Background: Executive functions (EF) impairments have long been observed in children and youths with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Until very recently, little attention has been paid to examine EF profiles of adults with ASD. Given the importance of EF to cope with the demands of daily life and participate in society (e.g. maintaining an…

The Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Cognitive Abilities (WJ IV COG) is a comprehensive assessment battery designed to assess broad and narrow cognitive abilities, as defined by the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of intelligence. Previous studies examined the invariance of the WJ assessments across sex and age groups using factor analytic methods.…

Goals: This study examined: (a) crystallized/fluid intelligence trajectories of adolescents and adults with Down syndrome; and (b) the contribution of endogenous (health, activities of daily living--ADL) and exogenous (cognitively stimulating leisure activities) factors on adults' intelligence with age. Method: Four cohorts (N = 80) with Down…

Face recognition is a fundamental function that requires holistic processing. Differences in face processing have been consistently identified in autistic children, but it is unknown whether these differences persist across the adult lifespan. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured holistic face processing with a…

The aim of this study is to focus on the verbal stimuli of the Vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale -- Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV). To our knowledge, this is the first research to examine whether the abstractness/concreteness and the lexical category of the words in the WAIS-IV vocabulary subtest influence the ability to…

Purpose: Sentence comprehension deficits are common following a left hemisphere stroke and have primarily been investigated under optimal listening conditions. However, ample work in neurotypical controls indicates that background noise affects sentence comprehension and the cognitive resources it engages. The purpose of this study was to examine…

Research has demonstrated that students' learning outcomes and motivation to learn are influenced by the visual design of learning technologies (e.g., learning management systems or LMS). One aspect of LMS design that has not been thoroughly investigated is visual complexity. In two experiments, postsecondary students rated the visual complexity…

Achievement goal theory is one of the major theories of the relationship between learners' perception of learning processes and their academic achievements. The present research was focused on the relationship between learners' goals and the academic achievements of Hebrew-speaking students, who belong to the majority group, and Arabic-speaking…

The newest edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (5th ed., DSM-5) introduced substantial changes to the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder, including new severity level ratings for social communication and restricted and repetitive behavior domains. The purpose of this study was to evaluate…

Although hearing often declines with age, prior research has shown that older adults may benefit from multisensory input to a greater extent when compared to younger adults, a concept known as inverse effectiveness. While there is behavioral evidence in support of this phenomenon, less is known about its neural basis. The present functional MRI…

Purpose: As pulse rate increases beyond a few hundred Hertz, younger normal-hearing (NH) participants' ability to encode temporal information in band-limited acoustic pulse trains decreases, demonstrating a rate limitation in processing rapid temporal information. Rate discrimination abilities, however, have yet to be investigated in older NH…

We investigated the effects of age on proactive and reactive cognitive control in a large population sample of 809 individuals, ranging in age between 5 and 97 years. For that purpose, we used an anticue paradigm, which required a consistent remapping of cue location and response hand: Left-sided cues required right-hand responses and vice versa.…

Patterns of maintenance of ability across the life span have been documented on tests of knowledge ("Gc"), as have patterns of steady decline on measures of reasoning ("Gf/Gv"), working memory ("Gsm"), and speed ("Gs"). Whether these patterns occur at the same rate for adults from different educational…

Sounds deviating from an otherwise repeated or structured sequence capture attention and affect performance in an ongoing visual task negatively, testament to the balance between selective attention and change detection. Although deviance distraction has been the object of much research, its modulation across the life span has been more scarcely…

Research on sources of individual difference in parental Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) is limited and there is a particular lack of research on fathers' compared to mothers' speech. This study examined the predictive relations between infant characteristics and variability in paternal lexical diversity (LD) in dyadic free play with two-year-olds (M…