Controversy still exists over whether there is a magnocellular deficit associated with developmental dyslexia. Here we utilised a magnocellular system-biased phantom contour form discrimination task defined by high temporal frequency contrast reversals to compare contrast sensitivity in a group of children with dyslexia and an age- and nonverbal…

This paper reports data, part of a cross-sectional study about the use of pupil's drawings as a means of probing the development of 195 Brazilian pre-school children (4 to 6 year-olds) and 681 primary school pupils 1st Grade through 4th Grade (7 to 10 years of age) conceptions of the human brain. The aims of the present study is to analyze how the…

An important issue for understanding visual perception in autism concerns whether individuals with this neurodevelopmental disorder possess an advantage in processing local visual information, and if so, what is the nature of this advantage. Perception of movement speed is a visual process that relies on computation of local spatiotemporal signals…

Automatic stimulus-change detection is usually investigated in the auditory modality by studying Mismatch Negativity (MMN). Although the change-detection process occurs in all sensory modalities, little is known about visual deviance detection, particularly regarding the development of this brain function throughout childhood. The aim of the…

It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-lexeme theory. Theoretically, compounds could be structured through a multiple lemma architecture, in which the lemma nodes of both the compound and its constituents are involved in lexical processing. If this were the case, syntactic properties of…

Bilinguals who are fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and English often produce "code-blends"--simultaneously articulating a sign and a word while conversing with other ASL-English bilinguals. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying code-blend processing, we compared picture-naming times (Experiment 1) and semantic categorization…

The goal of research on how letter identity and order are perceived during reading is often characterized as one of "cracking the orthographic code." Here, we suggest that there is no orthographic code to crack: Words are perceived and represented as sequences of letters, just as in a dictionary. Indeed, words are perceived and represented in…

This study explored 10- and 11-year-old students' (N = 64) moral emotional attributions in relation to other and self in peer-to-peer bullying scenarios in primary school. Data were gathered using one-to-one semi-structured interviews facilitated by the use of a series of pictorial vignettes depicting a hypothetical story of peer bullying. The…

The ability to flexibly adapt to the changing demands of the environment is often reported as a core deficit in fragile X syndrome (FXS). However, the cognitive processes that determine this attentional set-shifting deficit remain elusive. The present study investigated attentional set-shifting ability in fragile X syndrome males with the…

Anxiety is typically considered an impediment to cognition. We propose anxiety-related impairments in cognitive-behavioral performance are the consequences of enhanced stimulus-driven attention. Accordingly, reflexive, habitual behaviors that rely on stimulus-driven mechanisms should be facilitated in an anxious state, while novel, flexible…

This study implemented eye-tracking technology to understand the impact of different multimedia instructional materials, i.e., five successive pages versus a single page with the same amount of information, on information-processing activities in 21 non-science-major college students. The findings showed that students demonstrated the same number…

In this study we explore listeners' sensitivity to vowel to vowel (VV) coarticulation, using both event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral methodologies. The stimuli used were vowels "colored" by the coarticulatory influence of other vowels across one, three or five intervening segments. The paradigm used in the ERP portion of the study was…

The present study was conducted to examine the relationship between expertise in movement correction and rate of movement reprogramming within limited time periods, and to clarify the specific cognitive processes regarding superior reprogramming ability in experts. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in baseball experts (n = 7) and…

Recent literature has sought to understand the presence of epenthetic vowels after the productions of postvocalic word-final consonants by second language (L2) learners whose first languages (L1s) restrict the presence of obstruents in coda position. Previous models include those in which epenthesis is seen as a strategy to mitigate the effects of…

Pattern generalisation has become an important feature of mathematics classrooms around the globe. Sometimes these activities focus purely on given numerical terms, but the use of pictorial or figural patterns is now becoming part of the standard repertoire for such generalisation exercises. From a pedagogic point of view, the investigation of…