This experiment investigated whether individual differences in written language proficiency among university students predict the early stages of lexical retrieval tapped by the masked form priming lexical decision task. To separate the contributions of sublexical facilitation and lexical competition to masked form priming, the effects of prime…

Adults use eye contact as a cue to the mental and emotional states of others. Here, we examined developmental changes in the ability to discriminate between eye contact and averted gaze. Children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults (n=18/age) viewed photographs of a model fixating the center of a camera lens and a series of positions to the…

A highly familiar type of movement occurs whenever a person walks towards you. In the present study, we investigated whether this type of motion has an effect on face processing. We took a range of different 3D head models and placed them on a single, identical 3D body model. The resulting figures were animated to approach the observer. In a first…

Barsalou (1985) argued that exemplars that serve category goals become more typical category members. Although this claim has received support, we investigated (a) whether categories have a single ideal, as negatively valenced categories (e.g., cigarette) often have conflicting goals, and (b) whether ideal items are in fact typical, as they often…

The binding of stimulus and response features into stimulus-response (S-R) episodes or "event files" is a basic process for the efficient control of behavior. However, relevant information is usually accompanied by information that is irrelevant for the selection of action. Recent studies showed that even irrelevant information is bound…

Configural coding is known to take place between the parts of individual objects but has never been shown between separate objects. We provide novel evidence here for configural coding between separate objects through a study of the effects of action relations between objects on extinction. Patients showing visual extinction were presented with…

The aim of the present experiment was to directly assess the role of the glutamatergic hippocampal-lateral septal (HPC-LS) neurotransmission in tone and contextual fear conditioning. We found that pretraining infusion of glutamatergic acid into the lateral septum promotes tone conditioning and concomitantly disrupts contextual conditioning.…

According to behavioral momentum theory, preference and relative resistance to change in concurrent chains schedules are correlated and reflect the relative conditioned value of discriminative stimuli. In the present study, we explore the generality of this relation by manipulating the temporal context within a concurrent-chains procedure through…

We examined whether the apparent size of an object is scaled to the morphology of the relevant body part with which one intends to act on it. To be specific, we tested if the visually perceived size of graspable objects is scaled to the extent of apparent grasping ability for the individual. Previous research has shown that right-handed…

Six experiments investigated how changes in stimulus speed influence subjective duration. Participants saw rotating or translating shapes in three conditions: constant speed, accelerating motion, and decelerating motion. The distance moved and average speed were the same in all three conditions. In temporal judgment tasks, the constant-speed…

Eye movements were monitored as subjects read sentences containing high- or low-predictable target words. The extent to which target words were predictable from prior context was varied: Half of the target words were predictable, and the other half were unpredictable. In addition, the length of the target word varied: The target words were short…

Although dual-task interference is ubiquitous in a variety of task domains, stop-signal studies suggest that response inhibition is not subject to such interference. Nevertheless, no study has directly examined stop-signal performance in a dual-task setting. In two experiments, stop-signal performance was examined in a psychological refractory…

Locating a target in a visual search task is facilitated when the target location is repeated on successive trials. Global statistical properties also influence visual search, but have often been confounded with local regularities (i.e., target location repetition). In two experiments, target locations were not repeated for four successive trials,…

Three studies explored whether younger and older adults' free recall performance can benefit from prior exposure to distraction that becomes relevant in a memory task. Participants initially read stories that included distracting text. Later, they studied a list of words for free recall, with half of the list consisting of previously distracting…

Working memory (WM) processing in children has been studied with different approaches, focusing on either the organizational structure of WM processing during development (factor analytic) or the influence of different task conditions on WM processing (experimental). The current study combined both approaches, aiming to distinguish verbal and…