Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic disorder associated with severe visuospatial deficits, relatively strong language skills, heightened social interest, and increased attention to faces. On the basis of the visuospatial deficits, this disorder has been characterized primarily as a deficit of the dorsal stream, the occipitoparietal brain regions…

The effect of cognitive load (CL) on speech recognition has received little attention despite the prevalence of CL in everyday life, e.g., dual-tasking. To assess the effect of CL on the interaction between lexically-mediated and acoustically-mediated processes, we measured the magnitude of the "Ganong effect" (i.e., lexical bias on phoneme…

Previous research has demonstrated a female advantage, albeit imperfectly, on tests of object location memory where object identity information is readily available. However, spatial and visual elements are often confounded in the experimental tasks used. Here spatial and visual memory performance was compared in 30 men and 30 women by presenting…

In Chinese orthography, a dominant character structure exists in which a semantic radical appears on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); a minority opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). As the number of phonetic radical types is much greater than semantic radical types, in SP characters the information is…

Aged dogs exhibit a spectrum of cognitive abilities including a syndrome similar to Alzheimer's disease. A major impediment to research so far has been the lack of a quick and accurate test of visuospatial memory appropriate for community-based animals. We therefore report on the development and validation of the Canine Sand Maze. A 4.5-m-diameter…

This study focused on a comparison of the visuo-spatial abilities (correct rate and speed) between dyslexic and normal students in Taiwan and Hong Kong. There were a total of 120 10-12 year old students. Thirty students had been diagnosed as dyslexic in Taiwan (T.W. dyslexia) and thirty students had been diagnosed as dyslexic in Hong Kong (H.K.…

Research points to a right hemisphere bias for processing social stimuli. Hemispheric specialization for attention shifts cued by social stimuli, however, has been rarely studied. We examined the capacity of each hemisphere to orient attention in response to social and nonsocial cues using a lateralized spatial cueing paradigm. We compared the…

The purpose of this study was to compare the cognitive processing profiles of school-age children (ages 7 to 17) who met criteria for underachievement in oral reading accuracy based on three different methods: 1) use of a regression-based IQ-achievement discrepancy only (REGonly), 2) use of a low-achievement cutoff only (LAonly), and 3) use of a…

Almost all locomotor animals are sensitive to optical expansion (visual looming) and for most animals this sensitivity is evident very early in their development. In humans there is evidence that responses to looming stimuli begin in the first 6 weeks of life, but here we demonstrate that as children become independent their perceptual acuity…

How are spatial and object attention coordinated to achieve rapid object learning and recognition during eye movement search? How do prefrontal priming and parietal spatial mechanisms interact to determine the reaction time costs of intra-object attention shifts, inter-object attention shifts, and shifts between visible objects and covertly cued…

Atypical activation during the Embedded Figures Task has been demonstrated in autism, but has not been investigated in siblings or related to measures of clinical severity. We identified atypical activation during the Embedded Figures Task in participants with autism and unaffected siblings compared with control subjects in a number of temporal…

This study investigates cognitive abilities of pre/primary school children without and with spina bifida in Uganda. Qualitative semi structured interviews and quantitative functioning scales measurements were combined and conducted with 133 parents, 133 children with spina bifida, and 35 siblings. ANCOVA was used to test for differences in…

The resting regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) patterns related to co-occurring symptoms such as inattention, hyperactivity, neurological soft signs and motor problems have not yet been disclosed in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In this study thirteen adults with ASD and ten matched neurotypical controls underwent PET. The scores of rating…

Preview benefits (PBs) from two words to the right of the fixated one (i.e., word N + 2) and associated parafoveal-on-foveal effects are critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. This experiment examined parafoveal processing during reading of Chinese sentences, using a boundary manipulation of N + 2-word preview…

Many current theories of false memories propose that, when we retrieve a memory, we are not reactivating a veridical, fixed representation of a past event, but are rather reactivating incomplete fragments that may be accurate or distorted and may have arisen from other events. By presenting the two phases of the misinformation paradigm in…