When communicating with others, individuals spend about half of the time listening to what the other person has to say (Dobkin & Pace, 2010). Actively attending to stimuli in our environment is a crucial part of being able to respond to a given task or command. For example, if a child is instructed to choose a red ball on the playground, it is important for the child to listen, interpret, and respond to that task by picking the red ball. The child must discriminate between both the spoken words (auditory stimuli) and the visual stimulus (the red ball versus other colored balls or objects). This study is intended to examine how the order of stimulus presentation influences one’s ability to learn these types of word-object relationships. In previous research, it has been found that the learning process is more effective when the auditory stimulus is presented to the learner prior to the visual stimuli (Petursdottir & Aguilar, 2015). Although there has been research related to presenting auditory before visual stimuli (sample-first) and presenting visual stimuli before auditory (comparison-first), there has been little research into the presentation of the visual (comparison) and audio (sample) simultaneously or into the repetition of the auditory with the visual stimuli. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of children’s acquisition of new word-object relations in auditory-visual identification tasks when simultaneously presenting the visual stimuli and auditory stimulus and when presenting the auditory stimulus first and then presenting the auditory stimulus again when the visual stimulus appears, in comparison to the previously studied sample-first method. Effects of the three presentation arrangement on acquisition rate are assessed in a single-case multi-element design. Data collection is currently in progress.

Children learn new vocabulary in many different ways that include temporally contiguous presentation of words and visual stimuli. The Naming Hypothesis (Horne and Lowe, 1996) suggests that during contiguous presentation it is necessary for the learner to make an overt or covert echoic response to the word stimuli in order for the word to be adequately learned and retained when there is no immediate requirement for recall. This hypothesis has been incorporated into early language interventions for children with autism, but in the absence of sufficient empirical evidence to support the role of echoic responses in vocabulary acquisition. This study extends prior research on the effects of echoic responding in a receptive task on subsequent recall of new verbal labels, by including a control condition intended to interfere with coert echoic responding. The participants were four-year old children who learned to receptively identify national flags in three different conditions. One condition requires an echoic response in each trial while pointing to the correct flag, one requires vocally labeling the background color of the flag while pointing, and the third requires no response. Effects of the three condition on verbal recall of flag labels are compared in an adapted alternating-treatments single-case design. Data collection is in progress; two participants have been enrolled and are currently undergoing instruction in all three

Attitude Representation Theory holds that people evaluate attitude objects by reference to the subset of associations that comes to mind at the time. Previous research on “audience tuning” has shown that people tend to slant their communications toward what they believe the audience wants to be told, and in the process convince themselves to hold more of that new attitude. Audience tuning effects on attitudes have been well documented, but all demonstrations of this phenomenon have involved communicating to an audience with a known opinion on one side or the other. We examined what happens when people who have a negative attitude of their own (based on limited information) communicate their views and the reasons behind their views, to an audience that knows nothing about the topic. Compared to a control group who just wrote about the weather, we predicted that those who talked about a target group to two friends would later be more likely to (falsely) recognize their own persuasive embellishments regarding the target group as being part of the information they were originally given about the target group. The experimental group will also report more negative attitudes toward the target group. We discuss the results of this experiment and the implications for future research on attitude polarization and audience tuning.

Research suggests that people most often prefer romantic partners similar to themselves on a wide variety of traits, such as physical appearance and educational attainment. This pattern of preferring similarity in potential mates, called assortative mating, is also found in several other species. Research in non-human animals, however, finds that when vulnerability to disease is high, some species will mate disassortatively to increase the likelihood that their offspring will have a novel set of immune genes that can reduce disease risk. In the current study (N = 87), we experimentally tested the hypothesis that perceived vulnerability to disease also leads to the desire to mate disassortatively in humans. We manipulated perceived immune quality by giving participants sham feedback about levels of a fictional enzyme in their saliva linked to poor immune health. Participants told they had a poor immune system - compared to those told they had a healthy immune system - reported desiring greater dissimilarity in potential romantic partners. These results support the hypothesis that humans mate disassortatively when vulnerability to disease is high.

Self-testing strategies have powerful effects on learning and long-term retention. One popular method of self-testing is by using flashcards. Indeed, forty percent of students report using flashcards to study material (Karpicke, Butler, & Roediger, 2009). However, there has not yet been any research exploring differences in how learners use physical flashcards versus electronic flashcards. There may be a learning benefit for electronic flashcards because individuals are able to put more information on a card more quickly. However, there may be a learning benefit for physical flashcards because individuals can compensate for time with better quality information. In the present experiment, we investigated the potential differences in how individuals construct flashcards on index cards compared to electronic cards.
Participants were instructed to make flashcards over an article about how Hollywood films portray history (materials provided by Rawson & Kintsch, 2005). In the physical flashcard condition, participants were given 40 index cards and participants in the electronic flashcard condition were given a laptop to access Quizlet. All participants were instructed to make flashcards over the material as they would if they were preparing for a test over the material in the future. Participants in the electronic flashcard condition made more flashcards than did participants in the index card condition, and they also constructed flashcards in a method that promoted self-testing more than did participants in the index card condition. There were no differences in time spent making the flashcards between the two conditions. Thus, the way learners construct flashcards is different depending on if flashcards are being created physically or electronically. Future work is needed to explore potential differences in the quality of information placed on physical flashcards versus electronic flashcards.