Recent neuroimaging studies suggest lateralized cerebral mechanisms in the right temporal parietal junction are involved in complex social and moral reasoning, such as ascribing beliefs to others. Based on this evidence, we tested 3 anterior-resected and 3 complete callosotomy patients along with 22 normal subjects on a reasoning task that…

Purpose: To establish whether the predictions of the extended optional infinitive (EOI) hypothesis (Rice, Wexler, & Cleave, 1995) hold for the language of Afrikaans-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and whether tense marking is a possible clinical marker of SLI in Afrikaans. Method: Production of tense morphology was…

Attentional interference between tasks performed in parallel is known to have strong and often undesired effects. As yet, however, the mechanisms by which interference operates remain elusive. A better knowledge of these processes may facilitate our understanding of the effects of attention on human performance and the debilitating consequences…

Atypical perception in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is well documented (Dakin & Frith, 2005). However, relatively little is known about colour perception in ASD. Less accurate performance on certain colour tasks has led some to argue that chromatic discrimination is reduced in ASD relative to typical development (Franklin, Sowden, Burley,…

Several groups have recently reported that people with autism may suffer from a deficit in visual motion processing and proposed that these deficits may be related to a general dorsal stream dysfunction. In order to test the dorsal stream deficit hypothesis, we investigated coherent and biological motion perception as well as coherent form…

It is well known that emotions participate in the regulation of social behaviors and that the emotion displayed by a conspecific influences the behavior of other animals. In its simplest form, empathy can be characterized as the capacity to be affected by and/or share the emotional state of another. However, to date, relatively little is known…

Remembering events frequently involves associating objects and their associated locations in space, and it has been implicated that the areas associated with the hippocampus are important in this function. The current study examined the role of the perirhinal cortex in retrieving familiar object-place paired associates, as well as in acquiring…

Objectives: The purpose of the study was to examine differences between maltreated and nonmaltreated children's ability to differentiate emotionally evocative fantastic and real events. Methods: Four- and 5-year-old (n=145) maltreated and nonmaltreated children viewed images depicting positive and negative fantastic and real events and reported…

Much evidence suggests that common posterior parietal mechanisms underlie the orientation of attention in physical space and along the "mental number line." For example, the small leftward bias ("pseudoneglect") found in paper-and-pencil line bisection is also found when participants "bisect" number pairs, estimating (without calculating) the…

Studies from many languages consistently report that subject relative clauses (SR) are easier to process than object relatives (OR). However, Hsiao and Gibson (2003) report an OR preference for Chinese, a finding that has been contested. Here we report faster OR versus SR processing in Basque, an ergative, head-final language with pre-nominal…

Recent research has found that sensitivity to linguistic stress is related to phonological awareness and reading development. This study investigated the roles of two types of linguistic stress sensitivity (lexical and metrical stress) in the phonological awareness and reading development of young children. Forty-five kindergarten children were…

The reported experiments aimed to investigate whether a person and his or her gaze direction presented in the context of a naturalistic scene cause perception, memory, and attention to be biased in typically developing adolescents and high-functioning adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A novel computerized image manipulation program…

The purpose of the current study was to examine the role of theory of mind in fairness-related behavior in preschoolers and to introduce a tool for examining fairness-related behavior in children. A total of 68 preschoolers played the Ultimatum Game in a face-to-face setting. Acquisition of theory of mind was defined as the understanding of false…

Since Finnish is not an Indo-European language, studying foreign languages in general and then also studying special fields through the medium of foreign languages may provide an extra difficulty for Finnish students. Most university language centres in Finland have organized reading comprehension courses in several foreign languages for the…

Background: Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are characterised by developmentally inappropriate levels of hyperactivity, impulsivity and/or inattention and are particularly impaired when performing tasks that require a high level of cognitive control. Methylphenidate (MPH) and motivational incentives may help improve…