This paper reports work in progress investigating gender differences and styles in the use of digital games amongst advanced level biology students. It is an elaboration on previous work exploring the relationship between cognitive style and academic performance in Maltese students taking biology at advanced level. In this previous work the…

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the role of the physical context in supporting 3- to 5-year-olds' use of spatiotemporal organization in recall. Children were familiarized with several target items and their corresponding landmarks arranged along a path in a model park. After familiarization, an experimenter removed the target items…

It has been suggested that neglect patients misrepresent the metric spatial relations along the horizontal axis (anisometry). The ''fabric'' of their internal spatial medium would be distorted in such a way that physically equal distances appear relatively shorter on the contralesional side (canonical anisometry). The case of GL, a 76-year-old…

Two experiments used both irrelevant speech and tones in order to assess the effect of manipulating the spatial location of irrelevant sound. Previous research in this area had produced inconclusive results (e.g., Colle, 1980). The current study demonstrated a novel finding, that sound presented to the left ear produces the greatest level of…

Children are nearly as sensitive as adults to some cues to facial identity (e.g., differences in the shape of internal features and the external contour), but children are much less sensitive to small differences in the spacing of facial features. To identify factors that contribute to this pattern, we compared 8-year-olds' sensitivity to spacing…

This study explored whether hand location affected spatial attention. The authors used a visual covert-orienting paradigm to examine whether spatial attention mechanisms--location prioritization and shifting attention--were supported by bimodal, hand-centered representations of space. Placing 1 hand next to a target location, participants detected…

This study examined language and executive functions (EF) in high-functioning school-aged individuals with autism and individually matched controls. Relationships between executive, language, and social functioning were also examined. Participants with autism exhibited difficulty on measures of expressive grammar, figurative language, planning,…

This article analyzes if working memory (WM) is especially important to understand "g." WM comprises the functions of focusing attention, conscious rehearsal, and transformation and mental manipulation of information, while "g" reflects the component variance that is common to all tests of ability. The centrality of WM in individual differences in…

Contextual cuing refers to the facilitation of performance in visual search due to the repetition of the same displays. Whereas previous studies have focused on contextual cuing within single-search trials, this study tested whether 1 trial facilitates visual search of the next trial. Participants searched for a T among Ls. In the training phase,…

The enumeration of small numbers of objects (approximately 4) proceeds rapidly, accurately, and with little effort via a process termed subitization. Four experiments examined whether it was possible to subitize the number of features rather than objects present in a display. Overall, the findings showed that when features are presented randomly…

Rats were trained to search for a food reward hidden under sawdust in the center of a square-shaped enclosure designed to force orientation on the basis of the overall geometry of the environment. They were then tested in a number of enclosures differing in shape and in size (rectangular-, double-side square-, and equilateral triangle-shaped…

Emotionally charged experiences alter memory storage via the activation of hormonal systems. Previously, we have shown that compared with rats trained for a massed spatial learning task in the water maze in warm water (25 degrees C), animals that were trained in cold water (19 degrees C) performed better and showed higher levels of the stress…

We have carried out a global survey of age-related changes in mRNA levels in the 57BL/6NIA mouse hippocampus and found a difference in the hippocampal gene expression profile between 2-month-old young mice and 15-month-old middle-aged mice correlated with an age-related cognitive deficit in hippocampal-based explicit memory formation. Middle-aged…

Nonreinforced retrieval can cause extinction and/or reconsolidation, two processes that affect subsequent retrieval in opposite ways. Using the Morris water maze task we show that, in the rat, repeated nonreinforced expression of spatial memory causes extinction, which is unaffected by inhibition of protein synthesis within the CA1 region of the…

Little is known about signaling mechanisms underlying temporal associative learning. Here, we show that mice with a targeted point mutation that prevents autophosphorylation of [alpha]CaMKII ([alpha]CaMKII[superscript T286A]) learn trace eyeblink conditioning normally. This forms a sharp contrast to the severely impaired spatial learning in the…