Natalie Schwob

University of Michigan | U-M

One of the hallmarks of complex motor planning in humans involves grasping objects in preparation for future actions, termed second-order motor planning. This ability has an extended developmental trajectory in humans and is also shared with nonhuman primates. Here, we presented seven cotton-top tamarins with a dowel task that has prompted variable...

Hysteresis in motor planning and syntactic priming in language planning refer to the influence of prior production history on current production behaviour. Computational efficiency accounts of action hysteresis and theoretical accounts of syntactic priming both argue that reusing an existing plan is less costly than generating a novel plan. Despite...

Humans share the ability to intuitively map 'sharp' or 'round' pseudowords, such as 'bouba' versus 'kiki', to abstract edgy versus round shapes, respectively. This effect, known as sound symbolism, appears early in human development. The phylogenetic origin of this phenomenon, however, is unclear: are humans the only species capable of experiencing...

Pre-crastination refers to the propensity to initiate tasks at the earliest possible moment. Research with human adults has found that some individuals consistently chose to transport a nearby object a further distance rather than delay initiation of the transport to select an object closer to the target. This phenomenon has never been tested in an...

A challenge to developing a model for testing animal consciousness is the pull of opposite intuitions. On one extreme, the anthropocentric view holds that consciousness is a highly sophisticated capacity involving self-reflection and conceptual categorization that is almost certainly exclusive to humans. At the opposite extreme, an anthropomorphic...

Trace conditioning involves the pairing of a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS), followed by a short interval with a motivationally significant unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Recently, trace conditioning has been proposed as a test for animal consciousness due to its correlation in humans with subjective report of the CS–UCS connection. We argue that...

This paper is to appear in Animal Behavior and Cognition. ----- Pre-crastination refers to the propensity to initiate tasks at the earliest possible moment. Research with human adults has found that some individuals consistently chose to transport a nearby object a further distance rather than delay initiation of the transport to select an object c...

Studies of statistical learning have shaped our understanding of the processes involved in the early stages of language acquisition. Many of these advances were made using experimental paradigms with artificial languages that allow for careful manipulation of the statistical regularities in the input. This article summarizes how these paradigms hav...