Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking may be relatively effortful. Yet adults routinely engage in effortful processes when needed. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate their resources to achieve successful…

One of the major questions in psychology is whether associative and nonassociative learning are fundamentally different or whether they involve similar processes and mechanisms. We have addressed this question by comparing mechanisms of a nonassociative form of learning, sensitization, and an associative form of learning, classical conditioning of…

Most studies of molecular mechanisms of synaptic plasticity have focused on the sequence of changes either at individual synapses or in the cell nucleus. However, studies of long-term facilitation at "Aplysia" sensory neuron--motor neuron synapses in isolated cell culture suggest two additional features of facilitation. First, that there…

The language we use over the course of conversation changes as we establish common ground and learn what our partner finds meaningful. Here we draw upon recent advances in natural language processing to provide a finer-grained characterization of the dynamics of this learning process. We release an open corpus (>15,000 utterances) of extended…

Long-term but not short-term memory and synaptic plasticity in many brain areas require neurotrophin signaling, transcription, and epigenetic mechanisms including DNA methylation. However, it has been difficult to relate these cellular mechanisms directly to behavior because of the immense complexity of the mammalian brain. To address that…

Science, Technology and Innovation in Uganda is part of the World Bank Studies series. These papers are published to communicate the results of the Bank's ongoing research and to stimulate public discussion. This study presents a unique methodology to view science, technology and innovation (STI) in developing countries. The study provides a set…

This article investigates how adult Korean-speaking learners of English interpret English definite descriptions ("the book," "the books") and demonstrative descriptions ("that book," "those books"). Korean lacks articles, but has demonstratives, and it is hypothesized that transfer leads learners to (initially) equate definites with…

This report is a summary of the Foreign Language Assistance Act. The Act, enacted as part of the Augustus Hawkins-Robert Stafford Elementary and Secondary Education Improvement Act of 1988 (PL100-297), provides formula grants to state education agencies for the creation of model elementary and secondary foreign language education programs in local…

Presents a study of the effects, on Australian children, of viewing American television programs. Concludes that the cultivation of beliefs about the world, at least in cases of violence and crime, does occur even when the messages are imported from another country. (PD)

Dishabituation has been thought to be due either to reversal of the process of habituation or to a second process equivalent to sensitization superimposed on habituation. One way to address this question is by testing whether dishabituation and sensitization can be dissociated. Previous studies using this approach in "Aplysia" have come to…

One hundred seventy-one middle school students participated in a study to assess cognitive activity during television viewing. Students completed a questionnaire about their favorite programs, viewing habits, and social reality beliefs, then viewed a 17-minute professionally edited episode of a family drama and answered a multiple choice…

The Body Awareness Resource Network (BARN) is a system of interactive computer programs designed to provide adolescents with confidential, nonjudgmental health information, behavior change strategies, and sources of referral. These programs cover five adolescent health areas: alcohol and other drugs, human sexuality, smoking prevention and…

Two underlying assumptions of the Cultural Indicators approach to television research were examined, using data on the television viewing habits of 76 second grade, 150 fifth grade, 509 eighth grade, and 350 eleventh grade students in Perth, Australia. The assumptions were that commercial television presented an organically composed total world of…

To understand how children respond to and make use of portrayals of the sexes on television, 192 third and eighth grade students participated in a study to determine what they notice and how important these distinctions are to them. The study obtained children's same/different paired comparisons of eight concepts--me, my mother, an average woman,…

Challenges two assumptions of the Gerbner cultivation analysis: that commercial television content is uniform in its symbolic messages about society's values, and that television viewing is habitual (ritual) rather than selective. Overall, both assumptions are found flawed; discarding them, however, serves to strengthen rather than weaken the…