Individual differences in solution strategies have frequently been reported for different measures of mental rotation (MR) ability. In the present study (N=346 German students), we investigated the relationship between solution strategies on two tests commonly used to identify different patterns of strategies: the Mental Rotations Test (MRT;…

Past research has uncovered a surprising paradox: Although 14-month-olds have exquisite phonetic discrimination skills (e.g., distinguishing [b] from [d]), they have difficulty using phonetic detail when mapping "novel" words to objects in laboratory tasks (confusing "bin" and "din"). While some have attributed infants' difficulty to immature word…

Reading acquisition requires, in addition to appropriate phonological abilities, accurate and rapid selection of sublexical orthographic units by attentional letter string parsing. Spatio-temporal distribution of attentional engagement onto 3-pseudoletter strings was studied in 28 dyslexic and 55 normally reading children by measuring attentional…

This study examined how the two cerebral hemispheres recruit semantic processing mechanisms by combining event-related potential measures and visual half-field methods in a word priming paradigm in which semantic strength and predictability were manipulated using lexically associated word pairs. Activation patterns on the late positive complex…

In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds…

Previous research on second language (L2) vocabulary learning has examined the relationship between word properties and learnability (e.g. Ellis and Beaton 1993). Few studies, however, have examined patterns in partial word form learning as a method of assessing learnability and improving our understanding of allocation of processing resources…

Abnormalities in eye tracking are consistently observed in schizophrenia patients and their relatives and have been proposed as an endophenotype of the disease. The aim of this study was to investigate the performance of patients at Ultra High Risk (UHR) for developing psychosis on a task of smooth pursuit eye movement (SPEM). Forty-six UHR…

In recent years, a strong functional relationship between finger counting and number processing has been suggested. Developmental studies have shown specific effects of the structure of the individual finger counting system on arithmetic abilities. Moreover, the orientation of the mental quantity representation ("number line") seems to be…

Using experimental, observational and interview-assessment methods, we examined relations among mother-child discussion skills and suggested strategies for coping with postdivorce interparental conflict in a conflict task, children's memory for those strategies in a later recall interview, and children's self-reported use of coping strategies in…

This review summarizes a series of experiments aimed at answering the question whether the hippocampus in rats can serve as an animal model of amnesia. It is recognized that a comparison of the functions of the rat hippocampus with human hippocampus is difficult, because of differences in methodology, differences in complexity of life experiences,…

The Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) is a widely used tool in cognitive neuroscience increasingly employed to identify brain regions associated with failures of sustained attention. An important claim of the SART is that it is significantly related to real-world problems of sustained attention such as those experienced by TBI and ADHD…

It has been proposed that switch costs in task switching reflect the strengthening of task-related associations and that strengthening is triggered by response execution. The present study tested the hypothesis that only task-related responses are able to trigger strengthening. Effects of task strengthening caused by error corrections were…

The aim of this work is to combine behavioural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to advance our knowledge of where the Frequency x Regularity interaction on word naming is located in the cerebral cortex. Participants named high and low frequency, regular and exception words in a behavioural lab (Experiment 1) and during an fMRI…

Three experiments examined whether the identification of a visual word is followed by its subvocal articulation during reading. An irrelevant spoken word (ISW) that was identical, phonologically similar, or dissimilar to a visual target word was presented when the eyes moved to the target in the course of sentence reading. Sentence reading was…

We show that perceptual sensitivity to visual stimuli can be modulated by matches between the contents of working memory (WM) and stimuli in the visual field. Observers were presented with an object cue (to hold in WM or to merely attend) and subsequently had to identify a brief target presented within a colored shape. The cue could be…