In everyday life, people often refer to attention as if it were a single, unitary thing, such as a vat of energy that can be spread across stimuli or tasks. Research suggests otherwise (Nobre and Kastner 2014). There appear to be many different limited mental resources associated with different brain networks and pertaining to different levels of processing (e.g., spatial vs. central) that can ...

This paper explores whether home buyers are inattentive to future energy costs. I exploit variation in energy costs in the form of fuel price changes in Massachusetts where there is significant overlap in the geographic and age distributions of oil-heated and gas-heated homes. I find that relative fuel price shifts cause relative changes in housing transaction prices consistent with full capita...

We evaluated age-related differences in the optimality of decision boundary settings in a diffusion model analysis. In the model, the width of the decision boundary represents the amount of evidence that must accumulate in favor of a response alternative before a decision is made. Wide boundaries lead to slow but accurate responding, and narrow boundaries lead to fast but inaccurate responding....

In this study of primary school children, a novel 'symbol-string' task is used to assess sensitivity to the position of briefly presented non-alphabetic but letter-like symbols. The results demonstrate that sensitivity in the symbol-string task explains a unique proportion of the variability in children's contextual reading accuracy. Moreover, developmental dyslexic readers show reduced sensiti...

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were collected concurrently with stimulus presentation during a source monitoring task. Younger adults were less likely than older adults to make source monitoring errors and their ERP records showed far greater discrimination between target stimuli and familiar but nontarget foils. Older adults not only made more source errors but produced high amplitude late po...

There are very few jokes about sociologists. This is frustrating for the sociologists, especially if they compare themselves with their more favored second cousins, the psychologists, who have pretty much taken over that sector of American humor that used to be occupied by clergymen. A psychologist, introduced as such at a party, at once finds himself the object of considerable attention and un...

The distinction of between-person age differences from within-person age changes is necessary for understanding aging-related change processes. Although longitudinal studies are required to address issues relating to within person change, most studies begin using age-heterogeneous samples and conclude using survival-heterogeneous samples. Given the numerous potential confounds associated with a...

Using data from two surveys in three counties where the prevalence of uxorilocal marriage differs greatly, this paper analyzes the effects of marriage form, individual, family and social factors on age at first marriage and spousal age difference. The results show that, under the Chinese patrilineal joint family system, compared with the dominant virilocal marriage form, uxorilocal marriage sig...

Preferences for certain age characteristics of partners are reported across cultures: men prefer mates who are younger and women prefer mates older than themselves. To examine whether these age preferences entail fitness effects for men and women, we investigated the association among age differences between partners and offspring count. On the basis of a sample of approximately 10,000 post-rep...

Block Design tasks are neuropsychologically valuable, but standard scoring sacrifices potentially useful information that could elucidate the cognitive processes underlying performance failures. Qualitative indices that were proposed in the WAIS-R-NI [Kaplan, E., Fein, D., Morris, R., & Delis, D. (1991). The WAIS-R as a neuropsychological instrument [Manual]. San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corp...