This review summarizes a series of experiments aimed at answering the question whether the hippocampus in rats can serve as an animal model of amnesia. It is recognized that a comparison of the functions of the rat hippocampus with human hippocampus is difficult, because of differences in methodology, differences in complexity of life experiences,…

Acquiring research skills is considered to be a highly challenging aspect of developing expertise in the social sciences. Because instruction and mentoring in these skills are typically grounded in the self-report of researchers, difficulties in learning the material may be due to the content and accuracy of these explanations. Using a…

Using a battery of working memory span tasks and n-back tasks, this study aimed to explore working memory functions in early-school-age children with Asperger's syndrome (AS). Twelve children with AS and 29 healthy children matched on age and IQ were recruited. Results showed: (a) children with AS performed better in digit and word recall tasks,…

Spontaneous classification was assessed using a free serial search task in 18 school-aged children at the high functioning end of the autistic spectrum and compared with results from age-matched typically developing controls. The task required participants to touch shapes in an exhaustive non-repetitive sequence. The positions of the items varied…

We tested the hypothesis that a computational overload results when two activities, one motor and the other cognitive that draw on the same neural processing pathways, are performed concurrently. Healthy young adult subjects carried out two seemingly distinct tasks of maintaining standing balance control under conditions of low (eyes closed),…

Previous research overwhelmingly suggests that feelings of ease people experience while processing information lead them to infer that their comprehension is high, whereas feelings of difficulty lead them to infer that their comprehension is low. However, the inferences people draw from their experiences of processing fluency should also vary in…

Results of a magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain imaging study conducted to examine the cortical responses during action execution and action observation in 10 healthy adults and 8 age-matched adults with Down syndrome are reported. During execution, the motor responses were strongly lateralized on the ipsilateral rather than the contralateral side…

Turner syndrome is associated with spatial and numerical cognitive impairments. We hypothesized that these nonverbal cognitive impairments result from limits in spatial and temporal processing, particularly as it affects attention. To examine spatiotemporal attention in girls with Turner syndrome versus typically developing controls, we used a…

There is rising interest in identifying precursors to bipolar disorder symptoms, including thought disorder. Thought disorder is identified in adults through self-report and in school-aged children through parent report and child story-telling. This study is an exploration to determine if preschoolers with mood dysregulation have evidence of…

The prospective relationship between initial rumination and subsequent bulimic symptoms, and vice versa, was examined, and possible mediators were tested in a community sample of 191 adolescent girls (M age = 14.5) at 3 different assessment time points. Path analyses indicated that Time 1 rumination predicted Time 3 bulimic symptoms, and vice…

In this article I report on a study of the cognitive tools that research mathematicians employ when developing deep understandings of abstract mathematical definitions. I arrived at several conclusions about this process: Examples play a predominant role in understanding definitions. Equivalent reformulations of definitions enrich understanding.…

We encounter many faces each day but relatively few are personally familiar. Once faces are familiar, they evoke semantic and social information known about the person. Neuroimaging studies demonstrate differential brain activity to familiar and non-familiar faces; however, brain responses related to personally familiar faces have been more rarely…

Grip selection tasks have been used to test "planning" in both autism and developmental coordination disorder (DCD). We differentiate between "motor" and "executive" planning and present a modified motor planning task. Participants grasped a cylinder in 1 of 2 orientations before turning it clockwise or anticlockwise.…

The aim of this work is to combine behavioural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to advance our knowledge of where the Frequency x Regularity interaction on word naming is located in the cerebral cortex. Participants named high and low frequency, regular and exception words in a behavioural lab (Experiment 1) and during an fMRI…

There have been strengthening recommendations that physical education (PE) should make a wider contribution to learning beyond that of psychomotor development. Cooperative learning models show considerable potential for study in PE but as yet these remain unexplored. This article reports upon an undergraduate gymnastics programme delivered using a…