In the present research, we investigated how 13-month-olds use their emergent theory-of-mind understanding (i.e., understanding about other people’s mental states, such as their intentions, perceptions, and beliefs) and social-evaluation skills to make sense of social interactions. The infants watched three puppets (A, B, and C) interact. The results showed that after seeing Agents A and [...]
Source: Association for Psychological Science
We showed that anticipatory cognitive control could be unconsciously instantiated through subliminal cues that predicted enhanced future control needs. In task-switching experiments, one of three subliminal cues preceded each trial. Participants had no conscious experience or knowledge of these cues, but their performance was significantly improved on switch trials after cues that predicted task switches [...]
With the continued integration of technology into people’s lives, saving digital information has become an everyday facet of human behavior. In the present research, we examined the consequences of saving certain information on the ability to learn and remember other information. Results from three experiments showed that saving one file before studying a new file [...]
We propose that self-control failures, and variation across individuals in self-control abilities, are partly due to differences in the speed with which the decision-making circuitry processes basic attributes, such as tastiness, versus more abstract attributes, such as healthfulness. We tested these hypotheses by combining a dietary-choice task with a novel form of mouse tracking that [...]
Substantial evidence suggests that unconscious processing can be characterized as a lesser or weaker version of conscious processing. To test this notion, we designed a novel repeated-cuing procedure based on exogenous attention: The location of the attentional cue was first fixed across blocks (fixed-cue blocks), and then the cue was removed in subsequent blocks (no-cue [...]