The development of executive functions in the preschool years is not fully understood. Although there exists a large body of research investigating the maturation of executive functioning in school-aged children, little is known about the emergence of such skills, in particular inhibition, among preschool-aged children. Understanding developmental…

Purpose: Many adults with aphasia demonstrate concomitant deficits in working memory (WM), but such deficits are difficult to quantify because of a lack of validated measures as well as the complex interdependence between language and WM. We examined the feasibility, reliability, and internal consistency of an "n"-back task for…

Background: Physical fitness is relevant for wellbeing and health, but knowledge on the feasibility and reliability of instruments to measure physical fitness for older adults with intellectual disability is lacking. Methods: Feasibility and test-retest reliability of a physical fitness test battery (Box and Block Test, Response Time Test, walking…

The study challenged the current practices in cognitive load measurement involving complex problem solving by manipulating the presence of pictures in multiple rule-based problem-solving situations and examining the cognitive load resulting from both off-line and online measures associated with complex problem solving. Forty-eight participants…

Many athletes display great sport skills in noncompetitive situations such as during practice, but fail to successfully execute these same skills in competition. Coaches often wonder (1) from a technical perspective, why is the good performance of athletes during practice sessions not transferred to actual competition; (2) what are the flaws of…

We studied error monitoring in a human patient with unique implantation of depth electrodes in both the left dorsal cingulate gyrus and medial temporal lobe prior to surgery. The patient performed a speeded go/nogo task and made a substantial number of commission errors (false alarms). As predicted, intracranial Local Field Potentials (iLFPs) in…

Purpose: This study evaluated the effects of noise and speech intelligibility on the processing of speech produced from native English; high-intelligibility, Korean-accented English; and moderate-intelligibility, Korean-accented English speakers. Method: Both listener comprehension, determined by accuracy judgment on true/false sentences, and…

Linguistic research suggests that certain skeletal frames (e.g., CVC) are preferred to others (e.g., VCC). We examine whether such preferences constrain reading in the Stroop task. We demonstrate that CCVC nonwords facilitate naming the color "black" (/blaek/, a CCVC frame) relative to CVC controls. Conversely, CCVC items inhibit "red" (a CVC…

Speakers are known to make subject-verb agreement errors both when a number-mismatching noun intervenes between the head of the subject phrase and the verb (e.g., "*The key to the cabinets are on the table") and in configurations in which there is a number-mismatching noun that does not intervene (e.g., "*The cabinets that the key open are on the…

Several studies showed a Simon effect when two participants sit close to each other and perform one of the two halves of a two-choice RT task. That is, each participant perform a go-no go task. A Simon effect emerges, which instead is absent when the same go-nogo tasks are performed individually. Hence the terms were introduced of "social Simon…

When healthy individuals are presented with peripheral figures in which small letters are arranged to form a large letter, they are faster to identify the global- than the local-level information, and have difficulty ignoring global information when identifying the local level. The global reaction time (RT) advantage and global interference effect…

Previous studies have demonstrated a dual-target cost in visual search. In the current study, the relationship between search for one and search for two targets was investigated to examine the effects of target prevalence and practice. Color-shape conjunction stimuli were used with response time, accuracy and signal detection measures. Performance…

To determine structural brain correlates of naming abilities in older adults, we tested 24 individuals aged 56-79 on two confrontation-naming tests (the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and the Action Naming Test (ANT)), then collected from these individuals structural Magnetic-Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data. Overall,…

Current theories of text processing say little about how authors' narrative choices, including the introduction of small mysteries, can affect readers' narrative experiences. Gerrig, Love, and McKoon (2009) provided evidence that 1 type of small mystery--a character introduced without information linking him or her to the story--affects readers'…

In 3 experiments, we examined Perruchet, Cleeremans, and Destrebecqz's (2006) double dissociation of cued reaction time (RT) and target expectancy. In this design, participants receive a tone on every trial and are required to respond as quickly as possible to a square presented on 50% of those trials (a partial reinforcement schedule).…