As scientists, we primarily award authorship, as well as legal patents, to those who generate ideas, often without formally crediting others who executed the actual experiments. However, little is known about how and when people come to value ideas. Here, we investigate whether young children also value ideas over labor. In Study 1, we found that…

Between the ages of 4 and 8 children increasingly make moral judgments on the basis of an actor's intent, as opposed to the outcome that the actor brings about. Does this reflect a reorganization of concepts in the moral domain, or simply the development of capacities outside the moral domain such as theory of mind and executive function?…

Speakers show a remarkable tendency to align their productions with their interlocutors'. Focusing on sentence production, we investigate the cognitive systems underlying such alignment (syntactic priming). Our guiding hypothesis is that syntactic priming is a consequence of a language processing system that is organized to achieve efficient…

We have investigated the relation between visuo-tactile interactions and the self-other distinction. In the Visual Enhancement of Touch (VET) effect, non-informative vision of one's own hand improves tactile spatial perception. Previous studies suggested that looking at "another"person's hand could also enhance tactile perception, but did not…

The pattern of shading across an image can provide a rich sense of object shape. Our ability to use shading information is remarkable given the infinite possible combinations of illumination, shape and reflectance that could have produced any given image. Illumination can change dramatically across environments (e.g. indoor vs. outdoor) and times…

Several studies have demonstrated that affective states influence the number of associations formed between remotely related concepts. Someone in a neutral or negative affective state might draw the association between "cold" and "hot", whereas someone in a positive affective state might spontaneously form the more distant association between…

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…

Experienced mental abacus (MA) users are able to perform mental arithmetic calculations with unusual speed and accuracy. However, it remains unclear whether their extraordinary gains in mental arithmetic ability are accompanied by an improvement in numerical processing efficiency. To address this question, the present study, using a numerical…

We report four experiments that explored the cognitive bases of vocal imitation. Specifically, we investigated the accuracy with which normal individuals vocally imitated the pitch-time trajectories of spoken sentences and sung melodies, presented in their original form and with phonetic information removed. Overall, participants imitated melodies…

The current study investigated children's solution choice and imitation of causally-irrelevant actions by using a controlled design to mirror naturalistic learning contexts in which children receive social information for tasks about which they have some degree of prior knowledge. Five-year-old children (N = 167) were presented with a reward…

The present research aimed to investigate whether, as previously observed with pictures, background auditory rhythm would also influence visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with bisyllabic visual words, segmented into two successive groups of letters, while an irrelevant strongly metric auditory…

People with grapheme-colour synaesthesia have been shown to have enhanced memory on a range of tasks using both stimuli that induce synaesthesia (e.g. words) and, more surprisingly, stimuli that do not (e.g. certain abstract visual stimuli). This study examines the latter by using multi-featured stimuli consisting of shape, colour and location…

Due to basic processes of psychological essentialism and contagion, one particular token of monetary currency is not always interchangeable with another piece of currency of equal economic value. When money loses its physical form it is perceived as "not quite the same" money (i.e., to have partly lost the original essence that distinguished it…

Five experiments provide evidence for a class of "dual character concepts." Dual character concepts characterize their members in terms of both (a) a set of concrete features and (b) the abstract values that these features serve to realize. As such, these concepts provide two bases for evaluating category members and two different criteria for…

Written production studies investigating central processing have ignored research on the peripheral components of movement execution, and vice versa. This study attempts to integrate both approaches and provide evidence that central and peripheral processes interact during word production. French participants wrote regular words (e.g. FORME),…