How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here, we argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as…

Purpose: The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) is a widely used, comprehensive test battery that assesses language in school-age children and adolescents. The CELF-R (E. Semel, E. H. Wiig, & W. Secord, 1987) was updated to the CELF-3 (E. Semel, E. H. Wiig, & W. A. Secord, 1995) in 1995. The goal of the present study was to…

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is related to an attenuated and dysfunctional dopamine system. Normally, a high extracellular dopamine level yields a tonic dopaminergic input that down-regulates stimuli-evoked phasic dopamine responses through autoreceptors. Abnormally low tonic extracellular dopamine in ADHD up-regulates the…

Previous research indicates that abnormal stereotyped movements are associated with central dopamine dysfunction and that eye-blink rate is a noninvasive, in vivo measure of dopamine function. We measured the spontaneous eye-blinking and stereotyped behavior of older adults with severe/profound mental retardation living in a state mental…

Research indicates that right-hemisphere mechanisms are specifically sensitive to and averse to risk. Research also indicates that mixed degree of handedness is associated with increased access to right hemisphere processing. Accordingly, it was predicted that mixed-handers would exhibit greater risk aversion. Participants were presented with…

This article proposes that a complete account of cognitive evolution may have to accommodate a domain-general source of variance in mental abilities accounting for differences among primate taxa. Deaner, van Schaik, and Johnson [Deaner, R.O., van Schaik, C.P. and Johnson, V.E. (2006). Do some taxa have better domain-general cognition than others?…

People perceive and conceive of activity in terms of discrete events. Here the authors propose a theory according to which the perception of boundaries between events arises from ongoing perceptual processing and regulates attention and memory. Perceptual systems continuously make predictions about what will happen next. When transient errors in…

Functional MRI was used to investigate brain activation in healthy volunteers during encoding of unfamiliar faces as well as during correct recognition of newly learned faces (CR) compared to correct identification of distractor faces (CF), missed alarms (not recognizing previously presented faces, MA), and false alarms (incorrectly recognizing…

Two divided visual field priming experiments examined cerebral asymmetries for understanding metaphors varying in sentence constraint. Experiment 1 investigated ambiguous words (e.g., SWEET and BRIGHT) with literal and metaphoric meanings in ambiguous and unambiguous sentence contexts, while Experiment 2 involved standard metaphors (e.g., "The…

This paper provides answers to questions about minimum legal drinking age. The questions include: (1) Youth in other countries are exposed to alcohol at earlier ages and engage in less alcohol abuse and have healthier attitudes toward alcohol. Don't those countries have fewer alcohol-related problems than we do?; (2) Does educating teens about…

The discovery that 3-year-old children have difficulties understanding false belief has fuelled two decades of research directed at understanding why children have this problem. One unresolved question is whether false belief problems are due to difficulties with mental or representational aspects of mental states. This question has implications…

Preterm birth is associated with an increased risk of developmental difficulties. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is increasingly being used to identify damage to the brain following preterm birth. It is hoped this information will aid prognostication and identify neonates who would benefit from early therapeutic intervention. Cystic…

It has been proposed, and questioned, whether motor impairments in attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder, combined type (ADHD-C) alone, developmental coordination disorder (DCD) alone, and ADHD-C and comorbid DCD (ADHD-C/DCD) may arise from disruption to a common set of cognitive functions and their related neural substrate. This study examined…

Several sensory-motor integration regions have been identified in parietal cortex, which appear to be organized around motor-effectors (e.g., eyes, hands). We investigated whether a sensory-motor integration area might exist for the human vocal tract. Speech requires extensive sensory-motor integration, as does other abilities such as vocal…

Behavioral and neurophysiological evidence suggest that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is characterized by the impact of abnormal reward prediction error signals carried by the midbrain dopamine system on frontal brain areas that implement cognitive control. To investigate this issue, we recorded the event-related brain potential…