People are exposed to inaccurate claims and ideas every day, from sources intended to inform, entertain, or do both. A large body of research has demonstrated that exposure to inaccurate statements, even when conveying obviously false ideas, can affect people’s subsequent judgments. Contemporary accounts suggest that these effects may be...
How do people make meaning of risk-taking? The present dissertation proposes a normative lay theory of risk-taking. The proposed model promotes the following core ideas: (a) Risk-taking is generally an ambiguous construct and requires the illumination of at least some dimensional parameters to disambiguate the risk behavior and risk-taker; (b)...
Speech recognition in complex acoustic environments is dependent on myriad bottom-up (i.e., peripheral) and top-down (i.e., central) processes. While bottom-up processes remain fairly stable during childhood, the development of top-down processes persists into young adulthood. The immaturity of top-down processes places younger children at considerable risk for poorer speech recognition...
Dynamic decision-making is a complex process that relies on our ability to generate, evaluate and implement a variety of strategies. Understanding how people navigate this process is a difficult problem that requires a wide range of methodologies. This study details a combination of behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging that...
Young children can sometimes acquire new vocabulary words—even property terms—through indirect learning (e.g. Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We explore two factors that contribute to this ability—perceptual alignment and linguistic contrast. We propose that spontaneous comparison processes lead children to notice key commonalities and differences that facilitate indirect property word learning....
Rhythmic fluctuations of electrical activity in the brain provide insights into the proposed mechanism by which we encode experiences and then maintain, forget, modify, and retrieve them. Yet there is still much to learn about how neural oscillations relate to memory function. The purpose of this research is to discover...