How can it be explained that early literacy and numeracy share variance? We specifically tested whether the correlation between four early literacy skills (rhyming, letter knowledge, emergent writing, and orthographic knowledge) and simple sums (non-symbolic and story condition) reduced after taking into account preschool attention control,…

Decision-makers effortlessly balance the need for urgency against the need for caution. Theoretical and neurophysiological accounts have explained this tradeoff solely in terms of the "quantity" of evidence required to trigger a decision (the "threshold"). This explanation has also been used as a benchmark test for evaluating…

The question of which cognitive impairments are primarily associated with dyslexia has been a source of continuous debate. This study examined the cognitive profile of Hebrew-speaking compensated adult dyslexics and investigated whether their cognitive abilities accounted for a unique variance in their reading performance. Sixty-nine young adults…

When students read for learning, they frequently are required to integrate text and graphics information into coherent knowledge structures. The following study aimed at analyzing how students deal with texts and how they deal with graphics when they try to integrate the two sources of information. Furthermore, the study investigated differences…

Recent studies suggest that there appears to be a similar developmental sequence in the understanding of mental states in both internal-state language and in standard theory-of-mind tasks. These findings suggest possible developmental relations between children's ability to talk and think about the mind. Two experiments investigated the concurrent…

This study investigates children's metarepresentational competence (MRC) with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa's (2002) seminal work on MRC in mathematics and sciences as background, it aims to assess the relative importance children attribute to several criteria for representational adequacy…

We explored perspective-taking behavior in a visuospatial mental rotation task that requires listeners to adopt an egocentric or "other-centric" frame of reference. In the current task, objects could be interpreted relative to the point-of-view of the listener (egocentric) or of a simulated partner (other-centric). Across three studies, we…

We argue that 4 fundamental gestalt phenomena in perception apply to the control of motor action. First, a motor gestalt, like a perceptual gestalt, is holistic in the sense that it is processed as a single unit. This notion is consistent with reaction time results indicating that all gestures for a brief unit of action must be programmed prior to…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can process both interpretations of an ambiguous figure (e.g. rabbit/duck) when told about the ambiguity, however they tend not to do so spontaneously. Here we show that although adolescents with ASD can explicitly experience such "reversals", implicit measures suggest they are conceptually…

In the current study, we explored the influence of synesthesia on memory for word lists. We tested 10 grapheme-color synesthetes who reported an experience of color when reading letters or words. We replicated a previous finding that memory is compromised when synesthetic color is incongruent with perceptual color. Beyond this, we found that,…

Through study of clinical cases with brain lesions as well as neuroimaging studies of cognitive processing of words and pictures, it has been established that material-specific hemispheric specialization exists. It remains however unclear whether such specialization holds true for all processes involved in complex tasks, such as recognition…

This study aimed to evaluate spatial function in subjects with Williams syndrome (WS) by using a large-scale task with multiple rewards and comparing the spatial abilities of WS subjects with those of mental age-matched control children. In the present spatial task, WS participants had to explore an open space to search nine rewards placed in…

Attention and working memory are fundamental for selecting and maintaining behaviorally relevant information. Not only do both processes closely intertwine at the cognitive level, but they implicate similar functional brain circuitries, namely the frontoparietal and the frontostriatal networks, which are innervated by cholinergic and dopaminergic…

In this study of the project DyAdd, three aspects of visual attention were investigated in adults (18-55 years) with dyslexia (n = 35) or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD, n = 22), and in healthy controls (n = 35). Temporal characteristics of visual attention were assessed with Attentional Blink (AB), capacity of visual attention…

Age-related hearing loss (ARHL), known as presbycusis, is characterized by progressive deterioration of auditory sensitivity, loss of the auditory sensory cells, and central processing functions associated with the aging process. ARHL is the third most prevalent chronic condition in older Americans, after hypertension and arthritis, and is a…