Eye-tracking methodologies have revealed that eye movements and pupil dilations are influenced by our previous experiences. Dynamic fluctuations in pupil size during learning reflect in part the formation of memories for learned information, while viewing behavior during memory testing is influenced by memory retrieval and drawn to previously…

We report three item-method directed forgetting (DF) studies to evaluate whether DF impairs primarily item memory, or whether it also impairs associative memory. The current studies used a modified associative recognition paradigm that allowed disentangling item impairment from associative impairment in DF. Participants studied scene-object…

This study examined the play of 4-year-old children with a forest diorama that included toy representations of plants and animals. To examine the potential role of culture and expertise in diorama play, children from 3 samples participated: rural Native American, urban Native American, and urban non-Native American. Children's playtime was divided…

Achieving fluency with basic subtraction and add-with-8 or -9 combinations is difficult for primary grade children. A 9-month training experiment entailed evaluating the efficacy of software designed to promote such fluency via guided learning of reasoning strategies. Seventy-five eligible first graders were randomly assigned to one of three…

Interactive models of language production predict that it should be possible to observe long-distance interactions; effects that arise at one level of processing influence multiple subsequent stages of representation and processing. We examine the hypothesis that disruptions arising in nonform-based levels of planning--specifically, lexical…

Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from accessing spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language develop gesture systems, called "homesigns", which have many of the properties of natural language--the so-called resilient properties of language. We explored the resilience of structure built…

We examined young adults' essentialist reasoning about gender categories. Previous developmental results suggest that until age 9 or 10, children show marked essentialist reasoning about gender, but this disappears by early adulthood. In contrast, results from social cognition suggest that essentialist thinking about social categories persists…

Novel phonotactic constraints can be acquired by hearing or speaking syllables that follow a novel constraint. When learned from hearing syllables, these newly learned constraints generalize to syllables that were not experienced during training. However, generalization of phonotactic learning to novel syllables has never been persuasively…

Serial position functions with marked primacy and recency effects are ubiquitous in episodic memory tasks. The demonstrations reported here explored whether bow-shaped serial position functions would be observed when people ordered exemplars from various categories along a specified dimension. The categories and dimensions were: actors and age;…

People can use a content-specific recapitulation strategy to trigger memories (i.e., mentally reinstating encoding conditions), but how people deploy this strategy is unclear. Is recapitulation naturally used to guide all recollection attempts, or is it only used selectively, after retrieving incomplete information that requires additional…

We used eye tracking to investigate the downstream processing consequences of encountering noun/verb (NV) homographs (i.e., park) in semantically neutral but syntactically constraining contexts. Target words were followed by a prepositional phrase containing a noun that was plausible for only 1 meaning of the homograph. Replicating previous work,…

During conversation, partners develop representations of jointly known information--the common ground--and use this knowledge to guide subsequent linguistic exchanges. Extensive research on 2-party conversation has offered key insights into this process, in particular, its partner-specificity: Common ground that is shared with 1 partner is not…

People's expectations about the future are guided not just by the contingencies of situations but also by what they hope or wish will happen next. These preferences can inform predictions that run counter to what should or must occur based on the logic of unfolding events. Effects of this type have been regularly identified in studies of judgment…

Formal algebras are among the most powerful and general mechanisms for expressing quantitative relational statements; yet, even university engineering students, who are relatively proficient with algebraic manipulation, struggle with and often fail to correctly deploy basic aspects of algebraic notation (Clement, 1982). In the cognitive tradition,…

Compared to words that are new to a discourse, repeated words are produced with reduced acoustic prominence. Although these effects are often attributed to priming in the production system, the locus of the effect within the production system remains unresolved because, in natural speech, repetition often involves repetition of referents and…