Background: The aim of the present study was to investigate the following issues: (1) Do students with borderline intellectual functioning have a pervasive pattern of impaired working memory skills across both verbal and visuo-spatial domains? (2) Is there evidence for impairment in executive function skills, and which tasks indicate greater…

Selective attention has been hypothesized to reduce distractor interference at both perceptual and postperceptual levels (Lavie, 2005), respectively, by focusing perceptual resources on the attended location and by blocking at postperceptual levels distractors that survive perceptual selection. This study measured the impact of load on these…

Some people report that they consistently and involuntarily associate time events, such as months of the year, with specific spatial locations; a condition referred to as time-space synesthesia. The present study investigated the manner in which such synesthetic time-space associations affect visuo-spatial attention via an endogenous cuing…

This study aims to investigate the types of difficulty encountered by children with nonverbal (visuospatial) learning disabilities (NLD) during the processing of spatial information derived from descriptions. Two spatial descriptions--one in survey, one in route perspective--and one nonspatial description were orally presented to children aged…

This study investigated how young children's increasingly flexible use of spatial reference frames enables accurate search for hidden objects by using a task that 3-year-olds have been shown to perform with great accuracy and 2-year-olds have been shown to perform inaccurately. Children watched as an object was rolled down a ramp, behind a panel…

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder, which stems from a genetic deletion on chromosome 7 and causes a profound weakness in visuospatial cognition. Our current study explores how orientation perception may contribute to the visuospatial deficits in WS. In Experiment 1, we found that WS individuals and normal 3-4 year olds…

Like adults, infants use working memory to represent occluded objects and can update these memory representations to reflect changes to a scene that unfold over time. Here we tested the limits of infants' ability to update object representations in working memory. Eleven-month-old infants participated in a modified foraging task in which they saw…

The present study adopted a cognitive linguistic framework--Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classification of motion events--to investigate how second-language (L2) Chinese learners come to express motion events in a targetlike manner. Fifty-five U.S. university students and 20 native speakers of Chinese participated in the study. A…

This study investigated intellectual development in 4-7 years old Greek and Chinese children. They were examined on speeded performance, working memory, reasoning, and self-awareness tasks in order to investigate possible effects of learning the Chinese logographic system on possible differences in intellectual development between these ethnic…

Two experiments were reported that aimed at investigating the development of spatial analysis of hierarchical patterns in children between 3 and 9 years of age. A total of 108 children participated in the drawing experiment, and 224 children were tested in a force-choice similarity judgment task. In both tasks, participants were exposed to…

Aim: This study investigated the nature of coordination and control problems in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD). Method: Seven adults (two males, five females, age range 20-28y; mean 23y, SD 2y 8mo) and eight children with DCD (six males, two females, age range 7-9y; mean 8y, SD 8mo), and 10 without DCD (seven males, three…

Object-location memory is an important form of spatial memory, comprising different subcomponents that each process specific types of information within memory, i.e. remembering objects, remembering positions and binding these features in memory. In the current study we investigated the neural correlates of binding categorical (relative) or…

Mnemonic deficits in patients with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage arising from temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) are traditionally constrained to long-term episodic memory, sparing short-term and working memory (WM). This view of WM as being independent of MTL structures has recently been challenged by a small number of patient and neuroimaging…

Oscillatory synchrony in the gamma band (30-120 Hz) has been involved in various cognitive functions including conscious perception and learning. Explicit memory encoding, in particular, relies on enhanced gamma oscillations. Does this finding extend to unconscious memory encoding? Can we dissociate gamma oscillations related to unconscious…

Inspection time (IT) measures speed of information processing without the confounding influence of motor speed. While IT has been found to relate to cognitive abilities in adults and older children, no measure of IT has been validated for use with children younger than 6 years. This study examined the validity of a new measure of IT for preschool…