Spontaneous classification was assessed using a free serial search task in 18 school-aged children at the high functioning end of the autistic spectrum and compared with results from age-matched typically developing controls. The task required participants to touch shapes in an exhaustive non-repetitive sequence. The positions of the items varied…

Previous research overwhelmingly suggests that feelings of ease people experience while processing information lead them to infer that their comprehension is high, whereas feelings of difficulty lead them to infer that their comprehension is low. However, the inferences people draw from their experiences of processing fluency should also vary in…

The "self" is a complex multidimensional construct deeply embedded and in many ways defined by our relations with the social world. Individuals with autism are impaired in both self-referential and other-referential social cognitive processing. Atypical neural representation of the self may be a key to understanding the nature of such impairments.…

We studied the age-related differences in inspection time and multiple cognitive domains in a group of monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins aged 7 to 17 years. Data from 111 twin pairs and 19 singleton siblings were included. We found clear age-related trends towards more efficient visual information processing in older participants. There…

This study investigated the prevalence and stability of latent classes at risk for reading disabilities (RD) in elementary-aged children whose first language is Spanish. To this end, children (N = 489) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 at Wave 1 were administered a battery of reading, vocabulary, and cognitive measures (short-term memory [STM], working memory…

The purpose of this study was to examine if any relationship exists between "Parenting Stress Index" factors and child's cognitive abilities (Cattell-Horn-Carroll Theory of general intelligence). The participant population consisted of 16 mothers and 16 children. The cognitive abilities were measured by using one of the following measures: (1)…

Many studies have explored the contribution of different factors from diverse theoretical perspectives to the explanation of academic performance. These factors have been identified as having important implications not only for the study of learning processes, but also as tools for improving curriculum designs, tutorial systems, and students'…

Various taxonomies of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) items have been proposed in the literature to account for performance on the test. In the present article, three such taxonomies based on information processing, namely Carpenter, Just and Shell's [Carpenter, P.A., Just, M.A., & Shell, P., (1990). What one intelligence test…

Although the dominant approach posits that developmental dyslexia arises from deficits in systems that are exclusively linguistic in nature (i.e., phonological deficit theory), dyslexics show a variety of lower level deficits in sensory and attentional processing. Although their link to the reading disorder remains contentious, recent empirical…

This article addresses issues in embodied sentence processing from a "cognitive neural systems" approach that combines analysis of the behavior in question, analysis of the known neurophysiological bases of this behavior, and the synthesis of a neuro-computational model of embodied sentence processing that can be applied to and tested in the…

Although executive functions can be improved by training, little is known about the extent to which these training-related benefits can be transferred to other tasks, or whether this transfer can be modulated by the type of training. This study investigated lifespan changes in near transfer of task-switching training to structurally similar tasks…

In his 1982 response to the myth that "creativity is too difficult to measure," Dr. Joe Khatena (a long-time contributor to the literature on creativity), characterized creativity as the "most exciting dimension of mental functioning." Building on a three-dimensional view of creativity (emphasizing the "individual," the "environment," and the…

The present report assesses information processing in the toddler years (24 and 36 months), using a cohort of preterms (less than 1750 g) and full-terms initially seen in infancy. The children received a battery of tasks tapping 11 specific abilities from four domains--memory, processing speed, attention, and representational competence. The same…

Psychometric intelligence correlates with reaction time in elementary cognitive tasks, as well as with performance in time discrimination and judgment tasks. It has remained unclear, however, to what extent these correlations are due to top-down mechanisms, such as attention, and bottom-up mechanisms, i.e. basic neural properties that influence…

Although it is well established that preterms as a group do poorly relative to their full-term peers on tests of global cognitive functioning, the basis for this relative deficiency is less understood. The present paper examines preterm deficits in core cognitive abilities and determines their role in mediating preterm/full-term differences in IQ.…