Background: The ability to understand figurative language, including metaphors and proverbs, decreases with age, although the phenomenon is not universal. Cognitive capacities and education play an important role in the competence connected with figurative language use and comprehension in people during the second half of life. Aims: To identify…

"Prosthesis" and the "human hand" have been terms used by various philosophers in order to describe the interaction that binds together the human being and the technical artefact -- Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida being among the most important of these philosophers. In Bernard Stiegler's philosophy, however, these notions…

The objective of this research was to determine the predominant learning strategy that is related to the development of the autonomy of students belonging to the seventh semester from a public educational institution in Lima. It was developed as a substantive research and with a quantitative approach. Its design was non-experimental and…

We examined whether bilinguals' conceptual representation of homonyms in one language are influenced by meanings in the other. One hundred and seventeen Spanish-English bilinguals generated sentences for 62 English homonyms that were also cognates with Spanish and which shared at least one meaning with Spanish (e.g., plane/"plano"). Production…

Representational Momentum (RepMo) refers to the phenomenon that the vanishing position of a moving target is perceived as displaced ahead in the direction of movement. Originally taken to reflect a strict internalization of physical momentum, the finding that the target implied mass did not have an effect led to its subsequent reinterpretation as…

People tend to assume that the motivations for their behavior--whether choosing a school, buying a car or pursuing a particular career--are readily available to them, waiting to be articulated. But a great deal of new multi-disciplinary research--in psychology, cognition, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology--is suggesting otherwise. In…

What are the consequences of calling things by their names? Six experiments investigated how classifying familiar objects with basic-level names (chairs, tables, and lamps) affected recognition memory. Memory was found to be worse for items that were overtly classified with the category name--as reflected by lower hit rates--compared with items…

Two experiments investigated whether motion metaphors for time affected the perception of spatial motion. Participants read sentences either about literal motion through space or metaphorical motion through time written from either the ego-moving or object-moving perspective. Each sentence was followed by a cartoon clip. Smiley-moving clips showed…

In 2 studies, the authors used a combination of psychometric and experimental techniques to investigate the effects of domain-general and domain-specific working memory factors on offline decisions concerning attachment of an ambiguous relative clause. Both studies used English and Dutch stimuli presented to English- and Dutch-speaking…

This study examined language and executive functions (EF) in high-functioning school-aged individuals with autism and individually matched controls. Relationships between executive, language, and social functioning were also examined. Participants with autism exhibited difficulty on measures of expressive grammar, figurative language, planning,…

Studies support the hypothesis that images aroused by discreet verbal stimuli can be integrated into complex images with the result that: (a) storage capacity requirements are reduced, and (b) recall of one component of the image leads to effective redintegration of the rest. (JB)