The present study examined individual differences in the processing of different forms of figurative language. Sixty participants read sarcastic, metaphorical, and literal sentences embedded in story contexts while their eye movements were recorded, and responded to a text memory and an inference question after each story. Individual differences…

A large literature suggests that the organization of words in semantic memory, reflecting meaningful relations among words and the concepts to which they refer, supports many cognitive processes, including memory encoding and retrieval, word learning, and inferential reasoning. The co-activation of related items has been proposed as a mechanism by…

Daily physical activities may slow down the deterioration of cognitive aging. This study intended to develop embodiment interactive video games with friendly human-machine interface to break through the elder's literacy, cognitive aging, and psychomotor hindrances toward technology. Another objective was to understand, through field experiments…

Inhibition of return (IOR) is modulated by task set and appears later in discrimination tasks than in detection tasks. Several hypotheses have been suggested to account for this difference. We tested three of these hypotheses in two experiments by examining the influence of cue and target level of processing on the onset of IOR. In the first…

Six lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the influence of complex structure on the processing speed of English compounds. All experiments revealed that semantically transparent compounds (e.g., "rosebud") were processed more quickly than matched monomorphemic words (e.g., "giraffe"). Opaque compounds (e.g., "hogwash") were also…

Communication, language and conceptual knowledge related to concrete objects may rely on the sensory-motor systems from which they emerge. How abstract concepts can emerge from these systems is however still unknown. Here we report a functional interaction between a specific meaningful finger movement, such as a finger grip closing, and a concept…

Theories about the functional relevance of consciousness commonly posit that higher order cognitive control functions, such as response inhibition, require consciousness. To test this assertion, the authors designed a masked stop-signal paradigm to examine whether response inhibition could be triggered and initiated by masked stop signals, which…

Readers immediately slow down when an anaphor (e.g. herself) refers to an antecedent that mismatches in stereotypical gender (e.g. minister). The mismatch-cost has been attributed to a clash between the gender of the pronoun and the gender associated with the stereotypical role noun. However, the nature of such stereotypical gender is still…

Reviews empirical studies on aging and learning that support the thesis that learning slows down aging and some of its physical and cognitive subprocesses. (Contains 54 references.) (SK)

Previous research has shown that the appearance of task-irrelevant abrupt onsets influences saccadic eye movements during visual search and may slow down manual reactions to target stimuli. Analysis of reaction time distributions in the present study offers evidence suggesting that top-down inhibition processes actively suppress oculomotor or…

A study examined whether students were able to transfer the learning of a modeled "think-aloud" strategy to comprehension monitoring in other learning situations. Sixty-four eighth grade students in a midwestern town were identified as average proficiency readers based on a cloze test. There were no significant differences among the…