This study suggests that familiarity and novelty preferences in infant experimental tasks can in some instances be interpreted together as a single indicator of language advance. We provide evidence to support this idea based on our use of the auditory headturn preference paradigm to record responses to words likely to be either familiar or unfamiliar to infants. Fifty-nine 10-month-old infants...

In many group-living animals, within-group associations are determined by familiarity, i.e. familiar individuals, independent of genetic relatedness, preferentially associate with each other. The ultimate causes of this behaviour are poorly understood and rigorous documentation of its adaptive significance is scarce. Limited attention theory states that focusing on a given task has interrelated...

The dual-process theory of recognition memory posits that recognition is supported by two separable processes: familiarity and recollection. Familiarity is the feeling of previously encountering something, without retrieval of contextual information about that encounter, whereas recollection refers to additional retrieval of contextual details (Yonelinas, 2002). While it is generally agreed tha...

Prior event-related potential studies using group statistics within a priori selected time windows have yielded conflicting results about familiarity effects in face processing. Our goal was to evaluate the temporal dynamics of the familiarity effect at all time points at the single-subject level. Ten subjects were shown faces of anonymous people or celebrities. Individual results were analysed...

Despite flourishing research on the relationship between emotion and literal language, and despite the pervasiveness of figurative expressions in communication, the role of figurative language in conveying affect has been underinvestigated. This study provides affective and psycholinguistic norms for 619 German idiomatic expressions and explores the relationships between affective and psycholin...

Déjà vu is a nebulous memory experience defined by a clash between evaluations of familiarity and novelty for the same stimulus. We sought to generate it in the laboratory by pairing a DRM recognition task, which generates erroneous familiarity for critical words, with a monitoring task by which participants realise that some of these erroneously familiar words are in fact novel. We tested 30 p...

The relative contribution of cognitive and motor processing to psychomotor slowing in schizophrenia was investigated using three tasks: a simple line-copying task and a more complex figure-copying task, both following a reaction paradigm, and a standard psychomotor test, the Digit Symbol Test (DST). Various movement variables of the task performances were derived from recordings made with the a...

Studies suggest that familiar faces are processed in a manner distinct from unfamiliar faces and that familiarity with a face confers an advantage in identity recognition. Our visual system seems to capitalize on experience to build stable face representations that are impervious to variation in retinal input that may occur due to changes in lighting, viewpoint, viewing distance, eye movements,...