Multiple external representations (MERs) are central to the practice and learning of science, mathematics and engineering, as the phenomena and entities investigated and controlled in these domains are often not available for perception and action. MERs therefore play a twofold constitutive role in reasoning in these domains. Firstly, MERs stand…

Three studies investigated developmental changes in facial expression processing, between 3 years-of-age and adulthood. For adults and older children, the addition of sunglasses to upright faces caused an equivalent decrement in performance to face inversion. However, younger children showed "better" classification of expressions of faces wearing…

Current debate in mental imagery research revolves around the perceptual and cognitive role of eye movements to "nothing" (Ferreira, Apel, & Henderson, 2008; Richardson, Altmann, Spivey, & Hoover, 2009). While it is established that eye movements are comparable when inspecting a scene (or hearing a scene description) as when…

We investigated whether the interpretation of auditory stimuli as speech or non-speech affects audiovisual (AV) speech integration at the neural level. Perceptually ambiguous sine-wave replicas (SWS) of natural speech were presented to listeners who were either in "speech mode" or "non-speech mode". At the behavioral level, incongruent lipread…

This paper starts from the premise that drawing can be a means of visualising thinking, with an emphasis on the process involved. A gap often seems to exist in the minds of students of visual/material creative fields in ideas-generative contexts, between thought and action. The thesis is that the gap between thinking and doing can be reduced to…

This article considers the appeal of cognitive neuroscience research to the general public within the context of the deep puzzles involved in using our minds to understand how our minds work. It offers a few promising examples of findings that illuminate the ways of the mind and reveal these workings to be counter-intuitive with our subjective…

The peripheral manifestations of the inherited neuropathies are increasingly well characterized, but their effects upon cranial nerve function are not well understood. Hearing loss is recognized in a minority of children with this condition, but has not previously been systemically studied. A clear understanding of the prevalence and degree of…

Attention and working memory are fundamental for selecting and maintaining behaviorally relevant information. Not only do both processes closely intertwine at the cognitive level, but they implicate similar functional brain circuitries, namely the frontoparietal and the frontostriatal networks, which are innervated by cholinergic and dopaminergic…

Cognitive science research shows that the brain has two systems for processing visual information, one specialized for spatial information such as position, orientation, and trajectory, and the other specialized for information used to identify objects, such as color, shape and texture. Some individuals seem to be more facile with the spatial…

The present review summarizes historic and recent research which has investigated the role of the corpus callosum in dichotic processing within the context of audiology. Examination of performance by certain clinical groups, including split brain patients, multiple sclerosis cases, and other types of neurological lesions is included. Maturational,…

The present study quantified the magnitude of sex differences in perceptual asymmetries as measured with dichotic listening. This was achieved by means of a meta-analysis of the literature dating back from the initial use of dichotic listening as a measure of laterality. The meta-analysis included 249 effect sizes pertaining to sex differences and…

Tested whether a verbal description given before or after presentation of a picture effected visual processing and/or memory. (SB)

For many years, most scientists believed that the physical structure of our brains, and by definition the people we had become, was set after the initial developmental period of early childhood and adolescence. New research in the area of neurology and neuropsychology is revealing that our brain is a much more open system than ever thought…

The sensory modality of a task and the modality of a retroactive interfering activity were systematically covaried in order to test two models of intersensory functioning. Subjects were 40 ten-year-old boys and girls. (BD)