The aim of this experiment was to examine the preattentive processing of syllables in 9-11-year-old children with dyslexia and matched controls using the Mismatch Negativity (MMN), an auditory Event-Related brain potential (ERP) related to preattentive discrimination. Children were presented with a sequence of syllables that included standards…

Both taxonomic and thematic semantic relations have been studied extensively in behavioral studies and there is an emerging consensus that the anterior temporal lobe plays a particularly important role in the representation and processing of taxonomic relations, but the neural basis of thematic semantics is less clear. We used eye tracking to…

Computational models of hippocampal function propose that the hippocampus is capable of rapidly storing distinct representations through a process known as pattern separation. This prediction is supported by electrophysiological data from rodents and neuroimaging data from humans. Here, we test the prediction that damage to the hippocampus would…

In this training study, we aimed to selectively train participants' filtering mechanisms to enhance visual working memory (WM) efficiency. The highly restricted nature of visual WM capacity renders efficient filtering mechanisms crucial for its successful functioning. Filtering efficiency in visual WM can be measured via the lateralized change…

Controversy still exists over whether there is a magnocellular deficit associated with developmental dyslexia. Here we utilised a magnocellular system-biased phantom contour form discrimination task defined by high temporal frequency contrast reversals to compare contrast sensitivity in a group of children with dyslexia and an age- and nonverbal…

An important issue for understanding visual perception in autism concerns whether individuals with this neurodevelopmental disorder possess an advantage in processing local visual information, and if so, what is the nature of this advantage. Perception of movement speed is a visual process that relies on computation of local spatiotemporal signals…

Patients with right hemisphere lesions often omit or misread words on the left side of a text or the initial letters of single words, a phenomenon termed neglect dyslexia (ND). Omissions of words on the contralesional side of the page are considered as egocentric or space-based errors, whereas misread words can be viewed as a type of…

The role of the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in semantic memory is now firmly established. There is still controversy, however, regarding the specific role of this region in processing various types of concepts. There have been reports of patients suffering from semantic dementia (SD), a neurodegenerative condition in which the ATL is damaged…

It is widely reported that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) direct their attention in an atypical manner. When viewing complex scenes, typically developing individuals look at social aspects of scenes more rapidly than individuals with ASD. In the absence of a strong drive to extract social information, is something else capturing…

Considering the high risk for individuals with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (A-MCI) to progress towards Alzheimer's disease (AD), we investigated the efficacy of a non-pharmacological intervention, that is, cognitive training that could reduce cognitive difficulties and delay the cognitive decline. For this, we evaluated the efficacy of a…

Patients with anorexia nervosa frequently believe they are larger than they really are. The precise nature of this bias is not known: is it a false belief related to the patient's aesthetic and emotional attitudes towards her body? Or could it also reflect abnormal processing of the representation of the body in action? We tested this latter…

Dyslexia has been widely held to be associated with deficient temporal processing. It is, however, not established that the slower visual processing of dyslexic readers is not a secondary effect of task difficulty. To illustrate this we re-analyze data from Liddle et al. (2009) who studied temporal order judgment in dyslexia and plotted the…

Studies investigating reading and spelling difficulties heavily focused on the neural correlates of reading impairments, whereas spelling impairments have been largely neglected so far. Hence, the aim of the present study was to investigate brain structure and function of children with isolated spelling difficulties. Therefore, 31 children, aged…

Autism is thought to be associated with a bias towards detail-focussed processing. While the cognitive basis remains controversial, one strong hypothesis is that there are high processing costs associated with changing from local into global processing. A possible neural mechanism underlying this processing style is abnormal neural connectivity;…

There is now a large body of evidence suggesting that color and photographic detail exert an effect on recognition of visually presented familiar objects. However, an unresolved issue is whether these factors act at the visual, the semantic or lexical level of the recognition process. In the present study, we investigated this issue by having…