Alan W Kersten

Florida Atlantic University | FAU · Department of Psychology

This research reveals that mugshot viewing accompanied by questions about an action can cause young adults to associate the pictured person and the queried action, leading to later false recollection of having seen that person perform that action. In contrast, mugshot viewing in older adults can lead to vague feelings of familiarity for the picture...

Four experiments provide evidence for a distinction between two different kinds of motion representations. Extrinsic motions involve the path of an object with respect to an external frame of reference. Intrinsic motions involve the relative motions of the parts of an object. This research suggests that intrinsic motions are represented conjointly...

Two experiments demonstrated that eyewitnesses more frequently associate an actor with the actions of another person when those two people had appeared together in the same event, rather than in different events. This greater likelihood of binding an actor with the actions of another person from the same event was associated with high-confidence re...

Three experiments provide evidence that the conceptualization of moving objects and events is influenced by one's native language, consistent with linguistic relativity theory. Monolingual English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in an English-speaking context performed better than monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual Sp...

Three experiments provided evidence that 3.5- to 4-year-old English-speaking children (N = 72) attend to the appearances of novel objects, not only when they hear a novel noun, but also when they hear a novel verb. Children learning nouns in the context of novel, moving objects attended exclusively to the appearances of objects, even though nouns w...

Objectives This research tested whether performing an action themselves leads young and older adults to false memory for having seen that action performed by another person. It also tested whether observing another person perform an action leads to false memory for self-performance of that action. Method Healthy young and older adults viewed video...

Two studies were conducted to explore whether the addition of animal movement would influence the intensity of emotional reactions toward that animal. Both studies compared self-reported emotional reactions to still images and videos for six animal categories (snakes, spiders, rodents, hoofed animals, animals with flippers, and turtles). In Study 1...

Two experiments demonstrate that eyewitnesses often falsely recognize an actor performing an action that had actually been performed by someone else, even if the action involves negative emotions and the actor in question had only appeared in emotionally neutral contexts. Participants viewed videos, each involving an actor performing a neutral (e.g...

This research provides evidence for similarities and differences between the results of traditional source memory paradigms and results from the Person-Action Conjunction (PAC) test. In the PAC test, participants view actions performed by different actors and are later tested on their memory for which actor performed each action. The PAC test can b...

The building blocks of human cognition are concepts. What we see, hear, interpret, remember, understand, and talk about is crucially shaped by our concepts. They allow us to communicate, categorize objects and events into inductively powerful groups, organize our world, construct complicated thoughts, and conserve memory resources. Alternative theo...

Motion plays an important role in recognising animate creatures. This research supports a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motions in their relationship to identifying information about the characters performing the motions. Participants viewed events involving costumed human characters. Intrinsic motions involved relative movements of a...

Three experiments test the theory that verb meanings are more malleable than noun meanings in different semantic contexts, making a previously-seen verb difficult to remember when it appears in a new semantic context. Experiment 1 revealed that changing the direct object noun in a transitive sentence reduced recognition of a previously-seen verb, w...

When remembering an event, it is important to remember both the features of the event (e.g., a person and an action), and the connections among features (e.g., who performed which action). Emotion often enhances memory for stimulus features, but the relationship between emotion and the binding of features in memory is unclear. Younger and older adu...

Human knowledge is organized by concepts. Our access to the world is filtered through our concepts. Concepts allow us to communicate, to categorize objects and events into inductively powerful groups, to construct complicated thoughts out of more elementary mental building blocks, and to conserve memory resources by facilitating encodings that inco...

Two experiments provide evidence for an age-related deficit in the binding of actors with actions that is distinct from binding deficits associated with distraction or response pressure. Young and older adults viewed a series of actors performing different actions. Participants returned 1 week later for a recognition test. Older adults were more li...

Mistakes in eyewitness identification frequently occur when incorrect associations are made between a familiar person and the actions of another person. The present research demonstrates that actors do not need to be similar in appearance for such conjunction errors to occur. The actors can, in fact, be very different in appearance, even of differe...

Three experiments provide evidence for an age-related deficit in the binding of actors with their actions. Young and older adults were tested on their memory for a series of events, each involving an actor performing a simple action. Older adults had greater difficulty than did young adults at discriminating old events from novel conjunctions of fa...

This chapter reviews the evidence for an influence of object knowledge on verb learning. A number of lines of research provide evidence that the meanings of verbs are more general and flexible than are the meanings of nouns. In particular, the same verb can have markedly different meanings in the context of different objects and the different nouns...

An increase in task difficulty or time pressure during the performance of cognitive tasks decreased the ability of older adults to recall the tasks. In Experiments 1 and 2, adult age differences in recall of cognitive tasks were smaller for easier than for more difficult tasks, and, in Experiment 3, adult age differences were smaller for recall of...

Three experiments revealed that memory for verbs is more dependent on semantic context than is memory for nouns. The participants in Experiment 1 were asked to remember either nouns or verbs from intransitive sentences. A recognition test included verbatim sentences, sentences with an old noun and a new verb, sentences with an old verb and a new no...

Issues related to concepts and categorization are nearly ubiquitous in psychology because of people’s natural tendency to perceive a thing as something. We have a powerful impulse to interpret our world. This act of interpretation, an act of “seeing something as X ” rather than simply seeing it (Wittgenstein, 1953), is fundamentally an act of categ...

This paper reviews the evidence for Kersten's (1998a) theory of a division of labor between nouns and relational terms in the description of a motion event. According to this theory, nouns tend to convey intrinsic motion, or motion defined with respect to a frame of reference internal to the object carrying it out. Relational terms, on the other ha...

Memory for actions that are performed is substantially better than memory for descriptions of actions (e.g., Earles, 1996). In fact, people may form memories for actions even if they do not intend to or want to remember them. The directed forgetting paradigm was used to test the ability of younger and older adults to intentionally forget simple act...

Three experiments provide support for a key prediction of Newport's (1988, 1990) “Less Is More” hypothesis. Adults were found to learn a miniature artificial language better when they were initially presented with only small segments of language than when they were presented immediately with the full complexity of the language. Adults who were pres...

Younger and older adults were asked to remember noun pairs (e.g., head - cap), verb pairs (e.g., bounce - throw), and verb-noun pairs (e.g., break - stick). For half of the pairs, participants performed, using imagined objects, an action or series of related actions for each pair. For the other half of the pairs, participants read, but did not perf...

Confusions arise when 'stable' is equated with 'foundational.' Spurred on by the image of a house`s foundation, it is tempting to think that something provides effective support to the extent that it is rigid and stable. We will argue that when considering the role of perception in grounding our concepts, exactly the opposite is true. Our perceptua...

Immediate and delayed recall of performed cognitive activities was examined in 136 adults aged 20 to 85. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to assess the association between perceptual speed and age differences in activity memory. The age-related variance in delayed activity recall was reduced by 52% by the statistical control of perceptual...

Age differences in adults' memory for performed actions (e.g., wave hand) are sometimes smaller than age differences in memory for nonperformed phrases. In this study, we examined the conditions under which performance reduces age differences in recall. Younger and older adults performed or read verb-noun phrases that were either related (e.g., act...

Four experiments provide evidence that people are biased to associate particular types of motion with nouns and different types of motion with verbs. Novel nouns and verbs were related to two types of motion: (1) path, or the direction of motion of one character with respect to the other character, and (2) movement orientation, or the direction a c...

This research provides evidence that there are 2 competing attentional mechanisms in category learning. Attentional persistence directs attention to attributes previously found to be predictive, whereas attentional contrast directs attention to attribute values that have not already been associated with a category. Three experiments provided eviden...

After they performed each of a series of activities, older and younger adults were asked to rate the difficulty of the activity. Recall of the activities was later tested. Older adults tended to remember those activities they perceived to be less difficult, whereas younger adults tended to remember those activities they perceived to be more difficu...

This study examines the association of nouns and verbs with 2 different kinds of motion. Extrinsic motion is the motion of 1 object with respect to another object, whereas intrinsic motion is the motion of an object (or its parts) defined with respect to itself. Several experiments are reported that compare the association of these types of motion...

This research investigated the learning of event categories, in particular, categories of simple animated events, each involving a causal interaction between 2 characters. Four experiments examined whether correlations among attributes of events are easier to learn when they form part of a rich correlational structure than when they are independent...

This study contrasts the learning of two different kinds of motion. The first of these we call extrinsic motion, or the motion of one object with respect to another, reference object. The second we call intrinsic motion, or the motion of an object or its parts expressed with respect to the object itself. An experiment tests for people's abilities t...

A componential analysis was conducted to determine the locus of adult age differences in symbol arithmetic. Measures of the duration of two proposed components, substitution of digits for symbols and the addition or subtraction of the digits resulting from these substitutions, were obtained from 52 young adults and 52 older adults. Tests of working...

How do people learn categories of simple, transitive events? We claim that people attempt to recover from input the predictive structure that is the basis of 'good', inferentially rich categories. Prior work with object categories found facilitation in learning a component relation (e.g., feathers covary with beak) when that correlation was embedde...

The goal of this study was to test a foreign language teaching method inspired by Newport (1990)'s Less is More hypothesis. Computerized French language lessons were presented to 112 adults over two one-hour sessions. Learning trials were presented either in full sentences to resemble the adult learning environment, or in small phrases that increme...

Ph.D. Dorrit Billman