Episodic memory, i.e. memory for specific episodes situated in space and time, seems impaired in individuals with autism. According to weak central coherence theory, individuals with autism have general difficulty connecting contextual and item information which then impairs their capacity to memorize information in context. This study…

Successful interaction with the environment depends upon our ability to retain and update visuo-spatial information of both front and back egocentric space. Several studies have observed that healthy people tend to show a displacement of the egocentric frame of reference towards the left. However representation of space behind us (back space) has…

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…

In response to M. Rawson's paper, the author uses an analogy with coronary artery disease to show that current brain research is not entirely at odds with the position that dyslexia may be a developmental variation, rather than a defect. (Author/DB)

Fourteen right-handed stutterers and 14 normal speakers responded to monaurally presented stimuli with their right and left hands. Results suggested a bilateral model of neurolinguistic organization for stutterers in which both hemispheres must participate simultaneously in the decoding process. (Author/DB)

Research on neural networks and hippocampal function demonstrating how mammals construct mental maps and develop navigation strategies is being used to create Intelligent Autonomous Mobile Robots (IAMRs). Such robots are able to recognize landmarks and navigate without "vision." (SK)

The purpose of the present study was to identify differences between cerebral hemispheres for processing temporal intervals ranging from .9 to 1.4s. The intervals to be judged were marked by series of brief visual signals located in the left or the right visual field. Series of three (two standards and one comparison) or five intervals (four…

In this paper we review the literature on visual constraints in written word processing. We notice that not all letters are equally visible to the reader. The letter that is most visible is the letter that is fixated. The visibility of the other letters depends on the distance between the letters and the fixation location, whether the letters are…

Through much is known about the N400 component, an event-related EEG potential that is sensitive to semantic manipulations, it is unclear whether modulations of N400 amplitude reflect automatic processing, controlled processing, or both. We examined this issue using a semantic judgment task that manipulated local and global contextual cues. Word…

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…