This study investigated the internal reliability, temporal stability and plasticity of commonly used measures of inhibition-related functions. Stop-signal, go/no-go, antisaccade, Simon, Eriksen flanker, Stroop and Continuous Performance tasks were administered twice to 23 healthy participants over a period of approximately 11 weeks in order to…

In some cochlear implant users, success is not achieved in spite of optimal clinical factors (including age at implantation, duration of rehabilitation and post-implant hearing level), which may be attributed to disorders at higher levels of the auditory pathway. We used cortical auditory evoked potentials to investigate the ability to perceive…

Purpose: Apraxia of speech (AOS) is considered a speech motor programming impairment, but the specific nature of the impairment remains a matter of debate. This study investigated 2 hypotheses about the underlying impairment in AOS framed within the Directions Into Velocities of Articulators (DIVA; Guenther, Ghosh, & Tourville, 2006) model: The…

Perception of mechanical (i.e. physical) causality, in terms of a cause-effect relationship between two motion events, appears to be a powerful mechanism in our daily experience. In spite of a growing interest in the earliest causal representations, the role of experience in the origin of this sensitivity is still a matter of dispute. Here, we…

Flanker congruency effects were measured in a masked flanker task to assess the properties of spatial attention during conscious and nonconscious processing of form, color, and conjunctions of these features. We found that (1) consciously and nonconsciously processed colored shape distractors (i.e., flankers) produce flanker congruency effects;…

Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined…

A multitude of models have been proposed to account for the neural mechanism of value integration and decision making in speeded decision tasks. While most of these models account for existing data, they largely disagree on a fundamental characteristic of the choice mechanism: independent versus different types of competitive processing. Five…

If the diffusion model (Ratcliff & McKoon, 2008) is to account for the relative speeds of correct responses and errors, it is necessary that the components of processing identified by the model vary across the trials of a task. In standard applications, the rate at which information is accumulated by the diffusion process is assumed to be normally…

Mind wandering is a pervasive feature of human cognition often associated with the withdrawal of task-related executive control processes. Here, we explore the possibility that, in tasks requiring executive control to sustain consistent responding, moments of mind wandering could be associated with moments of increased behavioral variability. To…

Previous studies suggest that action representations are activated during object processing, even when task-irrelevant. In addition, there is evidence that lexical-semantic context may affect such activation during object processing. Finally, prior work from our laboratory and others indicates that function-based ("use") and structure-based…

Purpose: This study investigated the age-related speed--accuracy strategies of children, adolescents, and adults in performing a rapid striking task that allowed the self-selection of the interception position in a virtual, two-dimensional environment. Method: The moving target had curvilinear trajectories that were determined by combinations of…

Advances in technology now make it possible to capture detailed multimodal data about real-world everyday activity. Researchers have taken advantage of these advances to address questions about activity in more systematic and precise ways. Along with exciting opportunities to record data in ways that were not possible before, there are also…

Purpose: The present study investigated phonological encoding skills in children who stutter (CWS) and those who do not (CNS). Participants were 9 CWS (M=11.8 years, SD=1.5) and 9 age and sex matched CNS (M=11.8 years, SD=1.5). Method: Participants monitored target phonemes located at syllable onsets and offsets of bisyllabic words. Performance in…

This study compared workloads of undergraduate courses taught in 16-week and 8-week sessions. A statistically significant difference in workload was found between the two. Based on survey data from approximately 29,000 students, on average students spent about 17 minutes more per credit per week on 16-week courses than on similar 8-week courses.…

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among language educators in implementing and researching collaborative learning in wiki-based learning environments. However, little empirical evidence has been reported about the role of EFL learners' online self-regulating capacity in their collaborative learning. This study used wiki-based…