Based on the testimony of others, children learn about a variety of figures that they never meet. We ask when and how they are able to differentiate between the historical figures that they learn about (e.g., Abraham Lincoln) and fantasy characters (e.g., Harry Potter). Experiment 1 showed that both younger (3- and 4-year-olds) and older children…

Purpose: Conceptual and methodological confounds occur when non(sense) word repetition tasks are administered to speakers who do not have the target speech sounds in their phonetic inventories or who habitually misarticulate targeted speech sounds. In this article, the authors (a) describe a nonword repetition task, the Syllable Repetition Task…

This study aims to investigate the types of difficulty encountered by children with nonverbal (visuospatial) learning disabilities (NLD) during the processing of spatial information derived from descriptions. Two spatial descriptions--one in survey, one in route perspective--and one nonspatial description were orally presented to children aged…

Within the parietal cortex, the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) seem to be involved in both spatial and nonspatial functions: Both areas are activated when misleading information is provided by invalid spatial cues in Posner's location-cueing paradigm, but also when infrequent deviant stimuli are presented within…

Previous research suggests that action video game play improves attentional resources, allowing gamers to better allocate their attention across both space and time. In order to further characterize the plastic changes resulting from playing these video games, we administered the Attentional Network Test (ANT) to action game players and…

Increased motivation towards social stimuli in Williams syndrome (WS) led us to hypothesize that a face's human status would have greater impact than face's orientation on WS' face processing abilities. Twenty-nine individuals with WS were asked to categorize facial emotion expressions in real, human cartoon and non-human cartoon faces presented…

This essay uses a case study to explore some of the reasons why understanding failures associated with diagnosis seems to have lagged behind the attention and understanding directed at failures in other aspects of healthcare (e.g., wrong patient/procedure, medication misadministration, etc). The goal is not to pose an alternative to many of the…

Effects of perceptual and cognitive loads on spoken-word recognition have so far largely escaped investigation. This study lays the foundations of a psycholinguistic approach to speech recognition in adverse conditions that draws upon the distinction between energetic masking, i.e., listening environments leading to signal degradation, and…

This article aimed to examine the relationship between mirror neuron and theory of mind functions and to explore their possible roles in the emergence of an achievement goal contagion in educational settings such as classrooms. Based on the evidence from different lines of research such as neurobiology, neuropsychology, social psychology, and…

Two studies examined development of the ability to judge what another person is looking at. In Study 1, 54 2- to 4-year-olds judged where someone was looking in real-life, photograph, and drawing formats. A minority of 2-year-olds, but a majority of older children, passed all tasks, suggesting that the ability arises at around 3 years of age.…

Empirical studies of creativity have focused on the importance of divergent thinking, which supports generating novel solutions to loosely defined problems. The present study examined creativity and frontal cortical activity in an externally-validated group of creative individuals (trained musicians) and demographically matched control…

Increased public speaking confidence is often cited as a major benefit for undergraduates taking the basic communication course. Several scholars have reported that the state anxiety of novice speakers declines progressively during performance, a phenomenon called within-session habituation. However, the contributions of these short-term…

Several studies suggest that children with ADHD tend to perform worse than typically developing children on emotion recognition tasks. However, most of these studies have focused on the recognition of facial expression, while there is evidence that context plays a major role on emotion perception. This study aims at further investigating emotion…

In the present study, we investigated mindreading abilities in a group of adults with Asperger Syndrome (AS) by using the faux pas task, an advanced test of theory of mind (Baron-Cohen et al. (1999). "Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 29," 407-418). The faux pas is a particular case of a non-intentional action reflecting an…

Despite being ignored, visual distractors often produce traceable negative priming (NP) effects that can be used to investigate inhibitory processes. Robust NP effects are typically found with young adults, but not with children. Using 2 different NP tasks, the authors compared NP in 5 different age groups spanning 5 to 25 years of age. The 1st…