The direction of another person's gaze is difficult to ignore when presented at the center of attention. In 6 experiments, perception of unattended gaze was investigated. Participants made directional (left-right) judgments to gazing-face or pointing-hand targets, which were accompanied by a distractor face or hand. Processing of the distractor…

Observers can recognize other people from their movements. What is interesting is that observers are best able to recognize their own movements. Enhanced visual sensitivity to self-generated movement may reflect the contribution of motor planning processes to the visual analysis of human action. An alternative view is that enhanced visual…

A meta-analytic review of empirical studies that have investigated incubation effects on problem solving is reported. Although some researchers have reported increased solution rates after an incubation period (i.e., a period of time in which a problem is set aside prior to further attempts to solve), others have failed to find effects. The…

R. Ratcliff, P. Gomez, and G. McKoon (2004) suggested much of what goes on in lexical decision is attributable to decision processes and may not be particularly informative about word recognition. They proposed that lexical decision should be characterized by a decision process, taking the form of a drift-diffusion model (R. Ratcliff, 1978), that…

In order to examine hypothesized underlying neurocognitive processes in repetitive behaviour, children and adolescents (7-16 years) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) were compared on a range of executive function (EF) measures. Performance on neuropsychological tests assessing executive functioning showed…

How are bilinguals able to switch from one language to another? The prevailing inhibition hypothesis takes larger reaction-time (RT) costs for switching to the first language (L1) than to the second language (L2) as evidence for suppression of the non-target language. Switch cost asymmetries can alternatively be explained by an L1-repeat-benefit,…

The current study examined the contribution of brain areas affected by Parkinson's disease (PD) to sequence learning, with a specific focus on response-related processes, spatial attentional control, and executive functioning. Patients with mild PD, patients with moderate PD, and healthy age-matched participants performed three tasks--a sequence…

One of the most intriguing findings on language comprehension is that violations of syntactic predictions can affect event-related potentials as early as 120 ms, in the same time-window as early sensory processing. This effect, the so-called early left-anterior negativity (ELAN), has been argued to reflect word category access and initial…

Young children's integration of weight and distance information was examined using a new methodology that combines a single-armed apparatus with functional measurement. Weight and distance values were varied factorially across the item set. Children estimated how far the beam would tilt when different numbers of weights were placed at different…

Many researchers have studied the population of individuals with mild mental retardation (MIMR) as if it is a clear entity. Few researchers have investigated potential subtypes within the MIMR population. The purpose of the present study was to investigate which subtypes can be identified on the basis of intellectual, adaptive and behavioral…

The goal of this paper is to explore qualities of mathematical imagination in light of a classroom episode. It is based on the analysis of a classroom interaction in a high school Algebra class. We examine a sequence of nine utterances enacted by one of the students whom we call Carlene. Through these utterances Carlene illustrates, in our view,…

This study aimed to investigate temporally extended self-awareness (awareness of one's place in and continued existence through time) in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), using the delayed self-recognition (DSR) paradigm (Povinelli et al., Child Development 67:1540-1554, 1996). Relative to age and verbal ability matched comparison children, children…

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder, which stems from a genetic deletion on chromosome 7 and causes a profound weakness in visuospatial cognition. Our current study explores how orientation perception may contribute to the visuospatial deficits in WS. In Experiment 1, we found that WS individuals and normal 3-4 year olds…

We report a two-year longitudinal study aimed at investigating the rate of access to numerical and non-numerical information in long-term memory and the functioning of automatic and effortful cognitive inhibition processes in children with arithmetical learning disabilities (ALDs). Twelve children with ALDs, of age 9.3 years, and twelve…

Three studies were conducted examining the relationship between thoughts of defecation and thoughts of death. In Study 1 and Study 3 it was found that making thoughts of feces salient reduced the accessibility of death thoughts. In Study 2 it was found that making thoughts of death salient decreased the accessibility of feces thoughts. It is…