Prior eye-tracking studies of spoken sentence comprehension have found that the presence of two potential referents, e.g., two frogs, can guide listeners toward a Modifier interpretation of "Put the frog on the napkin..." despite strong lexical biases associated with "Put" that support a Goal interpretation of the temporary ambiguity (Tanenhaus,…

When two visual targets, Target 1 (T1) and Target 2 (T2), are presented among a rapid sequence of distractors, processing of T1 produces an attentional blink. Typically, processing of T2 is markedly impaired, except when T1 and T2 are adjacent (Lag 1 sparing). However, if a shift of task set--a change in task requirements from T1 to T2--occurs,…

Nine studies showed a bidirectional link (a) between a global processing style and generation of similarities and (b) between a local processing style and generation of dissimilarities. In Experiments 1-4, participants were primed with global versus local perception styles and then asked to work on an allegedly unrelated generation task. Across…

Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping…

Using an attentional blink paradigm, we show that the typical enhancement of perception for emotionally arousing events is significantly reduced in Asperger's syndrome (AS) at short inter-target intervals. Control experiments demonstrate that this finding cannot be attributed to differences in the perceived arousal of the stimuli, or to a global…

The aim of this study was to determine what visual information expert soccer players encode when they are asked to make a decision. We used a repetition-priming paradigm to test the hypothesis that experts encode a soccer pattern's structure independently of the players' physical characteristics (i.e., posture and morphology). The participants…

Some recent evidence suggests that mental rotation of characters in children aged 7 or 8 years might be lateralized to the left parietal hemisphere. An alternative statement exists, however, the finding might be completely unspecific for mental rotation but either be simply a function of task difficulty or a consequence of the use of characters as…

Previous research has established that people vary in action orientation, a tendency toward decisiveness and initiative, versus state orientation, a tendency toward indecisiveness and hesitation (J. Kuhl & J. Beckmann, 1994b). In the present 3 studies, the authors examined whether action orientation versus state orientation regulates cognitive…

Human society depends on the ability to remember the actions of other individuals, which is information that must be stored in a temporary buffer to guide behavior after actions have been observed. To date, however, the storage capacity, contents, and architecture of working memory for observed actions are unknown. In this article, the author…

In this study, participants performed a sentence-picture verification task in which they read sentences about an agent viewing an object (e.g., moose) through a differentially occlusive medium (e.g., clean vs. fogged goggles), and then verified whether a subsequently pictured object was mentioned in the previous sentence. Picture verification…

This study was designed to explore how adults with autism and Asperger syndrome (ASD) would visually process compound figures. They were tested in two tasks, one involving hierarchical global/local stimuli, the other involving face-like or geometrical stimuli where the processing of the inter-elemental spatial relationships was emphasized. Adults…

We performed an event-related potential study to investigate the self-relevance effect in object recognition. Three stimulus categories were prepared: SELF (participant's own objects), FAMILIAR (disposable and public objects, defined as objects with less-self-relevant familiarity), and UNFAMILIAR (others' objects). The participants' task was to…

Previous studies indicate that the benefits of dividing an information processing load across both cerebral hemispheres outweigh the costs of interhemispheric transfer as tasks become more difficult or cognitively complex. This is demonstrated as better performance when two stimuli to be compared are presented one to each visual field and…

To increase our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in internal working models of attachment, this study investigated the relationship between secure attachment and attentional breadth to mother using a dual task design. The content of the cues (mother vs. unfamiliar women) and the duration of the presentation of the cues (34 msec,…

Why females generally perform better on language tasks than males is unknown. Sex differences were here identified in children (ages 9-15) across two linguistic tasks for words presented in two modalities. Bilateral activation in the inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri and activation in the left fusiform gyrus of girls was greater than in…