Publications by authors named "D J Shanks"

Research on unconscious processing has been a valuable source of evidence in psycholinguistics for shedding light on the cognitive architecture of language. The automaticity of syntactic processing, in particular, has long been debated. One strategy to establish this automaticity involves detecting significant syntactic priming effects in tasks that limit conscious awareness of the stimuli.

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Article Synopsis
  • Excitons, which are pairs of electrons and holes held together by Coulomb forces, can form a superfluid at low temperatures due to their bosonic properties.
  • The research involves directly imaging this exciton superfluid in a specific material setup (MoSe-WSe heterostructure), demonstrating a significant level of order across the sample.
  • The study also details how variations in exciton density and temperature help construct a phase diagram, revealing that the superfluid state can persist up to 15 K, aligning well with theoretical expectations and paving the way for advancements in quantum devices and superfluid research.
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Retrieval practice is a powerful method for consolidating long-term learning. When learning takes place over an extended period, how should tests be scheduled to obtain the maximal benefit? In an end-test schedule, all material is studied prior to a large practice test on all studied material, whereas in an interim test schedule, learning is divided into multiple study/test cycles in which each test is smaller and only assesses material from the preceding study block. Past investigations have generally found a difference between these schedules during practice but not during a final assessment, although they may have been underpowered.

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Cronbach (1957) famously noted the divergence between the experimental and psychometric traditions in psychology and called for a unification, but many domains of cognitive experimental psychology continue to pay minimal heed to basic psychometric principles. The present article considers the lack of attention devoted to the reliability of measures extracted in a popular visual search task for studying putatively unconscious mental processes, , and the inferential fallacies that this neglect can cause. Two experiments (total = 200) demonstrated that the reliability of contextual cuing and awareness measures can be increased by three manipulations designed to increase between-participant variability in search performance.

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A widely adopted approach in research on unconscious perception and cognition involves contrasting behavioral or neural responses to stimuli that have been presented to participants (e.g., old items in a memory test) against those that have not (e.

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