Recent research demonstrates neurologic and behavioral differences in people's responses to the space that is within and beyond reach. The present studies demonstrated a perceptual difference as well. Reachability was manipulated by having participants reach with and without a tool. Across 2 conditions, in which participants either held a tool or…

The present study investigated reinstatement of conditioned responses in humans by using a differential Pavlovian conditioning procedure. Evidence for reinstatement was established in a direct (fear rating) and in an indirect measure (secondary reaction time task) of conditioning. Moreover, the amount of reinstatement in the secondary reaction…

In two experiments on very young children's response to the orientation of pictures and objects, 18-, 24- and 30-month-old children showed no preference for upright pictures over inverted ones. More importantly, we found that children in all three age groups were equally accurate and equally fast at identifying depicted objects regardless of…

A forced-choice reaction-time (RT) task was used to examine voluntary visual orienting among children and adolescents with trisomy 21 Down syndrome and typically developing children matched at an MA of approximately 5.6 years, an age when the development of orienting abilities reaches optimal adult-like efficiency. Both groups displayed faster…

First-grade students (n=101) completed two tasks of morphological awareness (MA), one assessing judgments of morphological relations and the other assessing the production of inflected and derived forms. Subjects were also tested for phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary, and word reading. (Author)

It is not known why people move their eyes when engaged in non-visual cognition. The current study tested the hypothesis that differences in saccadic eye movement rate (EMR) during non-visual cognitive tasks reflect different requirements for searching long-term memory. Participants performed non-visual tasks requiring relatively low or high…

Infants younger than 20 months of age interpret both words and symbolic gestures as object names. Later in development words and gestures take on divergent communicative functions. Here, we examined patterns of brain activity to words and gestures in typically developing infants at 18 and 26 months of age. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were…

Extending S. Graham and K. R. Harris's (2003) self-regulated strategy development model, this study examined whether self-regulation procedures would increase the effectiveness of a writing strategies training designed to improve 4th graders' (N = 113) composition skills. Students who were taught composition strategies in conjunction with…

Purpose: To examine the behavioral effects and neural activation patterns associated with implicit semantic processing influences on phonological judgments during reading in children and adults. Method: Whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings were obtained from 2 groups, children (9-13 years) and adults, performing a homophone judgment…

This study took a pragmatic approach to examining the effects of task difficulty on L2 oral output. Twenty native English speakers and 59 Japanese students of English at two different proficiency levels produced speech acts of requests and refusals in a role play task. The task had two situation types based on three social variables:…

The aim of the study was to investigate the developmental trajectory of error monitoring. For this purpose, children (age 7-8), young adolescents (age 13-14) and adults (age 23-24) performed a Go/No-Go task and were compared on overt reaction time (RT) performance and on event-related potentials (ERPs), thought to reflect error detection…

This study examined factors that influence the dynamic pursuit of multiple goals over time. As hypothesized, goal-performance discrepancies were significantly related to subsequent time allocation. Greater distance from a given goal resulted in greater time subsequently allocated to that goal. In addition, the incentives offered for goal…

Deficits in social cognition may impair the ability to negotiate social transactions and relationships and contribute to socio emotional difficulties experienced by some post-institutionalized children. We examined false belief and emotion understanding in 40 institutional care-adopted children, 40 foster care-adopted children and 40 birth…

Animal studies provided evidence that stress modulates multiple memory systems, favoring caudate nucleus-based "habit" memory over hippocampus-based "cognitive" memory. However, effects of stress on learning strategy and memory consolidation were not differentiated. We specifically address the effects of psychosocial stress on the applied learning…

In this study, self-regulation was investigated in 7- to 10-year-old children using three different measures: (1) parent and child report questionnaires measuring temperamental effortful control, (2) a conflict task assessing efficiency of executive attention, and (3) the mistaken gift paradigm assessing social smiling in response to an…