We investigated how humans encode large-scale spatial environments using a virtual taxi game. We hypothesized that if 2 connected neighborhoods are explored jointly, people will form a single integrated spatial representation of the town. However, if the neighborhoods are first learned separately and later observed to be connected, people will…

Elucidating how inequity aversion (a tendency to dislike and correct unequal outcomes) functions as one develops is important to understanding more complex fairness considerations in adulthood. Although previous research has demonstrated that adults and children reduce inequity, it is unclear if people are actually responding negatively to…

The delayed discrimination methodology has been used to demonstrate a high-fidelity nondecaying visual short-term memory (VSTM) for so-called preattentive basic features. In the current Study, I show that the nondecaying high VSTM precision is not restricted to basic features by using the same method to measure memory precision for gait direction…

In simple mechanical events, we can directly perceive causal interactions of the physical objects. Physical cues (especially spatiotemporal features of the display) are found to associate with causal perception. Here, we demonstrate that cues of a completely different domain--"social cues"--also impact the causal perception of…

The goal of this study was to evaluate the claim that young children display preferences for auditory stimuli over visual stimuli. This study was motivated by concerns that the visual stimuli employed in prior studies were considerably more complex and less distinctive than the competing auditory stimuli, resulting in an illusory preference for…

We investigated how preschoolers use their understanding of the actions available to a speaker to resolve referential ambiguity. In this study, 58 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with arrays of eight objects in a toy house and were instructed to retrieve various objects from the display. The trials varied in terms of whether the speaker's hands…

Humans often make seemingly irrational choices in situations of conflict between a particular smaller-sooner reinforcer and a more abstract, temporally extended, but larger reinforcer. In two experiments, the extent to which the availability of commitment responses--self-imposed restrictions on future choices--might improve self-control in such…

We examined how rapid automatized naming (RAN) components--articulation time and pause time--predict word and text reading fluency in a consistent orthography (Greek). In total, 68 children were followed from Grade 2 to Grade 6 and were assessed three times on RAN (Digits and Objects), phonological awareness, orthographic processing, speed of…

This article examines two issues: the role of gesture in the communication of spatial information and the relation between communication and mental representation. Children (8-10 years) and adults walked through a space to learn the locations of six hidden toy animals and then explained the space to another person. In Study 1, older children and…

Current GPS-based mobile navigation assistance systems support wayfinding, but they do not support learning about the spatial configuration of an environment. The present study examined effects of visual presentation modes for navigation assistance on wayfinding accuracy, route learning, and configural learning. Participants (high-school students)…

Eye movements were monitored to examine search efficiency and infer how color is mentally represented to guide search for multiple targets. Observers located a single color target very efficiently by fixating colors similar to the target. However, simultaneous search for 2 colors produced a dual-target cost. In addition, as the similarity between…

Research has shown that consistently right-handed individuals have poorer memory than do inconsistently right- or left-handed individuals under baseline conditions but more reliably exhibit enhanced memory retrieval after making a series of saccadic eye movements. From this it could be that consistent versus inconsistent handedness, regardless of…

In many theories, forgetting is closely linked to the passage of time. In the present experiments, recall in a short-term memory task was less accurate when the retention interval included a difficult arithmetic addition task, compared with an easy task. In a novel condition, the interfering task was switched from hard to easy partway through the…

Several bodies of research have found different results with regard to presentation timing, categorization, and generalization. Both presenting instances at the "same time" (simultaneous) and presenting instances "apart in time" (spacing) have been shown to facilitate generalization. In this study, we resolved these results by examining…

The slope of the z-transformed receiver-operating characteristic (zROC) in recognition memory experiments is usually less than 1, which has long been interpreted to mean that the variance of the target distribution is greater than the variance of the lure distribution. The greater variance of the target distribution could arise because the…