The association between a word and typical location (e.g., cloud-up) appears to modulate healthy individuals' response times and visual attention. This study examined whether similar effects can be observed in a clinical population characterized by difficulties in both spatial representation and lexical processing. In an eye-tracking experiment,…

We examined the perception of an ambiguous squares stimulus evoking bistable perception in a sample of 31 individuals with autistic spectrum condition and 22 matched typical adults. The perception of the ambiguous figure was manipulated by adaptation to unambiguous figures and/or by placing the ambiguous figure into a context of unambiguous…

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorders, and daily transient feelings of anxiety (or "stress") are ubiquitous. However, the precise impact of both transient and pathological anxiety on higher-order cognitive functions, including short- and long-term memory, is poorly understood. A clearer understanding of the…

Structures in the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex, are known to be essential for the formation of long-term memory. Recent animal and human studies have investigated whether perirhinal cortex might also be important for visual perception. In our study, using a simultaneous oddity discrimination task, rats with…

Paired associates learning is impaired in both schizophrenia and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), which may reflect hippocampal pathology. In addition, schizophrenia is characterized by the dysfunction of the retino-geniculo-striatal magnocellular (M) visual pathway. The purpose of this study was to investigate the interaction between…

The expertise of adults in face perception is facilitated by their ability to rapidly detect that a stimulus is a face. In two experiments, we examined the role of early visual input in the development of face detection by testing patients who had been treated as infants for bilateral congenital cataract. Experiment 1 indicated that, at age 9 to…

The capacity to learn new visuomotor associations is fundamental to adaptive motor behavior. Evidence suggests visuomotor learning deficits in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the exact nature of these deficits and the ability of dopamine medication to improve them are under-explored. Previous studies suggested that learning driven by large and…

Two experiments are reported that use patients with visual extinction to examine how visual attention is influenced by action information in images. In Experiment 1 patients saw images of objects that were either correctly or incorrectly colocated for action, with the objects held by hands that were congruent or incongruent with those used…

Schizophrenia patients exhibit perceptual and cognitive deficits, including in visual motion processing. Given that cognitive systems depend upon perceptual inputs, improving patients' perceptual abilities may be an effective means of cognitive intervention. In healthy people, motion perception can be enhanced through perceptual learning, but it…

Background: We may improve our understanding of the role of common versus unique risk factors in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by examining ADHD-related cognitive deficits in single- (SPX), and multi-incidence (MPX) families. Given that individuals from multiplex (MPX) families are likely to share genetic vulnerability for the…

Aim: Children with congenital heart disease (CHD) are at risk of developing neurocognitive problems. However, as these problems are usually identified after cardiac surgery, it is unclear whether they resulted from the surgery or whether they pre-existed and hence might be explained by complications and events associated with the heart disease…

The underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms of the ability to discriminate left from right are hardly explored. Clinical studies from patients with impairments of left-right discrimination (LRD) and neuroimaging data suggest that the left angular gyrus is particularly involved in LRD. Moreover, it is argued that the often reported sex…

Deficits in short-term memory are common in adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but their current ADHD symptoms cannot well predict their short-term performance. Taking a developmental perspective, we wanted to clarify the association between ADHD symptoms at early childhood and short-term memory in late childhood and…

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) typically suffer from an asymmetric degeneration of dopaminergic cells in the substantia nigra, resulting in right-sided (RPD) or left-sided (LPD) predominance of motor symptomatology. As the dopaminergic system is also involved in attention, we examined horizontal and vertical orienting of attention in LPD…

Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) are two different genetical disorders both characterized, among other features, by muscular hypotonia. Postural control seems to be impaired in both conditions. The aim of the present study was to quantitatively compare postural control in adult PWS and EDS using stabilometric platform…