Three major "neural systems", specialized for different types of information processing, are the sensory, declarative, and procedural systems. It has been proposed ("Trends Neurosci.",30(4), 135-141) that dyslexia may be attributable to impaired function in the procedural system together with intact declarative function. We provide a brief…

Observers can recognize other people from their movements. What is interesting is that observers are best able to recognize their own movements. Enhanced visual sensitivity to self-generated movement may reflect the contribution of motor planning processes to the visual analysis of human action. An alternative view is that enhanced visual…

Although phonological representations have been a primary focus of verbal working memory research, lexical-semantic manipulations also influence performance. In the present study, the authors investigated whether a classic phenomenon in verbal working memory, the phonological similarity effect (PSE), is modulated by a lexical-semantic variable,…

Some types of automaticity can be attributed to simple stimulus-response associations (G. D. Logan, 1988). This can be studied with paradigms in which associations to an irrelevant stimulus automatically influence responding to a relevant stimulus. In 1 example, the irrelevant and relevant stimuli were presented successively with the 1st,…

We explored how speakers and listeners use hand gestures as a source of perceptual-motor information during naturalistic communication. After solving the Tower of Hanoi task either with real objects or on a computer, speakers explained the task to listeners. Speakers' hand gestures, but not their speech, reflected properties of the particular…

In 5 experiments, the authors examined the perceptual and cognitive processes used to track the locations of objects during locomotion. Participants learned locations of 9 objects on the outer part of a turntable from a single viewpoint while standing in the middle of the turntable. They subsequently pointed to objects while facing the learning…

It is widely accepted that the brain processes biological and non-biological movements in distinct neural circuits. Biological motion, in contrast to non-biological motion, refers to active movements of living beings. Aim of our experiment was to investigate the mechanisms underlying mental simulation of these two movement types. Subjects had to…

Background: In order to design appropriate environments for performance and learning of movement skills, physical educators need a sound theoretical model of the learner and of processes of learning. In physical education, this type of modelling informs the organisation of learning environments and effective and efficient use of practice time. An…

Improvements in performance on many perceptual skills can occur with only a single training session. Of interest here is what aspects of the training experience are being learned during this brief exposure. Although there is considerable evidence that learning associated with specific feature values of the stimulus used in training ("stimulus…

Nearly all studies on perception and cognition have used discrete responses to infer internal cognitive processes. In the current study, we demonstrate that visually-guided manual reaching can provide new opportunities to access internal processes over time. In each trial, participants were required to compare a single digit Arabic number…

Mirror neurons are increasingly recognized as a crucial substrate for many developmental processes, including imitation and social learning. Although there has been considerable progress in describing their function and localization in the primate and adult human brain, we still know little about their ontogeny. The idea that mirror neurons result…

The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to delineate cortical networks that are activated when objects or spatial locations encoded either visually (visual encoding group, n = 10) or haptically (haptic encoding group, n = 10) had to be retrieved from long-term memory. Participants learned associations between auditorily…

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether learning in 10-year-old children--that is, the age group for which the Chiviacowsky et al. (2006) study found benefits of self-controlled knowledge of results (KR)--would differ depending on the frequency of feedback they chose. The authors surmised that a relatively high feedback frequency…

Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping…

Voluntary motor actions aim at and are thus governed by predictable action effects. Therefore, representations of an action's effects normally must become activated prior to the action itself. In 5 psychological refractory period experiments the authors investigated whether the activation of such effect representations coincides with the response…