The importance of kinematics in emotion perception from body movement has been widely demonstrated. Evidence also suggests that the perception of biological motion relies to some extent on information about spatial and spatiotemporal form, yet the contribution of such form-related cues to emotion perception remains unclear. This study reports, for…

The development of children's ability to recognize facial emotions and the role of configural information in this development were investigated. In the study, 100 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and 26 adults needed to recognize the emotion displayed by upright and upside-down faces. The same participants needed to recognize the emotion displayed by…

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…

Spatial reasoning or locating objects in a spatial space has long been an important area of research in cognitive science because analyzing space categorically and finding objects is a fundamental act of mental perception and cognition. Premise integration in tasks of spatial reasoning has recently received considerable research attention. This is…

It has been discovered recently that monocular deprivation in young adult mice induces ocular dominance plasticity (ODP). This contradicts the traditional belief that ODP is restricted to a juvenile critical period. However, questions remain. ODP of young adults has been observed only using methods that are indirectly related to vision, and the…

This article explores the consequences of the view that the identifications of children and adults and the spaces they inhabit are intimately related. Firstly, the article reviews the rationales that suggest we should consult with children and young people and encourage their participation. Arguments are made, using examples, to support the view…

We compared the ability of auditory, visual, and audiovisual (bimodal) exogenous cues to capture visuo-spatial attention under conditions of no load versus high perceptual load. Participants had to discriminate the elevation (up vs. down) of visual targets preceded by either unimodal or bimodal cues under conditions of high perceptual load (in…

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…

From a behavioral perspective, the CA3a,b subregion of the hippocampus plays an important role in the encoding of new spatial information within short-term memory with a duration of seconds and minutes. This can easily be observed in tasks that require rapid encoding, novelty detection, one-trial short-term or working memory, and one-trial cued…

This article argues that a clear division between two sources of information--one oriented to world knowledge, the other to linguistic semantics--offers a framework within which mechanisms for modelling the highly flexible relation between language and interpretation necessary for natural discourse can be specified and empirically validated.…

Four experiments examined transfer of noncorresponding spatial stimulus-response associations to an auditory Simon task for which stimulus location was irrelevant. Experiment 1 established that, for a horizontal auditory Simon task, transfer of spatial associations occurs after 300 trials of practice with an incompatible mapping of auditory …

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…

Ideomotor (IM) theory suggests that observing someone else perform an action activates an internal motor representation of that behaviour within the observer. Evidence supporting the case for an ideomotor theory of imitation has come from studies that show imitative responses to be faster than the same behavioural measures performed in response to…

The ability to compute, problem solve, and apply concepts and skills in mathematics influences multiple decisions in our lives. The National Research Council (1989) reported that mathematics is especially evident in our technology-rich society, where number sense and problem solving skills have increased the importance and demands of advanced…

We describe the case of a child ("S") who was treated with radiation therapy at age 5 for a recurrent malignant brain tumor. Radiation successfully abolished the tumor but caused radiation-induced tissue necrosis, primarily affecting cerebral white matter. "S" was introduced to us at age 15 because of her profound dyslexia. We assessed cognitive…