Objective: The neurobiological basis of inattentiveness, a core feature of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is not yet well understood. Structural abnormalities in thalamus, especially the pulvinar nuclei, have recently been reported in ADHD. Pulvinar nuclei maintain reciprocal connections with cortical/subcortical areas, and play…

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of three different screen sizes (small, medium and large) and two types of multimedia instruction (text only and text with pictorial annotation) on vocabulary learning. One hundred thirty-five Korean middle school students learning English as a foreign language were randomly distributed…

This longitudinal study examined the contribution of phonological awareness, phonological memory, and visuospatial ability to reading development in 142 English-speaking children from the start of kindergarten to the middle of Grade 2. Partial cross-lagged analyses revealed significant relationships between early performance on block design and…

The current study examined individual differences in children's phonological and visuospatial short-term memory as potential mediators of the relationship among attention problems and near- and long-term scholastic achievement. Nested structural equation models revealed that teacher-reported attention problems were associated negatively with…

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of several specific neurocognitive functions in developmental dyslexia (DD). The performances of 60 dyslexic children and 65 age-matched normally reading children were compared on tests of phonological abilities, visual processing, selective and sustained attention, implicit learning, and executive…

Two experiments were used to investigate the scope of imitation by testing whether 36-month-olds can learn to produce a categorization strategy through observation. After witnessing an adult sort a set of objects by a visible property (their color; Experiment 1) or a nonvisible property (the particular sounds produced when the objects were shaken;…

The present work investigated the effects of caffeine (0 mg, 100 mg, 200 mg, 400 mg) on a flanker task designed to test Posner's three visual attention network functions: alerting, orienting, and executive control [Posner, M. I. (2004). "Cognitive neuroscience of attention". New York, NY: Guilford Press]. In a placebo-controlled, double-blind…

Prior neuroimaging work on visual perceptual expertise has focused on changes in the visual system, ignoring possible effects of acquiring expert visual skills in nonvisual areas. We investigated expertise for reading musical notation, a skill likely to be associated with multimodal abilities. We compared brain activity in music-reading experts…

The concepts of God and Devil are well known across many cultures and religions, and often involve spatial metaphors, but it is not well known if our mental representations of these concepts affect visual cognition. To examine if exposure to divine concepts produces shifts of attention, participants completed a target detection task in which they…

The present study examined whether 6- and 9-month-old Caucasian infants could categorize faces according to race. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with different female faces from a common ethnic background (i.e. either Caucasian or Asian) and then tested with female faces from a novel race category. Nine-month-olds were able to form…

We explored whether rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) share one important feature of human essentialist reasoning: the capacity to track category membership across radical featural transformations. Specifically, we examined whether monkeys--like children (Keil, 1989)--expect a transformed object to have the internal properties of its original…

It is currently being debated whether human newborns' preference for faces is due to an unlearned, domain-specific and configural representation of the appearance of a face, or to general mechanisms, such as an up-down bias (favouring top-heavy stimuli, which have more elements in their upper part). Here we show that 2-day-old domestic chicks,…

How do humans use target-predictive contextual information to facilitate visual search? How are consistently paired scenic objects and positions learned and used to more efficiently guide search in familiar scenes? For example, humans can learn that a certain combination of objects may define a context for a kitchen and trigger a more efficient…

Perceiving objects activates the representation of their affordances. For example, experiments on compatibility effects showed that categorizing objects by producing certain handgrips (power or precision) is faster if the requested responses are compatible with the affordance elicited by the size of objects (e.g., small or large). The article…

Adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and typically developing (TD) controls underwent a rigorous psychophysical assessment that measured contrast sensitivity to seven spatial frequencies (0.5-20 cycles/degree). A contrast sensitivity function (CSF) was then fitted for each participant, from which four measures were obtained: visual…