Cross-cultural comparisons of categorization often confound cultural factors with expertise. This paper reports four experiments on the conceptual behavior of Native American and majority-culture fish experts. The two groups live in the same general area and engage in essentially the same set of fishing-related behaviors. Nonetheless, cultural…

In this study, a large number of observers (N=201) were asked to segment a collection of outlines derived from line drawings of everyday objects (N=88). This data set was then used as a benchmark to evaluate current models of object segmentation. All of the previously proposed rules of segmentation were found supported in our results. For example,…

The assessment of individual differences in facial expression recognition is normally required to address two major issues: (1) high agreement level (ceiling effect) and (2) differential difficulty levels across emotions. We propose a new assessment method designed to quantify individual differences in the recognition of the six basic emotions,…

Observers demonstrate an impaired ability to report the second of two targets in a "rapid serial visual presentation" (RSVP) stream if it appears within 500 ms of the first target--a phenomenon known as the "attentional blink." This study investigated the fate of stimuli in dual-target RSVP streams that do not require report--the distractors. In…

In two experiments, we explore how recent experience with particular syntactic constructions affects the strength of the structural priming observed for those constructions. The results suggest that (1) the strength of structural priming observed for double object and prepositional object constructions is affected by the relative frequency with…

The creator of an artifact, by virtue of having made the object, has privileged knowledge about its intended function. Do children recognize that the label an artifact's creator uses can convey this privileged information? 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with an object that looked like a member of one familiar artifact category, but which the…

Five experiments investigated whether adults and preschool children can perform simple arithmetic calculations on non-symbolic numerosities. Previous research has demonstrated that human adults, human infants, and non-human animals can process numerical quantities through approximate representations of their magnitudes. Here we consider whether…

Two experiments investigated sensory/motor-based functional knowledge of man-made objects: manipulation features associated with the actual usage of objects. In Experiment 1, a series of prime-target pairs was presented auditorily, and participants were asked to make a lexical decision on the target word. Participants made a significantly faster…

Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that a variety of contextual factors can influence the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous structures, but psycholinguistic experimentation inherently does not allow for the investigation of the role that these factors play in natural (uncontrolled) language use. We use regression modeling in…

We investigated processing of numerical order information and its relation to mechanisms of numerical quantity processing. In two experiments, performance on a quantity-comparison task (e.g. 2 5; which is larger?) was compared with performance on a relative-order judgment task (e.g. 2 5; ascending or descending order?). The comparison task…

Can children reason the Bayesian way? We argue that the answer to this question depends on how numbers are represented, because a representation can do part of the computation. We test, for the first time, whether Bayesian reasoning can be elicited in children by means of natural frequencies. We show that when information was presented to fourth,…

Although children take over a year to learn the meanings of the first three number words, they eventually master the logic of counting and the meanings of all the words in their count list. Here, we ask whether children's knowledge applies to number words beyond those they have mastered: Does a child who can only count to 20 infer that number…

Two experiments presented infants with artificial language input in which at least two generalizations were logically possible. The results demonstrate that infants made one of the two generalizations tested, the one that was most statistically consistent with the particular subset of the data they received. The experiments shed light on how…

How do we talk about events we perceive? And how tight is the connection between linguistic and nonlinguistic representations of events? To address these questions, we experimentally compared motion descriptions produced by children and adults in two typologically distinct languages, Greek and English. Our findings confirm a well-known asymmetry…

There is little experimental evidence that any non-human species is capable of purposefully attempting to manipulate the psychological states of others deceptively (e.g., manipulating what another sees). We show here that chimpanzees, one of humans' two closest primate relatives, sometimes attempt to actively conceal things from others.…