Visuospatial processing speed underlies several cognitive functions critical for successful completion of everyday tasks, including driving and walking. While it is widely accepted that visuospatial processing speed peaks in early adulthood, performance across the lifespan remains incompletely characterized. Additionally, there remains a lack of…

The "bouba-kiki effect" refers to the correspondence between arbitrary visual and auditory stimuli. Previous studies have demonstrated that neurodevelopmental conditions and sensory impairment affect subjects' performance on the bouba-kiki task. This study examined the bouba-kiki effect in participants with severe-to-profound hearing…

Purpose: Subjective reports of listening effort are frequently inconsistent with behavioral and physiological findings. A potential explanation is that participants unwittingly substitute an easier question when faced with a judgment that requires computationally expensive analysis (i.e., heuristic response strategies). The purpose of this study…

Klauer and Phye's "Cognitive Training for Children" ("Cognitive training for children: a developmental program of inductive reasoning and problem solving." Hogrefe & Hogrefe Publisher, Kirkland, 1994) provides instruction in inductive reasoning through a sequence of 120 illustrations following a prescribed two-way…

Speech is more difficult to understand when it is presented concurrently with a distractor speech stream. One source of this difficulty is that competing speech can act as an attentional lure, requiring listeners to exert attentional control to ensure that attention does not drift away from the target. Stronger attentional control may enable…

False working memories readily emerge using a visual item-recognition variant of the converging associates task. Two experiments, manipulating study and test modality, extended prior working memory results by demonstrating a reliable false recognition effect (more false alarms to associatively related lures than to unrelated lures) within seconds…

Purpose: Aging is known to influence temporal processing, but its relationship to speech perception has not been clearly defined. To examine listeners' use of contextual and phonetic information, the Revised Speech Perception in Noise test (R-SPIN) was used to develop a time-gated word (TGW) task. Method: In Experiment 1, R-SPIN sentence lists…

It is usually accepted that the binding of what, where, and when is a central component of young children's and animals' nonconceptual episodic abilities. We argue that additionally binding self-in-past (what-where-when-"who") adds a crucial conceptual requirement, and we ask when it becomes possible and what its cognitive correlates…

The perception of target events presented in a rapid stream of non-targets is impaired for early target positions, but then gradually improves, a phenomenon known as attentional awakening. This phenomenon has been associated with better resource allocation. It is unclear though whether improved resource allocation and attentional awakening are a…

The goals of this study were to explore the deficits in working memory associated with literacy disorders (i.e. developmental disorders of reading and/or spelling) and the developmental trajectories of these working memory deficits. The performance of 28 children with literacy disorders was compared to a non-disabled control group with the same…

Reading-impaired children have difficulty tapping to a beat. Here we tested whether this relationship between reading ability and synchronized tapping holds in typically-developing adolescents. We also hypothesized that tapping relates to two other abilities. First, since auditory-motor synchronization requires monitoring of the relationship…

In a recent critique Boles and Barth (2011) argue that their prior study investigating asymmetry/performance relationships (Boles, Barth, & Merrill, 2008) uncovered the "true" association (i.e., negative correlation) between lateralization of visual lexical processes and word recognition performance. They contend that our study reporting positive…

There is a need for a musical ensemble study that can describe the idiosyncratic, authentic movements that choral musicians make in a performance setting. In addition, it could benefit teachers to know whether those who score highest on a measure of expressive performance also tend to be strong performers. If this is the case, then the link…

Using a non-speech-specific measure of prosody, rise time perception, Goswami and her colleagues have found that individuals with dyslexia perform significantly worse than nonimpaired readers. Studies have also found that children and adults with specific language impairment were impaired on these tasks. Despite the high comorbidity of these…

This research focuses on the relation between color and psychological functioning, specifically, that between red and performance attainment. Red is hypothesized to impair performance on achievement tasks, because red is associated with the danger of failure in achievement contexts and evokes avoidance motivation. Four experiments demonstrate that…