The postural sway patterns of newly standing infants were compared under two conditions: standing while holding a toy and standing while not holding a toy. Infants exhibited a lower magnitude of postural sway and more complex sway patterns when holding the toy. These changes suggest that infants adapt postural sway in a manner that facilitates…

Affective evaluations of previously ignored visual stimuli are more negative than those of novel items or prior targets of attention or response. This has been taken as evidence that inhibition has negative affective consequences. But inhibition could act instead to attenuate or "neutralize" preexisting affective salience, predicting opposite…

The purpose of the present study is twofold. One is to assess the cultural generality of the information integration rule for moral obligation. The other is to examine how people integrate moral obligation and self-interest. Two studies were implemented following the functional measurement methodology with Chinese samples. Study 1 replicated the…

In two experiments, 4- to 9-year-olds played a game in which they selected one of two boxes to win a prize. On "regret" trials the unchosen box contained a better prize than the prize children actually won, and on "baseline" trials the other box contained a prize of the same value. Children rated their feelings about their prize before and after…

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is the finding of impaired memory performance for information stored in long-term memory due to retrieval of a related set of information. This phenomenon is often assigned to operations of a specialized mechanism recruited to resolve interference during retrieval by deactivating competing memory representations.…

The "word frequency paradox" refers to the finding that low frequency words are better recognized than high frequency words yet high frequency words are better recalled than low frequency words. Rather than comparing separate groups of low and high frequency words, we sought to quantify the functional relation between word frequency and…

In 2 main experiments, the mediated priming effect was used to determine whether retrieval continues to be mediated after repeated testing. In each experiment, participants used the keyword method to learn French vocabulary, then completed a modified lexical decision task in which they first translated a French word, and then made a lexical…

People often displace their aggression against innocent targets. Notwithstanding the merits of previous research on displaced aggression, critical gaps remain. First, it is unclear whether and how situational and dispositional factors interact to influence displaced aggression. Moreover, it is unclear whether engaging in direct aggression…

Updating and maintenance of information are 2 conflicting demands on working memory (WM). We examined the time required to update WM (updating latency) as a function of the sequence of updated and not-updated items within a list. Participants held a list of items in WM and updated a variable subset of them in each trial. Four experiments that vary…

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…

Psycholinguistic research spanning a number of decades has produced diverging results with regard to the nature of constraint integration in online sentence processing. For example, evidence that language users anticipatorily fixate likely upcoming referents in advance of evidence in the speech signal supports rapid context integration. By…

According to an action-specific account of perception, the perceived speed of a ball can be a function of the ease to block the ball. Balls that are easier to stop look like they are moving slower than balls that are more difficult to stop. This was recently demonstrated with a modified version of the classic computer game Pong (Witt & Sugovic,…

The effects of cocaine were examined under a titrating-delay matching-to-sample procedure. In this procedure, the delay between sample stimulus offset and comparison stimuli onset adjusts as a function of the subject's performance. Specifically, matches increase the delay and mismatches decrease the delay. Titrated delay values served as the…

We examined whether inductive reasoning development is better characterized by accounts assuming an early category bias versus an early perceptual bias. We trained 264 children aged 3 to 9 years to categorize novel insects using a rule that directly pitted category membership against appearance. This was followed by an induction task with…

Doctors often make decisions for their patients and predict their patients' preferences and decisions to customize advice to their particular situation. We investigated how doctors make decisions about medical treatments for their patients and themselves and how they predict their patients' decisions. We also studied whether these decisions and…