This study examined behavioral and neuroelectric intra-individual variability (IIV) in preadolescent children during a task requiring variable amounts of cognitive control. The current study further examined whether IIV was moderated by aerobic fitness level. Participants performed a modified flanker task, comprised of congruent and incongruent…

Studies show that as we enter older adulthood (greater than 64 years), our ability to mentally represent action in the form of using motor imagery declines. Using a chronometry paradigm to compare the movement duration of imagined and executed movements, we tested young-, middle-aged, and older adults on their ability to perform sequential finger…

Damage to the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) can lead to Optic Ataxia (OA), in which patients misreach to peripheral targets. Recent research suggested that the PPC might be involved not only in simple reaching tasks toward peripheral targets, but also in changing the hand movement trajectory in real time if the target moves. The present study…

The present study investigated the impact of study-test similarity on face recognition by manipulating, in the same experiment, the expression change (same vs. different) and the task-processing context (inclusion vs. exclusion instructions) as within-subject variables. Consistent with the dual-process framework, the present results showed that…

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have identified activation in the prefrontal-parietal-sub-cortical circuit during feigned memory impairment when comparing with truthful telling. Here, we used fMRI to determine whether neural activity can differentiate between answering correctly, answering randomly, answering…

The neural correlates of cognitive control for typically developing 9-year-old children were examined using dense-array ERPs and estimates of cortical activation (LORETA) during a go/no-go task with two conditions: a neutral picture condition and an affectively charged picture condition. Activation was estimated for the entire cortex after which…

In this study we quantify for the first time electrophysiological components associated with incorporating long-term semantic knowledge with visuo-spatial information using two variants of a traditional matrix patterns task. Results indicated that the matrix task with greater semantic content was associated with enhanced accuracy and RTs in a…

Emotionally arousing information is treated in a specialised manner across a number of different processing stages, and memory for affective events is often found to be heightened by virtue of this. However, in some cases, emotional experiences might be the very ones that we would like to forget. Here, two item-method directed forgetting studies…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine, using meta-analytical techniques, the differential effects of differing intensities of acute exercise on speed and accuracy of cognition. Overall, exercise demonstrated a small, significant mean effect size (g = 0.14, p less than 0.01) on cognition. Examination of the comparison between speed and…

Keeping aware of the locations of objects while one is moving requires the updating of spatial representations. As long as the objects are visible, attentional tracking is sufficient, but knowing where objects out of view went in relation to one's own body involves an updating of spatial working memory. Here, multiple object tracking was employed…

Impaired tool related action in ideomotor apraxia is normally ascribed to loss of sensorimotor memories for habitual actions (engrams), but this account has not been tested against a hypothesis of a general deficit in representation of hand-object spatial relationships. Rapid reaching for familiar tools was compared with reaching for abstract…

Understanding the functional neuroanatomy of planning and problem solving may substantially benefit from better insight into the chronology of the cognitive processes involved. Based on the assumption that regularities in cognitive processing are reflected in overtly observable eye-movement patterns, here we recorded eye movements while…

Category training can induce category effects, whereby color discrimination of stimuli spanning a newly learned category boundary is enhanced relative to equivalently spaced stimuli from within the newly learned category (e.g., categorical perception). However, the underlying mechanisms of these acquired category effects are not fully understood.…

The role of frontal cortex in selective attention to visual distractors was examined in an attentional capture task in which participants searched for a unique shape in the presence or absence of an additional colour singleton distractor. The presence of the additional singleton was associated with slower behavioural responses to the shape target,…

Studies on affordances typically focus on single objects. We investigated whether affordances are modulated by the context, defined by the relation between two objects and a hand. Participants were presented with pictures displaying two manipulable objects linked by a functional (knife-butter), a spatial (knife-coffee mug), or by no relation. They…