Perhaps now more than ever before the U.S. military is called on to perform tasks that are outside its normal/traditional purview. Recent wars--Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, for example--have demonstrated the need for the U.S. military to do more than find and defeat a clearly defined enemy. At all levels of the war theater (conflict area), the…

The study examined individual differences in code-switching to determine the relationship between code-switching frequency and performance in verbal and non-verbal task switching. Seventy-eight Cantonese-English bilinguals completed a semi-structured conversation to quantify natural code-switching, a verbal fluency task requiring language…

Background: Rhyme awareness is one of the earliest forms of phonological awareness to develop and is assessed in many developmental studies by means of a simple rhyme task. The influence of more demanding experimental paradigms on rhyme judgment performance is often neglected. Addressing this issue may also shed light on whether rhyme processing…

Age of acquisition (AoA) effects have been used to support the notion of a critical period for first language acquisition. In this study, we examine AoA effects in deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users via a grammaticality judgment task. When English reading performance and nonverbal IQ are factored out, results show that accuracy of…

We analyzed several studies of non-verbal communication (prosody and facial expressions) completed in our lab and conducted a secondary analysis to compare performance on receptive vs. expressive tasks by adolescents with ASD and their typically developing peers. Results show a significant between-group difference for the aggregate score of…

Using narrative story-completion tasks with a sample of 97 preschool-age Mexican-heritage children from a large urban area, the authors examined differences in children's representations about their mothers and teachers. The authors also looked at teachers' perceptions to determine whether teachers viewed children in the same way as children…

To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the…

Video surrogates can help people quickly make sense of the content of a video before downloading or seeking more detailed information. Visual and audio features of a video are primary information carriers and might become important components of video retrieval and video sense-making. In the past decades, most research and development efforts on…

Visual peripersonal space (i.e., the space immediately surrounding the body) is represented by multimodal neurons integrating tactile stimuli applied on a body part with visual stimuli delivered near the same body part, e.g., the hand. Tool use may modify the boundaries of the peri-hand area, where vision and touch are integrated. The neural…

Load theory of attention proposes that distractor processing is reduced in tasks with high perceptual load that exhaust attentional capacity within task-relevant processing. In contrast, tasks of low perceptual load leave spare capacity that spills over, resulting in the perception of task-irrelevant, potentially distracting stimuli. Tsal and…

Several studies have shown that handedness has an impact on visual spatial abilities. Here we investigated the effect of laterality on auditory space perception. Participants (33 right-handers, 20 left-handers) completed two tasks of sound localization. In a dark, anechoic, and sound-proof room, sound stimuli (broadband noise) were presented via…

The present work investigated the effects of caffeine (0 mg, 100 mg, 200 mg, 400 mg) on a flanker task designed to test Posner's three visual attention network functions: alerting, orienting, and executive control [Posner, M. I. (2004). "Cognitive neuroscience of attention". New York, NY: Guilford Press]. In a placebo-controlled, double-blind…

The reorientation task is a paradigm that has been used extensively to study the types of information used by humans and animals to navigate in their environment. In this task, subjects are reinforced for going to a particular location in an arena that is typically rectangular in shape. The subject then has to find that location again after being…

Motor overflow refers to involuntary movement or muscle activity coinciding with voluntary movement. We examined whether 16 young adults (18-30 years) and 16 older adults (50-80 years) could voluntarily inhibit overflow. Participants performed a finger pressing task, exerting 50% of their maximal force. Overflow was concurrently recorded in the…

The current practice of preference assessment offers a variety of approaches to determine an individual's preference for specific items. However, the majority of the research has been completed on school-age children or individuals with significant cognitive or behavioral deficits. Further, studies on preference assessments have not adequately…