Opening the panel, Jacqueline Amati Mehler pointed out that language lies at the heart of human psychic development, and she referred to the ‘psycho-archeology’ of language as it is embedded in early affects and psychosensory experiences related to the world of primary object relationships and primary process. The acquisition and development of language implies the development of the symbolic f...

One of the main unresolved problems in data mining is related with the treatment of data that is inherently sequential. Algorithms for the inference of association rules that manipulate sequential data have been proposed and used to some extent but are ineffective, in some cases, because too many candidate rules are extracted and filtering the relevant ones is difficult and inefficient. In this...

Fifty years ago, Mednick [Psychological Review, 69 (1962) 220] proposed an elaborate model that aimed to explain how creative ideas are generated and why creative people are more likely to have creative ideas. The model assumes that creative people have flatter associative hierarchies and as a consequence can more fluently retrieve remote associative elements, which can be combined to form crea...

BACKGROUND Semantic memory has generated much research. As such, the majority of investigations have focused on the English language, and much less on other languages, such as Hebrew. Furthermore, little research has been done on search processes within the semantic network, even though they are abundant within cognitive semantic phenomena. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We examine a unique d...

Priming is an unconscious (nondeclarative) form of memory whereby identification or production of an item is improved by an earlier encounter. It has been proposed that declarative memory and priming might be related-for example, that conceptual priming results in more fluent processing, thereby providing a basis for familiarity judgments. In two experiments, we assessed conceptual priming and ...

Repetition normally enhances memory. While in some cases the benefit of added repetition may be incremental, few would expect that massed repetition could actually reverse the benefits of brief repetition. Here we report two experiments that document a clear example of a paradoxical effect of massed repetition. Subjects first repeated words (e.g., "sheep") aloud one at a time for 0, 5, 10, 20, ...