Visual perspective-taking is the ability to perceive the world from another person's perspective, and research on visual perspective-taking ability in children with autism spectrum conditions yielded inconsistent results. To solve a visual perspective-taking task, people can mentally rotate themselves to another person's location (embodied…

Recent evidence in adults indicates that object perceptual processing is affected by the competition between action representations. In the absence of a specific motor plan, reachable objects associated with distinct structural (grasping) and functional (using) actions (e.g., calculator) elicit slower judgments than objects associated with similar…

Representations of the fingers are embodied in our cognition and influence performance in enumeration tasks. Among deaf signers, the fingers also serve as a tool for communication in sign language. Previous studies in normal hearing (NH) participants showed effects of embodiment (i.e., embodied numerosity) on tactile enumeration using the fingers…

Purpose: The purpose was (1) to test a new version of a mental rotation task (MRT), which assesses mental rotation abilities of men and women for sport-specific items, and (2) to investigate potential differences in MRT performance, which are based on athletic expertise. Methods: Eighty-eight basketball experts (42 females) and 123 novices (64…

Our visual system samples external information, adjusts its sensitivity and constructs a stable representation of the world that allows us to perceive and interact with objects in our environments. Visual information with different levels of complexity is processed through the hierarchically organized visual cortical areas. This dissertation…

Children's ability to discriminate nonsymbolic number (e.g., the number of items in a set) is a commonly studied predictor of later math skills. Number discrimination improves throughout development, but what drives this improvement is unclear. Competing theories suggest that it may be due to a sharpening numerical representation or an improved…

In the present study, we investigated the accuracy of eyewitness accounts over time from a metacognitive perspective, in which post-retrieval monitoring and control processes play a crucial role in mediating between memory retrieval and ultimate memory performance. In two experiments, participants viewed a narrated slide show depicting ordinary…

Purpose: This study compared global coherence (GC) in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) to a healthy older adult (HOA) group during single (sitting) and dual (stationary cycling) tasks. Additionally, it explored the relationship between GC and cognition in PD. Method: Thirty-seven individuals with PD and 19 HOAs participated in the…

Previous research has shown that Stroop effects interact with working memory capacity (WMC) more strongly with lists of mostly congruent items. Although the predominant explanation for this relationship is goal maintenance, some research has challenged whether listwide effects truly reflect goal-maintenance abilities. The current study improved…

This study explored whether the color of letters could influence letter discrimination task performances and whether this effect of color could be modulated by processing level (global vs. local) and attention level of color (color-attended vs. color-unattended). We used the Navon letters in red, green, or white as stimuli at a relatively small…

Studies have identified deficits in attention in individuals with aphasia in language and nonlanguage tasks. Attention may play a role in the construction and use of language, as well as in learning and the process of rehabilitation, yet the role of attention on rehabilitation is not fully understood. To improve the understanding of attention and…

Some previous studies have shown that increased stress hormone levels have beneficial effects on memory encoding; however, there is no clear consensus on which encoding-related processes are affected by stress hormones. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between interindividual differences in neuroendocrine response to acute…

Research indicates that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are superior at local processing while the integration of local features to global percepts is reduced. Here, we compared infants at familiar risk for ASD to typically developing infants in terms of global coherence processing at 5 months of age, using steady state visually…

Using Chinese characters, we investigated how stroke count and frequency of use influence attention and short-term memory (STM) encoding in Mainland Chinese speakers. To isolate specific components of attention we employed the Theory of Visual Attention (TVA), which allowed estimates of STM capacity, processing speed, and the threshold of visual…

In direct interactions with others, 9-month-old infants' learning about objects is facilitated when the interaction partner addresses the infant through eye contact before looking toward an object. In this study we investigated whether similar factors promote infants' observational learning from third-party interactions. In Experiment 1,…