People's moods can influence moral judgment. Such influences may arise because moods affect moral emotion, or because moods affect moral thought. The present study provides evidence that, at least in the footbridge dilemma, moods affect moral thought. The results of two experiments are reported in which, after induction of positive, negative, or…

Generic sentences (e.g., bare plural sentences such as "dogs have four legs" and "mosquitoes carry malaria") are used to talk about "kinds" of things. Three experiments investigated the conceptual foundations of generics as well as claims within the formal semantic approaches to generics concerning the roles of prevalence, cue validity and…

The present research examined whether lexical (whole word) or more rule-based (morphological constituent) processes can be locally biased by experimental list context in past tense verb inflection. In Experiment 1, younger and older adults completed a past tense inflection task in which list context was manipulated across blocks containing regular…

In recent years, Bayesian learning models have been applied to an increasing variety of domains. While such models have been criticized on theoretical grounds, the underlying assumptions and predictions are rarely made concrete and tested experimentally. Here, I use Frank and Tenenbaum's (2011) Bayesian model of rule-learning as a case study to…

We study people's abilities to transfer object category knowledge across visual and haptic domains. If a person learns to categorize objects based on inputs from one sensory modality, can the person categorize these same objects when the objects are perceived through another modality? Can the person categorize novel objects from the same…

Many objects and events can be categorized in different ways, and learning multiple categories in parallel often requires flexibly attending to different stimulus dimensions in different contexts. Although infants and young children often exhibit poor attentional control, several theoretical proposals argue that such flexibility can be achieved…

Five experiments examined the integration and competition between body and context objects in locating an object. Participants briefly viewed a target object in a virtual environment and detected whether the target object was moved or not after a 10 s interval. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that performance when both the observer body and the context…

Much research has demonstrated a shape bias in categorizing and naming solid objects. This research has shown that when an entity is conceptualized as an individual object, adults and children attend to the object's shape. Separate research in the domain of numerical cognition suggest that there are distinct processes for quantifying small and…

Perception studies have shown similarities between humans and other animals in a wide array of language-related processes. However, the components of language that make it uniquely human have not been fully identified. Here we show that nonhuman animals extract rules over speech sequences that are difficult for humans. Specifically, animals easily…

The current study investigates the relative extent to which information utility and planning efficiency guide information-sampling strategies in a classification task. Prior research has pointed to the importance of probability gain, the degree to which sampling a feature reduces the chance of error, in contexts where participants are restricted…

In the multiple object tracking task, participants are asked to keep targets separate from identical distractors as all items move randomly. It is well known that simple manipulations such as object speed and number of distractors dramatically alter the number of targets that are successfully tracked, but very little is known about what "causes"…

Various recent studies attest that reading involves creating an implicit prosodic representation of the written text which may systematically affect the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in sentence comprehension. Research up to now suggests that implicit prosody itself depends on a partial syntactic analysis of the text, raising the question of…

We present results from five search experiments using a novel "unpacking" paradigm in which participants use a mouse to sort through random heaps of distractors to locate the target. We report that during this task participants often fail to recognize the target despite moving it, and despite having looked at the item. Additionally, the missed…

Two experiments explored the consolidation of spoken words, and assessed whether post-sleep novel competitor effects truly reflect engagement of these novel words in competition for lexical segmentation. Two types of competitor relationships were contrasted: the onset-aligned case (such as "frenzylk"), where the novel word is a close variant of…

A visual search experiment employed strings of Landolt "C"s to examine how the gap size of and frequency of exposure to distractor strings affected eye movements. Increases in gap size were associated with shorter first-fixation durations, gaze durations, and total times, as well as fewer fixations. Importantly, both the number and duration of…