Recent work with the 42 mental ability tests administered to participants of the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA) has suggested that there are important dimensions of mental ability that function independently of "g". Two of these dimensions, rotation-verbal and focus-diffusion, appear to involve trade-offs: greater…

The mechanism by which humans perceive others differs greatly from how humans perceive inanimate objects. Unlike inanimate objects, humans have the distinct property of being "like me" in the eyes of the observer. This allows us to use the same systems that process knowledge about self-performed actions, self-conceived thoughts, and…

Both emotional reactivity and categorization have long been studied within the framework of hemispheric asymmetry. However, little attempt has been made to integrate both research areas using any form of neuropsychological research, despite behavioral data suggesting a consistent relationship between affective and categorization processes. The…

In this functional MRI experiment, encoding of objects was associated with activation in left ventrolateral prefrontal/insular and right dorsolateral prefrontal and fusiform regions as well as in the left putamen. By contrast, correct recognition of previously learned objects (R judgments) produced activation in left superior frontal, bilateral…

Eleven patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD), 11 left hemisphere damaged (LHD) nonaphasic subjects, and 11 neurologically intact controls were given three story description tasks. The two brain-damaged groups had no language, visuospatial, memory, or conceptual deficits on standardized neuropsychological testing. In the first experiment, the…

The Right-Hemisphere Hypothesis posits that emotional stimuli are perceived more efficiently by the right hemisphere than by the left hemisphere. The current research examines this hypothesis by examining hemispheric asymmetries for the conscious and unconscious perception of emotional stimuli. Negative, positive, and neutral words were presented…

This research investigates the hemispheric processing of anaphors when readers activate multiple antecedents. Participants read texts promoting an anaphoric inference and performed a lexical decision task to inference-related target words that were consistent (Experiment 1) or inconsistent (Experiment 2) with the text. These targets were preceded…

To examine the neurobiological consequences of early institutionalization, the authors recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 3 groups of Romanian children--currently institutionalized, previously institutionalized but randomly assigned to foster care, and family-reared children--in response to pictures of happy, angry, fearful, and sad…

This article reports on the linguistic and pragmatic language skills of adults with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Seventeen adults (aged 18-67 years) with a diagnosis of ASD were assessed using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB), the Right Hemisphere Language Battery (RHLB) and the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence-Second Edition…

Phrenologists believed that specific brain regions corresponded to certain character traits. In addition, the size of each brain region was believed to determine the strength of the respective trait. Phrenology originated in Austria with Franz Josef Gall and was popularized and commercialized in America at the end of the 19th century by Orson…

Smooth pursuit eye movements enable us to focus our eyes on moving objects by utilizing well-established mechanisms of visual motion processing, sensorimotor transformation and cognition. Novel smooth pursuit tasks and quantitative measurement techniques can help unravel the different smooth pursuit components and complex neural systems involved…

Speech-related changes in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) were measured using H[subscript 2][superscript 15]O positron-emission tomography in 9 adults with adductor spasmodic dysphonia (ADSD) before and after botulinum toxin (BTX) injection and 10 age- and gender-matched volunteers without neurological disorders. Scans were acquired at rest…

This article presents 3 studies that examine how students and experts employ mental rotation and a learned heuristic to solve chemistry tasks that involve spatial information. Results from Study 1 indicate that despite instruction in analytical strategies, students choose to employ mental rotation on canonical assessment tasks. In Study 2, experts…

When bisecting words in their middle, people reveal leftward bisection errors. This tendency might emerge from an attentional bias towards the beginning of the word. However, when longer meaningless letter strings are presented, people reveal a rightward bisection bias. To test the role of semantic information on leftward or rightward bisection…

Poor readers perform worse than their normal reading peers on a variety of speech perception tasks, which may be linked to their phonological processing abilities. The purpose of the study was to compare the brain activation patterns of normal and impaired readers on speech perception to better understand the phonological basis in reading…