fMRI was used to examine the differential effect of two problem-solving strategies. Participants were trained to use both a pictorial/spatial and a symbolic/algebraic strategy to solve word problems. While these two strategies activated similar cortical regions, a number of differences were noted in the level of activation. These differences…

Affective priming is a technique used in experimental psychology to investigate the organization of emotional schemata not fully available to conscious awareness. The presentation of stimuli (the prime) with strong positive emotional valence alters the accessibility of positive stimuli within the individual's emotionally encoded cognitive system.…

Background: The "broken mirror" theory of autism, which proposes that a dysfunction of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) is responsible for the core social and cognitive deficits in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), has received considerable attention despite weak empirical evidence. Methods: In this electroencephalographic…

Adults with visual impairments experience a loss of balance and mobility, which presents a barrier to independence and is associated with the fear of falling. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which visual status, age, gender, body mass index (BMI), and the strength of quadriceps and hamstrings contribute to compromised…

Purpose: To determine the extent to which behavioral and physiological responses during child-directed speech (CDS) correlate concurrently and predictively with communication skills in young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Method: Twenty-two boys with ASD (initial mean age: 35 months) participated in a longitudinal study. At entry,…

This study investigated the effects of introducing the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) on the frequency of requesting and commenting and the length of verbal utterances of two children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who presented with some spoken language, but limited use of language in communicative exchanges. A mixed research…

The current study investigated the effects of Social Stories written according to Gray's specifications on on-task behavior in inclusive classroom settings in three children with autism. Using a multiple-baseline design across participants, modest improvements in on-task behavior were associated with implementation of an auditory-visual Social…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of 2 transfer of stimulus control procedures to teach tacting to individuals with autism. Five participants with differing verbal skills were assessed by a subset of the ABLLS prior to intervention, then were taught 36 previously unknown tacts using the receptive-echoic-tact (r-e-t) and…

The functional organization of working memory (WM) in the human prefrontal cortex remains unclear. The present study used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to clarify the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) both in the types of information (verbal vs. spatial), and the types of processes (maintenance vs.…

Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three- to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1 and 3). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not…

Configural/holistic processing, a key property of face recognition, has previously been examined only for front views of faces. Here, 6 experiments tested front (0 degree), three-quarter (45 degree), and profile views (90 degree), using composite and peripheral inversion tasks. Results showed an overall disadvantage in identifying profiles. This…

Standardized passages used for speech nasalance measures may be too long for clinical use with very young or non-compliant patients. The aim of this study was to establish whether nasalance scores from shorter sections of three Swedish speech stimuli were equivalent to those from their corresponding whole stimulus. Nasalance recordings for three…

We show that simple perceptual competences can emerge from an internal simulation of action effects and are thus grounded in behavior. A simulated agent learns to distinguish between dead ends and corridors without the necessity to represent these concepts in the sensory domain. Initially, the agent is only endowed with a simple value system and…

Recent challenges to Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus" thesis for language acquisition suggest that children's primary data may carry "indirect evidence" about linguistic constructions despite containing no instances of them. Indirect evidence is claimed to suffice for grammar acquisition, without need for innate knowledge. This article reports…

In four experiments, we investigated whether 9-month-old infants are sensitive to the relationship between gaze direction and object location and whether this sensitivity depends on the presence of communicative cues like eye contact. Infants observed a face, which repeatedly shifted its eyes either toward, or away from, unpredictably appearing…