The brain's frontal eye fields (FEF), responsible for eye movement control, are known to be involved in spatial working memory (WM). In a previous fMRI experiment (Wallentin, Roepstorff & Burgess, Neuropsychologia, 2008) it was found that FEF activation was primarily related to the formation of an object-centered, rather than egocentric, spatial…

The study investigates empirical properties of reasoning speed which is conceived as the fluency of solving reasoning problems. Responses and response times in reasoning tasks are modeled jointly to clarify the covariance structure of reasoning speed and reasoning ability. To determine underlying abilities, the predictive validities of two…

This study investigates response inhibition and its relationship to phonological processing in third-graders with and without dyslexia. Children with dyslexia (n = 20) and children without dyslexia (n = 16) were administered a stop signal task and a digit span forwards task. Initial analyses revealed phonological processing deficits in terms of a…

Speed of processing (SOP) is a crucial factor in fluent reading and is measured using reading rate. This measure is commonly used to examine correct reading patterns, yet in the present study it is employed to determine whether differences in SOP exist for correct and incorrect reading. One of the characteristics of dyslexia is slow and inaccurate…

Most children under 7 years of age presented with 10 daisies and 2 roses fail to indicate that there are more flowers than daisies. Instead of the appropriate comparison of the relative numerosities of the superordinate class (flowers) to its subordinate class (daisies), they perform a direct perceptual comparison of the extensions of the 2…

This study explores the effects of the "presence of external representations of a mathematical object" (ERs) on problem solving performance associated with short double-choice problems. The problems were borrowed from secondary school algebra and geometry, and the ERs were either formulas, graphs of functions, or drawings of geometric…

While most studies of emotion recognition in Asperger's Syndrome (AS) have focused solely on the verbal decoding of affective states, the current research employed the novel technique of using both nonverbal matching and verbal labeling tasks to examine the decoding of emotional body postures and facial expressions. AS participants performed…

It is well established that a task-irrelevant sound (deviant sound) departing from an otherwise repetitive sequence of sounds (standard sounds) elicits an involuntary capture of attention and orienting response toward the deviant stimulus, resulting in the lengthening of response times in an ongoing task. Some have argued that this type of…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated how acoustic distortion affected younger and older adults' use of context in a lexical decision task. Method: The authors measured lexical decision reaction times (RTs) when intact target words followed acoustically distorted sentence contexts. Contexts were semantically congruent, neutral, or…

This paper investigates how language comprehension is modulated by temporal information, marked by time adverbs, and bodily constraints imposed by motor actions. The experiment used a paradigm similar to that employed by de Vega, Robertson, Glenberg, Kaschak and Rinck (2004), but included significant refinements in the materials and the…

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems often supplement oral communication for individuals with intellectual and communication disabilities. Research with preschoolers without disabilities has demonstrated that two visual--perceptual factors influence speed and/or accuracy of finding a target: the internal color and spatial…

This study examined how different components of working memory are involved in the acquisition of egocentric and allocentric survey knowledge by people with a good and poor sense of direction (SOD). We employed a dual-task method and asked participants to learn routes from videos with verbal, visual, and spatial interference tasks and without any…

Complex problem solving is often an integration of perceptual processing and deliberate planning. But what balances these two processes, and how do novices differ from experts? We investigate the interplay between these two in the game of SET. This article investigates how people combine bottom-up visual processes and top-down planning to succeed…

It is now well-established that intrinsic variations in human neural and behavioral activity tend to exhibit scaling laws in their fluctuations and distributions. The meaning of these scaling laws is an ongoing matter of debate between isolable causes versus pervasive causes. A spiking neural network model is presented that self-tunes to critical…

The aim of the study was to undertake a behavioral investigation of the development of automatic orthographic processing during reading acquisition in French. Following Castles and colleagues' 2007 study ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 97," 165-182) and their lexical tuning hypothesis framework, substituted-letter and…