Previous studies demonstrated that dual-task impairments are higher in children than in young adults. A previous study systematically assessed the sources of these larger dual-task impairments by identifying age-related differences in capacity limitations during dual-task processing. Capacity limitations in central cognitive processes were present…

Perception and action are closely related. Responses are assumed to be represented in terms of their perceptual effects, allowing direct links between action and perception. In this regard, the integration of features of stimuli (S) and responses (R) into S-R bindings is a key mechanism for action control. Previous research focused on the…

Previous research has shown that early in the word recognition process, there is some degree of uncertainty concerning letter identity and letter position. Here, we examined whether this uncertainty also extends to the mapping of letter features onto letters, as predicted by the Bayesian Reader (Norris & Kinoshita, 2012). Indeed, anecdotal…

The genetic diversity contained in a population can be used to engage the audience in an understanding of human genotypes and phenotypes. With a series of simple examples of well-documented sensory phenotypes related to the perception of colour, aromas or food preference, the diversity of the audience can be easily explored. The collecting of…

Memory performance in linear order reasoning tasks (A > B, B > C, C > D, etc.) shows quicker, and more accurate responses to queries on wider (AD) than narrower (AB) pairs on a hypothetical linear mental model (A -- B -- C -- D). While indicative of an analogue representation, research so far did not provide positive evidence for spatial…

Research on the topic of distractor inhibition has used different empirical approaches to study how the human mind selects relevant information from the environment, and the results are controversially discussed. One key question that typically arises is how selection deals with the irrelevant information. We used a new selection task, in which…

Six experiments examined the influence of emotional valence on the tagging and enumeration of multiple targets. Experiments 1, 5 and 6 found that there was no difference in the efficiency of tagging/enumerating multiple negative or positive stimuli. Experiment 2 showed that, when neutral-expression face distractors were present, enumerating…

In a variety of conflict paradigms, target and distractor stimuli are defined in terms of perceptual features. Interference evoked by distractor stimuli tends to be reduced when the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials is decreased, suggesting conflict-induced perceptual filtering (i.e., adjusting the processing weights assigned to stimuli…

This article presents an eye-tracking study using a novel combination of visual saliency maps and "area-of-interest" analyses to explore online feature extraction during category learning in infants. Category learning in 12-month-olds (N = 22) involved a transition from looking at high-saliency image regions to looking at more…

How does executive attentional control contribute to memory for sequences of visual objects, and what does this reveal about storage and processing in working memory? Three experiments examined the impact of a concurrent executive load (backward counting) on memory for sequences of individually presented visual objects. Experiments 1 and 2 found…

Accounts of task-set control generally assume that the current task's stimulus-response (S-R) rules must be elevated to a privileged state of activation. How are they represented in this state? In 3 task-cuing experiments, we tested the hypothesis that phonological working memory is used to represent S-R rules for task-set control by getting…

Although developmental dyslexia is often referred to as a cross-modal disturbance, tests of different modalities using the same stimuli are lacking. We compared the performance of 23 children with dyslexia and 42 chronologically matched control readers on reading versus repetition tasks and visual versus auditory lexical decision using the same…

Change blindness refers to the difficulty most people find in detecting a difference between two pictures when these are presented successively, with a brief interruption between. Attention at the site of the change is required for detection. A number of studies have investigated change blindness in adults and children with autism spectrum…

Five experiments examined crowding effects with letter and symbol stimuli. Experiments 1 through 3 compared 2-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) identification accuracy for isolated targets presented left and right of fixation with targets flanked either by 2 other items of the same category or a single item situated to the right or left of targets.…

A visual attention (VA) span disorder has been reported in dyslexic children as potentially responsible for their poor reading outcome. The purpose of the current paper was to identify the cerebral correlates of this VA span disorder. For this purpose, 12 French dyslexic children with severe reading and VA span disorders and 12 age-matched control…