(PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Visual statistical learning (VSL) occurs when participants are exposed to spatially or temporally ordered stimuli, and become increasingly sensitive to them without explicitly realizing the hidden regularities. In the temporal domain of VSL, participants are usually exposed to shape-triplets, followed by the use of familiarity judgments and recognition tasks to directly probe VSL. Other methods, such as the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task, indirectly probe the learning of temporal sequences, and provide evidence of learning within the triplets. Despite the RSVP's success, however, previous implementations of the RSVP task have only pseudorandomized the triplets to form the test sequence, such that the task permits only two stream locations for a given target shape (belonging to a certain within-triplet position), out of six available locations. These fixed locations may result in confounded response time (RT) findings and potentially lead to an overestimation of a weak (or nonexistent) VSL effectound in previous studies which could have been the effect of detection stream locations, misconstrued as VSL. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).When learning new information, students' prior knowledge related to that information will often vary. Prior research has not systematically explored how prior knowledge relates to learning of new, previously unknown information. Accordingly, the goal of the present research was to explore this relationship. In three experiments, students first completed a prior knowledge test over two domains (football and cooking) and then learned new information from these domains by answering questions and receiving feedback. Students also made a judgment of learning for each. To ensure that the learning was new (i.e., previously unknown) for all students, the to-be-learned information was false. Last, students completed a final test over the same questions from the learning phase. Prior knowledge in each domain was positively related to new learning for items from that domain but not from the other domain. Thus, the relationship between prior knowledge and new learning was domain specific, which we refer to as the rich-get-richer effect. Prior knowledge was also positively related to the magnitude of judgments of learning. In Experiment 3, to explore a potential reason why prior knowledge is related to new learning, students rated their curiosity in learning each item prior to receiving feedback. Critically, students' curiosity judgments mediated the relationship between prior knowledge and new learning. These outcomes suggest that for high-knowledge learners, curiosity may be related to attention-based mechanisms that increase the effectiveness of encoding during feedback. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Cues to prominence such as beat gesture and contrastive pitch accent play an important role in constraining what is remembered. However, it is currently unclear how beat gesture affects online discourse processing alone and in combination with contrastive accenting. Using an adaptation of the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we orthogonally manipulated the presence of these cues and their felicity (match) with contrast within local (sentence-level) and global (experiment-level) referential contexts. In Experiment 1, in which beat gesture and contrastive accenting were always globally felicitous with the context of filler referring expressions, beat gesture increased anticipation of both target and competitor referents of locally infelicitous critical referring expressions differing in color and shape, whereas contrastive accenting hindered resolution of these expressions. In Experiment 2, in which beat gesture and contrastive accenting were always globally infelicitous with the context of filler referring expressions, beat gesture increased anticipation of both target and competitor referents of locally felicitous critical referring expressions contrasting in color, whereas contrastive accenting did not affect their interpretation. Taken together, these findings indicate that local and global felicity of cues to prominence with contrast affects their interpretation during online spoken discourse processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Counterfactuals describe imagined alternatives to reality that people know to be false.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/nx-1607.html  Successful counterfactual comprehension therefore requires people to keep in mind both an imagined hypothetical world and the presupposed real world. Counterfactual transparency, that is, the degree to which a context makes it easy to determine counterfactuality, might affect semantic processing. This might especially be the case for languages like Chinese which lack dedicated counterfactual markers and therefore are more context-dependent. Using event-related potentials, this study investigates the role of counterfactual transparency on the comprehension of Chinese counterfactuals. For transparent contexts (e.g., "If everything in the world could go back in time . . ."), in which the information needed to identify counterfactuality is highly accessible, discourse incongruent words elicited P600 effects. In contrast, for nontransparent contexts (e.g., "If better preparations were made at that time . . .") in which readers must attend to specific discourse context and engage pragmatic information to arrive at the counterfactual interpretation, discourse incongruencies gave rise to N400 effects. These findings suggest that (a) provided a constraining context, semantic processing is not disrupted by the dual nature of counterfactuality (i.e., readers can rapidly make contextually appropriate inferences to interpret subsequent narratives) and (b) the degree of transparency of the counterfactual can affect the nature of subsequent semantic processing. Our findings support the usage-based view that Chinese counterfactual comprehension is highly context-dependent and pragmatics-driven. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).