To evaluate whether performance differences between good and poor readers relate to reading-specific cognitive factors that result from engaging in reading activities and other experiential factors, the authors gave students in Grades 4 and 6 a perceptual identification test of words not only drawn from their personal lexicon but also varying in…

Items studied as pictures are better remembered than items studied as words even when test items are presented as words. The present study examined the development of this picture superiority effect in recognition memory. Four groups ranging in age from 7 to 20 years participated. They studied words and pictures, with test stimuli always presented…

A picture-word interference paradigm with visually presented distractors was used to investigate the independent effects of orthographic and phonological facilitation on Mandarin monosyllabic word production. Both the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and the picture-word relationship along different lexical dimensions were varied. We observed a…

We examined developmental aspects of the ability to monitor the temporal context of an item's previous occurrence while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. In a continuous recognition task, children between 10 and 12 years and young adults watched a stream of pictures repeated with a lag of 10-15 intervening items and indicated…

The intervention of Intensive Interaction is gaining attention for its demonstrated effectiveness in promoting social engagement in individuals with severe communicative impairments. The present study sought to extend the evidence base for this intervention by investigating the rapidity with which an increase in engagement becomes apparent.…

Objective: To measure test-retest reliability of the Stop-Signal Task (SST) and the Conners' Continuous Performance Test (CPT) in children with ADHD. Methods: 12 children with ADHD (age 11.46 plus or minus 1.66) participated in the study. Primary outcome measures were stop-signal reaction time (SSRT) for the SST and CPT's commission errors (%FP).…

Semantic short-term memory (STM) patients have a reduced ability to retain semantic information over brief delays but perform well on other semantic tasks; this pattern suggests damage to a dedicated buffer for semantic information. Alternatively, these difficulties may arise from mild disruption to domain-general semantic processes that have…

Earlier research showed that divided attention, an aspect of executive function, is limited in both children and adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The current study explored divided attention capacity in adults with ASD and without intellectual disability (n = 36). Divided attention was tested using a computerized variant of a…

Background: Dyslexics read concrete words better than abstract ones. As a result, one of the major problems facing dyslexics is the fact that only part of the information that they require to communicate is concrete, i.e. can easily be pictured. Method: The experiment involved dyslexic third-grade, English-speaking children (8-year-olds) divided…

Using manual responses, human participants are remarkably fast and accurate at deciding if a natural scene contains an animal, but recent data show that they are even faster to indicate with saccadic eye movements which of 2 scenes contains an animal. How could it be that 2 images can apparently be processed faster than a single image? To better…

In a variable foreperiod (FP) paradigm, reaction times (RTs) decrease as a function of FP on trial n (FP effect) but increase with FP on trial n = 1 (sequential effects). These phenomena have traditionally been ascribed to different strategic preparation processes. According to an alternative explanation, common conditioning laws underlie both…

Recent models of the conceptual system hold that concepts are grounded in simulations of actual experiences with instances of those concepts in sensory-motor systems (e.g., Barsalou, 1999, 2003; Solomon & Barsalou, 2001). Studies supportive of such a view have shown that verifying a property of a concept in one modality, and then switching to…

In coincidence-timing studies, children have been shown to respond too early to slower stimuli and too late to faster stimuli. To examine this velocity effect, children aged 6, 7.5, 9, 10.5, and adults were tested with two different velocities in a prediction-motion task which consisted of judging, after the occlusion of the final part of its…

Children with dyslexia have consistently been found to have a variety of deficits in motor, cognitive, and sensory processes; however, the few studies that have been reported of the implicit learning ability of these children have produced conflicting results. The present study aimed to investigate the implicit learning abilities of children with…

The authors investigated whether speakers who named several objects processed them sequentially or in parallel. Speakers named object triplets, arranged in a triangle, in the order left, right, and bottom object. The left object was easy or difficult to identify and name. During the saccade from the left to the right object, the right object shown…