Lexical access is a core component of word processing. In order to produce or comprehend a word, language users must access word forms in their mental lexicon. However, despite its involvement in both tasks, previous research has often studied lexical access in either production or comprehension alone. Therefore, it is unknown to which extent…

Two experiments are presented that explore online counterfactual processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using eye-tracking. Participants' eye movements were tracked while they read factual and counterfactual sentences in an anomaly detection task. In Experiment 1, the sentences depicted everyday counterfactual situations (e.g., "If…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present difficulties in forming relations among items and context. This capacity for relational binding is also involved in spatial navigation and research on this topic in ASD is scarce and inconclusive. Using a computerised version of the Morris Water Maze task, ASD participants showed particular…

Although increased age is associated with greater errors in spatial memory tasks, it is unclear if there are age differences in error types. To investigate this, 334 participants (ages 22-88) completed a task in which they remembered object locations across multiple study-test trials. Far and close error types were categorized based on the spatial…

We investigated the effects of age on proactive and reactive cognitive control in a large population sample of 809 individuals, ranging in age between 5 and 97 years. For that purpose, we used an anticue paradigm, which required a consistent remapping of cue location and response hand: Left-sided cues required right-hand responses and vice versa.…

There is accumulating evidence that training on working memory (WM) generalizes to other nontrained domains, and there are reports of transfer effects extending as far as to measures of fluid intelligence. Although there have been several demonstrations of such transfer effects in young adults and children, they have been difficult to demonstrate…

Relational frame theory (RFT) explicitly suggests that derived relational responding underlies complex verbally-based cognitive performances. The current study investigated whether the ability to respond in accordance with temporal relations between stimuli was predictive of performance on the four indices of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale,…

Three forms of a symbol-digit substitution task were administered to 62 female and 96 male college students. Results support the theory that the superior performance of women over men on the Digit-Symbol Substituion subtest of the Wechsler scales is due to their greater ability to encode symbols verbally. (Author/JAC)