Generally, people respond faster to small numbers with left-sided responses and large numbers with right-sided responses, a pattern known as the SNARC (spatial numerical association of response codes) effect. The SNARC effect is interpreted as evidence for amodal automatic access of magnitude and its spatial associations, because it occurs in…

Science and technology education necessitates teaching and learning experiments involving electronic circuit construction and measurements using experimental equipment. In this study, a novel cross reality system for learning physical circuit construction and performing virtual experiments using virtual experimental equipment with mid-air haptics…

Within the domain of associative learning, there is substantial evidence that people (and other animals) select among environmental cues on the basis of their reinforcement history. Specifically, people preferentially attend to, and learn about, cueing stimuli that have previously predicted events of consequence (a predictiveness bias). By…

Stimuli that capture the central tendency of presented exemplars are often preferred--a phenomenon also known as the classic beauty-in-averageness effect. However, recent studies have shown that this effect can reverse under certain conditions. We propose that a key variable for such ugliness-in-averageness effects is the category structure of the…

Music cognition research has provided evidence for the benefit of temporally regular structures guiding attention over time. The present study investigated whether maintenance in working memory can benefit from an isochronous rhythm. Participants were asked to remember series of 6 letters for serial recall. In the rhythm condition of Experiment…

The word length effect, better recall of lists of short (fewer syllables) than long (more syllables) words has been termed a benchmark effect of working memory. Despite this, experiments on the word length effect can yield quite different results depending on set size and stimulus properties. Seven experiments are reported that address these 2…

Although ownership is acknowledged to exert a potent influence on various aspects of information processing, the origin of these effects remains largely unknown. Based on the demonstration that self-relevance facilitates perceptual judgments (i.e., the self-prioritization effect), here we explored the possibility that ownership enhances object…

Stimuli co-occurring with targets in a detection task are better remembered than stimuli co-occurring with distractors--the attentional boost effect (ABE). The ABE is of interest because it is an exception to the usual finding that divided attention during encoding impairs memory. The effect has been demonstrated in tests of item memory but it is…

There are multiple reports, in the context of the time taken to read aloud, that the joint effects of stimulus quality and word frequency (a) interact when only words appear in the list but (b) are additive when nonwords are intermixed with words (O'Malley & Besner, 2008). This triple interaction has been explained in terms of the idea that…

Serial position functions with marked primacy and recency effects are ubiquitous in episodic memory tasks. The demonstrations reported here explored whether bow-shaped serial position functions would be observed when people ordered exemplars from various categories along a specified dimension. The categories and dimensions were: actors and age;…

Memory performance in linear order reasoning tasks (A > B, B > C, C > D, etc.) shows quicker, and more accurate responses to queries on wider (AD) than narrower (AB) pairs on a hypothetical linear mental model (A -- B -- C -- D). While indicative of an analogue representation, research so far did not provide positive evidence for spatial…

Reaching for an object with a tool has been shown to cause a compressed perception of space just beyond arm's reach. It is not known, however, whether tools that have distal, detached effects at far distances can cause this same perceptual distortion. We examined this issue in the current study with targets placed up to 30m away. Participants who…

Because the environment often includes multiple sounds that overlap in time, listeners must segregate a sound of interest (the auditory figure) from other co-occurring sounds (the unattended auditory ground). We conducted a series of experiments to clarify the principles governing the extraction of auditory figures. We distinguish between auditory…

We live in a dynamic environment in which objects change location over time. To maintain stable object representations the visual system must determine how newly sampled information relates to existing object representations, the "correspondence problem". Spatiotemporal information is clearly an important factor that the visual system takes into…

In this study, novel and old scientific innovations (NSI and OSI) were selected as materials to explore the electrophysiological correlates of scientific innovation induced by heuristic information. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to do so, college students solved NSI problems (for which they did not know the answers) and OSI problems…