The ability to shield against distraction while focusing on a task requires the operation of executive functions and is essential for successful learning. We investigated the short-term dynamics of distraction control in a data set of 269 children aged 4-10 years and 51 adults pooled from three studies using multilevel models. Participants…

Previous studies found an impact of language familiarity on face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. Own race faces are better recognized when associated with native language, whereas for other race faces, it is with non-native language. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern…

This study compared the effects of listener training and tact training on the emergence of intraverbal responses in the form of foreign language equivalents of the native language. The study was based on Skinner's verbal operants with a focus on intraverbal responses. All participants received listener training and tact training after which a…

Since birth, infants develop the ability to perceive a wide range of intersensory relations among various kinds of amodal temporal information. This study addresses the development of the ability to perceive duration-based intersensory relations. Three groups of infants, four, seven and 10 months old, participated in two trials of an intersensory…

The purpose of this study was to investigate sub-lexical segmentation in Spanish-speaking children based on the perception of regular syllables (pseudomorphemes), as well as their association with a visual referent. Both of these skills are the precursors to learning morphology for language acquisition. Twenty-three 12-month-old children…

When Virtual Reality (VR) is used to present learning content, the three-dimensional image is often not sufficient and additional text is required, either in the form of visual or auditory text. Such additional instructional text could be particularly beneficial due to the many visual stimuli and the risk of visual working memory overload.…

The present study sought to evaluate trial designs and training designs that are commonly used in popular commercially available computer-assisted language-learning (CALL) programs. The first two experiments (Experiment 1a and 1b) compared the effects of passive viewing and active student response methods in vocabulary learning. Contingencies on…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

The same-different task is a classic paradigm that requires participants to judge whether two successively presented stimuli are the same or different. While this task is simple, with results that have been replicated many times, response times (RTs) and accuracy for both same and different decisions remain difficult to model. The biggest obstacle…

Little is explored regarding the modality-specific differences in recall abilities of preschool children. Understanding modality-specific differences in the recall at an early age might give an insight into age-linked trends, which can lay a foundation for later development. The current study used a cross-sectional design to investigate the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether a new oculomotor serial reaction time (RT) task revealed statistical sequence learning in young children. Method: We used eye tracking to measure typically developing children's oculomotor RTs in response to cartoon-like creatures that appeared successively in quadrants of a monitor…

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and…

This study investigated the role of contextual and prosodic information in turn-end estimation by means of a button-press task. We presented participants with turns extracted from a corpus of telephone calls visually (i.e., in transcribed form, word-by-word) and auditorily, and asked them to anticipate turn ends by pressing a button. The…

Category learning is fundamental to cognition, but little is known about how it proceeds in real-world environments when learners do not have instructions to search for category-relevant information, do not make overt category decisions, and do not experience direct feedback. Prior research demonstrates that listeners can acquire task-irrelevant…

People's everyday lives offer plenty of situations where complex processing of information takes place, in which information needs to transfer across modalities to achieve a behavioral goal. The study examined the differential effects on object detection by a visual, verbal, or auditory cue held in working memory (WM), and the role of concurrent…