracles or Marie-Antoinette? For many thinkers, trust is the answer. Humans rely on communicated information, sometimes even when it contradicts blatantly their firsthand experience. We investigate the early ontogeny of this trust using a non-verbal…

Humans excel in familiar face recognition, but often find it hard to make identity judgements of unfamiliar faces. Understanding of the factors underlying the substantial benefits of familiarity is at present limited, but the effect is sometimes qualified by the way in which a face is known--for example, personal acquaintance sometimes gives rise…

This work categorizes Japanese Sign Language (JSL) toponyms, or place names, and examines factors that potentially affect their structure. Exonyms, influenced by the source Japanese name, and endonyms, independent JSL names, contrast structurally in that exonyms tend to emerge as compounds while endonyms conform more closely to canonical…

Around the world, musical engagement frequently involves movement. Most adults easily clap or sway to a wide range of tempos, even without formal musical training. The link between movement and music emerges early--young infants move more rhythmically to music than speech, but do not reliably align their movements to the beat. Laboratory work…

Previous research has shown that even when famous people's identities cannot be discerned from faces that have been filtered with monochromatic noise, these unidentifiable famous faces still tend to receive higher familiarity ratings than similarly filtered non-famous faces. Experiment 1 investigated whether a similar face recognition without…

We propose a working definition of creative experience that involves principled engagement with the unfamiliar and a willingness to approach the familiar in unfamiliar ways. In other words, a creative experience can be defined as novel person world encounters grounded in meaningful actions and interactions, which are marked by the principles of:…

Purpose: Perceptual training paradigms, which leverage the mechanism of perceptual learning, show that naïve listeners, those with no prior experience with dysarthria, benefit from explicit familiarization with a talker with dysarthria. It is theorized that familiarization affords listeners an opportunity to acquire distributional knowledge of the…

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth (IOED) occurs when people overestimate their ability to explain the causal mechanisms of natural or social processes. Prior research has attributed this metacognitive bias to confounding the understanding of abstract causal patterns with the comprehension of domain-specific mechanisms. However, this explanation…

The frequency and length of games, conflicts, and contingency sequences that took place between toddlers as they got to know one another were studied using archival data. The sample consisted of 28 unfamiliar 20- and 30-month-old toddlers (predominantly White, 16 males) who met separately with each of two other toddlers for 18 play dates. The…