Two experiments are presented that use tasks common in research in numerical cognition with young adults and older adults as subjects. In these tasks, one or two arrays of dots are displayed, and subjects decide whether there are more or fewer dots of one kind than another. Results show that older adults, relative to young adults, tend to rely…

Although hearing often declines with age, prior research has shown that older adults may benefit from multisensory input to a greater extent when compared to younger adults, a concept known as inverse effectiveness. While there is behavioral evidence in support of this phenomenon, less is known about its neural basis. The present functional MRI…

Purpose: As pulse rate increases beyond a few hundred Hertz, younger normal-hearing (NH) participants' ability to encode temporal information in band-limited acoustic pulse trains decreases, demonstrating a rate limitation in processing rapid temporal information. Rate discrimination abilities, however, have yet to be investigated in older NH…

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…

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…

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)