Mouse ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) are often used as behavioral readouts of internal states, to measure effects of social and pharmacological manipulations, and for behavioral phenotyping of mouse models for neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. However, little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms of rodent USV production.…

This study reported adult scores on two measures of tongue shape, based on midsagittal tongue shape data from ultrasound imaging. One of the measures quantified the extent of tongue dorsum excursion, and the other measure represented the place of maximal excursion. Data from six adult speakers of Scottish Standard English without speech disorders…

Standardised tests of whole-word accuracy are popular in the speech pathology and developmental psychology literature as measures of children's speech performance. However, they may not be sensitive enough to measure changes in speech output in children with severe and persisting speech difficulties (SPSD). To identify the best ways of doing this,…

The aim of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to investigate brain activation associated with active and passive movements, and tactile stimulation in 17 children with right-sided unilateral cerebral palsy (CP), compared to 19 typically developing children (TD). The active movements consisted of repetitive opening and…

The olfactory span task (OST) uses an incrementing non-matching to sample procedure such that the number of stimuli to remember increases during the session. The number of consecutive correct responses (span length) and percent correct as a function of the memory load have been viewed as defining rodent working memory capacity limitations in…

Two experiments extend the ecological validity of tests of hemispheric interaction in three novel ways. First, we present a broad class of naturalistic stimuli that have not yet been used in tests of hemispheric interaction. Second, we test whether probable differences in complexity within the class of stimuli are supported by outcomes from…

Previous research indicates that removing initial strokes from Chinese characters makes them harder to read than removing final or internal ones. In the present study, we examined the contribution of important components to character configuration via singular value decomposition. The results indicated that when the least important segments, which…

Routine toothbrushing is an essential part of good oral hygiene. This study investigated the use of stimulus fading without escape extinction to increase compliance with toothbrushing with three children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A 30-step stimulus fading hierarchy was implemented; gradually increasing the proximity of the toothbrush to…

Previous studies have shown that deficiencies in visuospatial perception and semantic processing in people with Williams syndrome (WS) are due to deficient central cohesiveness. Unlike previous studies that used abstract stimuli, this study used pictures to determine the relative ability of people with WS to integrate contextual information with…

Early in development, many word-learning phenomena generalize to symbolic gestures. The current study explored whether children avoid lexical overlap in the gestural modality, as they do in the verbal modality, within the context of ambiguous reference. Eighteen-month-olds' interpretations of words and symbolic gestures in a symbol-disambiguation…

People with Williams syndrome (WS) are said to have sociable and extremely trusting personalities, approaching strangers without hesitation. This study investigated whether people with WS are less likely than controls to attribute negative intent to others when interpreting a series of ambiguous pictures. This may, at least partially, explain…

Teachers and trainers often try to prevent learners from making errors, but recent findings (e.g., Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009) have demonstrated that tests can potentiate subsequent learning even when the correct answer is difficult or impossible to generate (e.g., "What is Nate Kornell's middle name?"). In 3 experiments, we…

In this study, we present 3 picture-word interference (PWI) experiments designed to investigate whether lexical selection processes are competitive. We focus on semantic associative relations, which should interfere according to competitive models but not according to certain noncompetitive models. In a modified version of the PWI paradigm,…

Two experiments were conducted to determine if infants attribute false beliefs to others when tested with the violation-of-expectancy procedure. In Experiment 1, the false-belief task was administered to 14- and 18-month-old infants. The procedure was identical to the one used by Onishi and Baillargeon (2005), except that two transparent boxes…

In recent years, chewing has been discussed as producing effects of maintaining and sustaining cognitive performance. We have reported that chewing may improve or recover the process of working memory; however, the mechanisms underlying these phenomena are still to be elucidated. We investigated the effect of chewing on aspects of attention and…