Perceiving someone else's gaze shift toward an object can influence how this object will be manipulated by the observer, suggesting a modulatory effect of a gaze-based social context on action control. High-functioning autism (HFA) is characterized by impairments of social interaction, which may be associated with an inability to automatically…

Despite a number of research studies investigating the Yes-No vocabulary test format, one main question remains unanswered: What is the best scoring procedure to adjust for testee overestimation of vocabulary knowledge? Different scoring methodologies have been proposed based on the inclusion and selection of nonwords in the test. However, there…

Interactive display systems give users flexibility to tailor their visual displays to different tasks and situations. However, in order for such flexibility to be beneficial, users need to understand how to tailor displays to different tasks (to possess "metarepresentational competence"). Recent research suggests that people may desire…

Perhaps now more than ever before the U.S. military is called on to perform tasks that are outside its normal/traditional purview. Recent wars--Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, for example--have demonstrated the need for the U.S. military to do more than find and defeat a clearly defined enemy. At all levels of the war theater (conflict area), the…

Background: Children with specific language impairments (SLI) repeat nonwords less accurately than typically developing children, suggesting a phonological deficit. Much work has attempted to explain these results in terms of a phonological memory deficit. However, subsequent work revealed that these results might be explained better as a deficit…

Educational program assessment studies often use data from low-stakes tests to provide evidence of program quality. The validity of scores from such tests, however, is potentially threatened by examinee noneffort. This study investigated the extent to which one type of noneffort--rapid-guessing behavior--distorted the results from three types of…

The purposes of the study were to examine the effect of task constraint on the reaching performance in children with spastic cerebral palsy (CP) and to examine the correlations between the reaching performance and postural control. Eight children with CP and 16 typically developing (TD) children participated in the study. They performed a…

Perceiving objects activates the representation of their affordances. For example, experiments on compatibility effects showed that categorizing objects by producing certain handgrips (power or precision) is faster if the requested responses are compatible with the affordance elicited by the size of objects (e.g., small or large). The article…

The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken-word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realized. Listeners detected…

Earlier studies have shown divergent results concerning the use of familiar picture stimuli in demonstration of equivalence. In the current experiment, we trained 16 children to form three 3-member classes in a many-to-one training structure. Half of the participants were exposed first to a condition with all abstract stimuli and then to a…

In differentiation models, the processes of encoding and retrieval produce an increase in the distribution of memory strength for targets and a decrease in the distribution of memory strength for foils as the amount of encoding increases. This produces an increase in the hit rate and decrease in the false-alarm rate for a strongly encoded compared…

There is considerable interest in how individuals process single words when they are heard. An examination of the literature reveals an interesting, yet little-explored contradiction between the assumptions underlying the neighborhood activation model (NAM) and contemporary models of word retrieval. In this study, participants listened to CVC…

Purpose: The authors examined the involvement of 2 speech motor programming processes identified by S. T. Klapp (1995, 2003) during the articulation of utterances differing in syllable and sequence complexity. According to S. T. Klapp, 1 process, INT, resolves the demands of the programmed unit, whereas a second process, SEQ, oversees the serial…

Priming studies have demonstrated that an object's intrinsic and extrinsic qualities (size, orientation) influence subsequent motor behavior thus suggesting that these object qualities "afford" actions that are congruent with the prime. We present four experiments that aim to evaluate the relative effect of conceptual and physical object qualities…

The main issue of this study was to determine whether cognitive control is affected by acute moderate exercise. Twelve participants [4 females (VO[subscript 2 max]=42 ml/kg/min) and 8 males (VO[subscript 2 max]=48 ml/kg/min)] performed a Simon task while cycling at a carefully controlled workload intensity corresponding to their individual…