With a rising aging population, it is important to develop behavioral tasks that assess and track cognitive decline, and to identify protective factors that promote healthy brain aging. Mnemonic discrimination tasks that rely on pattern separation mechanisms are a promising metric to detect subtle age-related memory impairments. Behavioral…

Drawing on dual-process theories of cognitive function, the degree to which spatial contiguity influences incidental learning outcomes was examined. It was hypothesized that spatial contiguity would mediate what was learned even in the absence of an explicit learning goal. To test this hypothesis, 149 adults completed a multimedia-related task…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present difficulties in forming relations among items and context. This capacity for relational binding is also involved in spatial navigation and research on this topic in ASD is scarce and inconclusive. Using a computerised version of the Morris Water Maze task, ASD participants showed particular…

The ability to flexibly allocate attention to goal-relevant information is pivotal for the completion of high-level cognitive processes. For instance, in comprehending illustrated texts, the reader permanently has to switch the attentional focus between the text and the corresponding picture in order to extract relevant information from both…

Deaf Children usually achieve lower scores on numerical tasks than normally hearing peers. Explanations for mathematical disabilities in hearing children are based on quantity representation deficits (Geary, 1994) or on deficits in accessing these representations (Rousselle & Noël, 2008). The present study aimed to verify, by means of symbolic…

A sparse mask that persists beyond the duration of a target can reduce its visibility, a phenomenon called "object substitution masking". Y. Jiang and M. M. Chun (2001a) found an asymmetric pattern of substitution masking such that a mask on the peripheral side of the target caused stronger substitution masking than on the central side.…

Evidence from experiments designed to elicit the phenomenon of perisaccadic mislocalization of briefly presented probe stimuli suggests that mechanisms implicated in the planning of a saccade are also implicated in the means by which spatial constancy is maintained across saccades. We postulated that impairments of visual attention observed in…

Studies suggest motor deficit asymmetry may help predict the pattern of cognitive impairment in individuals with Parkinson disease (PD). We tested this hypothesis using a highly validated and sensitive spatial memory task, spatial delayed response (SDR), and clinical and neuroimaging measures of PD asymmetry. We predicted SDR performance would be…

Subjects with PDD excel on certain visuo-spatial tasks, amongst which visual search tasks, and this has been attributed to enhanced perceptual discrimination. However, an alternative explanation is that subjects with PDD show a different, more effective search strategy. The present study aimed to test both hypotheses, by measuring eye movements…

Pseudoneglect is traditionally viewed as reflecting right hemisphere specialization for processing spatial information, which brings about relatively greater activation of the right hemisphere and orienting towards the contralateral space. Such interpretation implies that the leftward attentional bias is a population trait. Animal studies,…

Eight experiments investigated the effects of visual, spatial, auditory, and executive interference on the symbolic comparison of animal size and ferocity, semantic goodness of words, and numbers. Dynamic visual noise (DVN) and the reading of visually presented stimulus items were shown to selectively interfere with response times on the animal…

Multielement visual tracking and visual search are 2 tasks that are held to require visual-spatial attention. The authors used the attentional operating characteristic (AOC) method to determine whether both tasks draw continuously on the same attentional resource (i.e., whether the 2 tasks are mutually exclusive). The authors found that observers…