Arousal level is thought to be a key determinant of variability in cognitive performance. In a recent study, Beerendonk, Mejías et al. show that peak performance in decision-making tasks is reached at moderate levels of arousal. They also propose a neurobiologically informed computational model that can explain the inverted-U-shaped relationship. Read Full Article (External Site) […]

Abstract General principles of human cognition can help to explain why languages are more likely to have certain characteristics than others: structures that are difficult to process or produce will tend to be lost over time. One aspect of cognition that is implicated in language use is working memory—the component of short-term memory used for […]

Abstract We report the results of one visual-world eye-tracking experiment and two referent selection tasks in which we investigated the effects of information structure in the form of prosody and word order manipulation on the processing of subject pronouns er and der in German. Factors such as subjecthood, focus, and topicality, as well as order […]