Executive dysfunction is thought to be primary to autism. We examined differences in executive function between 20 adults with autism and learning disability and 23 individuals with learning disabilities outside the autistic spectrum. All participants were matched for chronological age and full-scale IQ, and were given a battery of tasks assessing…

This study investigated whether illustrations facilitate story recall in preschoolers (N = 58) 46 to 63 months of age. Each child was exposed to either a verbal story narrative with illustrations (Verbal and Picture condition), the narrative alone (Verbal Only condition), the narrative with uninformative illustrations (Verbal and Irrelevant…

Recent work has shown that Whorf effects of language on color discrimination are stronger in the right visual field than in the left. Here we show that this phenomenon is not limited to color: The perception of animal figures (cats and dogs) was more strongly affected by linguistic categories for stimuli presented to the right visual field than…

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and insular cortex are implicated in distributed neural circuitry that supports emotional decision-making. Previous studies of patients with vmPFC lesions have focused primarily on decision-making under uncertainty, when outcome probabilities are ambiguous (e.g. the Iowa Gambling Task). It remains unclear…

Three experiments with short-term recognition tasks are reported. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants decided whether a probe matched a list item specified by its spatial location. Items presented at study in a different location (intrusion probes) had to be rejected. Serial position curves of positive, new, and intrusion probes over the probed…

The remarkable successes of the physical sciences have been built on highly general quantitative laws, which serve as the basis for understanding an enormous variety of specific physical systems. How far is it possible to construct universal principles in the cognitive sciences, in terms of which specific aspects of perception, memory, or decision…

This article reports findings of the Wurzburg and Gottingen Longitudinal Memory Studies, which focused on children's verbal memory development. The studies started with 102 (German) kindergarten children in Wurzburg and 86 second-graders in Gottingen who were tested on various memory measures, including sort-recall, memory capacity, metamemory,…

A group of 73 normal children (ages 8 to 10) was compared to 49 age-matched developmentally dyslexic children of average intelligence on the California Verbal Learning Test for Children (CVLT-C), to determine if reading disability was associated with impaired verbal memory. Dyslexics differed significantly from controls on 9 of the 12 CVLT-C…

This study investigated the possibility that episodes that deviate from a routine event script are retained in memory, tagged by their unique characteristics. Three groups of 9 preschool children experienced one of three deviations in their normal snack routine: (1) a puppet handed out the snack; (2) a puppet taught the children to play a game…

Many studies have examined group pressure and its effect on an individual. A study was undertaken to investigate the influence of a majority upon subjects and its effect upon long term memory. Undergraduate students (N=18) were selected and randomly assigned to either a treatment or control group. Each subject watched a 10-minute segment from a…

The purpose of this experiment was to examine lag function developmental parameters and to test a related developmental hypothesis and the predictions it generated. Fourth and eighth graders and adults were shown a series of words, one at a time, with some words presented twice. Between the two presentations of each repeated word there was one of…

Infants were tested in three studies of the acquisition and long-term retention of category-specific information. Results document retention of category-specific information after intervals of two weeks. (PCB)

Assessed the effect of the amount of physical detail in pictures on the picture recognition memory of 7- and 9-year-olds, young adults, and adults over 68. For each age group, recognition accuracy was significantly higher for pictures presented in the simple rather than the complex form. (PCB)

Examines changes in participants' memories for natural conversations over a one month period. Reports that after one month, participants recalled less content and reported more descriptive statements, made more inferences, and were less accurate than when they had recalled the conversations immediately. (MM)

Describes a study designed to identify the mental operations that contribute to people's ability to answer wh- questions, that is, questions which request information that plays a particular role in relation to some action or event. Wh- questions are signaled by interrogative pronouns and adverbs like who, what, when, and where. (SED)