With its own functional anatomy, circuitry and cellular structure, attention can be viewed as an organ system. This conceptualization reframes many problems in cognitive science and permits important insights into neurological and psychiatric disorders of both children and adults. Specifically, construing attention as an organ system helps to describe the evolutionary and developmental aspects ...

Results from an experiment with two parts are presented in this paper. In part one, participants listened to sentences containing two, three, four, or five clauses, and were asked questions about the content of the sentences. The results of part one demonstrate that an important unit of representation in sentence memory is the clause, and not some other component of discourse structure. In part...

The Interactive Social Book Search track at CLEF has run the same experiment, task, and interface for two years. This provides an opportunity to study the individual differences between two separately recruited participant cohorts, rather than between sub-sets of a single cohort. Overall the results show no significant differences in how the participants used the three main stages of the interf...

I s it better to be flexible, or persistent? A colleague once said that the secret to success in science is perseveration (no, not mere perseverence—that wouldn’t get you very far at all). Yet we all believe that the highest levels of cognitive function are associated with extreme flexibility—the ability to juggle many things at once and not get hung up on just one. Indeed, this ability to jugg...

Distance perception is among the most pervasive mental phenomena and the oldest research topics in behavioural science. However, we do not understand well the most pervasive finding of distance perception research, that of large individual differences. There are large individual differences in acrophobia (fear of heights), which we commonly assume consists of an abnormal fear of stimuli perceiv...

While text-based deception in computer mediated communication has been studied, e.g., Zhou (2005) and Duran et al. (2010), there has been less focus on the differentiation of strategies for deception, especially those which may manifest in modern communication, such as found in social media. In this paper, we extend our previous work on the evaluation of linguistic indicators to strategic decep...