Past research on the influence of self-efficacy in training has provided mixed results. Key differences between studies pertain to whether past performance is operationalized as a residual variable or as an unadjusted variable and to the type of task used. In this study, the authors conducted and performed a reanalysis to examine the influence of…

The dimensional change card-sorting task (DCCS task) is frequently used to assess young children's executive abilities. However, the source of children's difficulty with this task is still under debate. In the standard DCCS task, children have to sort, for example, test cards with a red cherry or a blue banana into two boxes marked with target…

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the use of trace diagrams for analysing collaborative problem solving. The paper describes a study where trace diagrams were used to analyse joint navigation in a virtual environment. Ten pairs of undergraduates worked together on a distributed virtual task to collect five flowers using two bees with each…

Persons with and without mental retardation who were matched on CA took part in three tasks: an inhibition of return task, a location negative-priming task, and an identity negative-priming task. Having participants perform all three tasks allowed us to correlate performance among the tasks and assess the various relationships among performance…

In 6 task-cuing experiments, with 2 cues per task, the authors varied cue-stimulus interval to investigate G. D. Logan and C. Bundesen's (2003) claim that when cue repetition is controlled for, task-switch cost and its reduction with preparation are largely eliminated and hence cannot index an endogenous control process. Experiment 1 replicates…

Compatibility level repetition benefits in interference paradigms have been taken to reflect enhanced processing selectivity in response to cognitive conflict elicited by a task-irrelevant stimulus feature. The authors demonstrate such sequential effects in the Simon task which (a) occur independent of previous behavioral conflict effects and (b)…

In this study, 13 individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA), 15 individuals with Asperger's disorder (AD), and age-, and IQ-matched controls were presented a list of sentences auditorily. Participants then evaluated semantically related but new sentences and reported whether they were old or new. The total rates of false recognition for…

Background: Interpreting emotional expressions is a socio-cognitive skill central to interpersonal interaction. Poor emotion recognition has been reported in autism but is less well understood in other kinds of intellectual disabilities (ID), with procedural differences making comparisons across studies and syndromes difficult. This study aimed to…

Do the viewpoint costs incurred when naming rotated familiar objects arise during initial identification or during consolidation? To answer this question we employed an attentional blink (AB) task where two target objects appeared amongst a rapid stream of distractor objects. Our assumption was that while both targets and distractors undergo…

The aim of this study was to identify promising endophenotypes for intelligence in children and adolescents for future genetic studies in cognitive development. Based on the available set of endophenotypes for intelligence in adults, cognitive tasks were chosen covering the domains of working memory, processing speed, and selective attention. This…

When bisecting words in their middle, people reveal leftward bisection errors. This tendency might emerge from an attentional bias towards the beginning of the word. However, when longer meaningless letter strings are presented, people reveal a rightward bisection bias. To test the role of semantic information on leftward or rightward bisection…

One of the components of abnormal social functioning in autism is an impaired ability to direct eye gaze onto other people's faces in social situations. Here, we investigated the relationship between gaze onto the eye and mouth regions of faces, and the visual information that was present within those regions. We used the "Bubbles" method to vary…

Poor readers perform worse than their normal reading peers on a variety of speech perception tasks, which may be linked to their phonological processing abilities. The purpose of the study was to compare the brain activation patterns of normal and impaired readers on speech perception to better understand the phonological basis in reading…

Research investigating risk perception suggests that not only the quantitative parameters used in technical risk assessment (i.e., frequency and severity of harm) but also "qualitative" aspects such as the dread a hazard provokes or its controllability influence risk judgments. It remains to be elucidated, however, which neural mechanism underlie…

The purpose of this research was to assess the development of phonological skills before and during learning to read. Thirty-four children were tested twice, in nursery school and in first grade with an epiphonological task (E), e.g. judgment of similarity, and two metaphonological tasks, one requiring the extraction of common units (M1) and one…