Rule finding is an important aspect of human reasoning and flexibility. Previous studies associated rule finding "failure" with past experience with the test stimuli and stable personality traits. We additionally show that rule finding performance is severely impaired by a mindset associated with applying an instructed rule. The mindset was…

Tool making evidences intelligent, flexible thinking. In Experiment 1, we confirmed that 4- to 7-year-olds chose a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tube. In Experiment 2, 3- to 5-year-olds consistently failed to innovate a simple hook tool. Eight-year-olds performed at mature levels. In contrast, making a tool following demonstration was easy…

Human response time (RT) data are widely used in experimental psychology to evaluate theories of mental processing. Typically, the data constitute the times taken by a subject to react to a succession of stimuli under varying experimental conditions. Because of the sequential nature of the experiments there are trends (due to learning, fatigue,…

In tool use, a transformation rule defines the relation between an operating movement and its distal effect. This rule is determined by the tool structure and requires no explicit definition. The present study investigates how humans represent and apply compatible and incompatible transformation rules in tool use. In Experiment 1, participants had…

Several studies have demonstrated that as listeners hear sentences describing events in a scene, their eye movements anticipate upcoming linguistic items predicted by the unfolding relationship between scene and sentence. While this may reflect active prediction based on structural or contextual expectations, the influence of local thematic…

Three experiments examined testing effects on learning of natural concepts and metacognitive assessments of such learning. Results revealed that testing enhanced recognition memory and classification accuracy for studied and novel exemplars of bird families on immediate and delayed tests. These effects depended on the balance of study and test…

Sound sources are perceived by integrating information from multiple acoustical features. The factors influencing the integration of information are largely unknown. We measured how the perceptual weighting of different features varies with the accuracy of information and with a listener's ability to exploit it. Participants judged the hardness of…

Repeated retrieval enhances long-term retention, and spaced repetition also enhances retention. A question with practical and theoretical significance is whether there are particular schedules of spaced retrieval (e.g., gradually expanding the interval between tests) that produce the best learning. In the present experiment, subjects studied and…

One might assume that familiarity with a scene or previous encounters with objects embedded in a scene would benefit subsequent search for those items. However, in a series of experiments we show that this is not the case: When participants were asked to subsequently search for multiple objects in the same scene, search performance remained…

Color and intensity coding provide perceptual cues to segregate categories of objects within a visual display, allowing operators to search more efficiently for needed information. Even within a perceptually distinct subset of display elements, however, it may often be useful to prioritize items representing urgent or task-critical information.…

This study investigated the active inhibition of precued distractor locations. In this study, the distractor location was precued by an arrow. Experiment 1 indicated that a valid precue could facilitate target localization. Experiment 2 demonstrated that when conflict trials were included, the distractor precue benefit was eliminated. Experiment 3…

Default options exert an influence in areas as varied as retirement program design, organ donation policy, and consumer choice. Past research has offered potential reasons why no-action defaults matter: (a) effort, (b) implied endorsement, and (c) reference dependence. The first two of these explanations have been experimentally demonstrated, but…

Automated diagnostic aids prone to false alarms often produce poorer human performance in signal detection tasks than equally reliable miss-prone aids. However, it is not yet clear whether this is attributable to differences in the perceptual salience of the automated aids' misses and false alarms or is the result of inherent differences in…

Research has documented two effects of interfeature causal knowledge on classification. A "causal status effect" occurs when features that are causes are more important to category membership than their effects. A "coherence effect" occurs when combinations of features that are consistent with causal laws provide additional…

Difficult visual search is often attributed to time-limited serial attention operations, although neural computations in the early visual system are parallel. Using probabilistic search models (Dosher, Han, & Lu, 2004) and a full time-course analysis of the dynamics of covert visual search, we distinguish unlimited capacity parallel versus serial…