Patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) display a greater tendency to endorse unstudied items as "old" on memory tests than healthy older adults. This liberal response bias may result in mistaken beliefs about the completion of common tasks. This research attempted to determine whether it was possible to shift the response bias of mild AD…

This study was aimed at investigating face categorization strategies in children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). Performance of 17 children with ASD was compared to that of 17 control children in a face-matching task, including hybrid faces (composed of two overlapping faces of different spatial bandwidths) and either low- or high-pass…

MOVE problems, like the Tower of London (TOL) or the Water Jug (WJ) task, are planning tasks that appear structurally similar and are assumed to involve similar cognitive processes. Carder et al. [Carder, H.P., Handley, S.J., & Perfect, T.J. ( 2004). Deconstructing the Tower of London: Alternative moves and conflict resolution as predictors of…

The saccadic eye movement system provides researchers with a powerful tool with which to explore the cognitive control of behaviour. It is a behavioural system whose limited output can be measured with exceptional precision, and whose input can be controlled and manipulated in subtle ways. A range of cognitive processes (notably those involved in…

Cognitive control of behavior continues to improve through adolescence in parallel with important brain maturational processes including synaptic pruning and myelination, which allow for efficient neuronal computations and the functional integration of widely distributed circuitries supporting top-down control of behavior. This is also a time when…

The 3D cube figures used by Shepard and Metzler [Shepard, R. N., & Metzler, J. (1971). "Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects." "Science," 171, 701-703] have been applied in a broad range of studies on mental rotation. This note provides a brief background on these figures, their general use in cognitive psychology and their role in…

In this study, the spatial limits of referred touch to a rubber hand were investigated. Participants rated the strength of the perceived illusion when the rubber hand was placed in one of six different spatial positions (at a distance of 17.5-67.5 cm horizontal from the participant's own hand). The results revealed a significant nonlinear…

Using a procedure of Hay and Jacoby [Hay, J. F., & Jacoby, L. L. (1999). "Separating habit and recollection in young and older adults: Effects of elaborative processing and distinctiveness." "Psychology and Aging," 14, 122-134], Korsakoff patients' capacity to encode and retrieve elaborative, semantic information was investigated. Habits were…

Smooth pursuit eye movements are performed in order to prevent retinal image blur of a moving object. Rhesus monkeys are able to perform smooth pursuit eye movements quite similar as humans, even if the pursuit target does not consist in a simple moving dot. Therefore, the study of the neuronal responses as well as the consequences of…

Poor decision-making and executive function deficits are frequently observed in individuals with substance use disorders (SUDs), and executive deficits may contribute to poor decision-making in this population. This study examined the influence of lifetime history of an alcohol, cocaine, heroin, or polysubstance use disorder on decision-making as…

Identifying threatening expressions is a significant social perceptual skill. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are impaired in social interaction, show deficits in face and emotion processing, show amygdala abnormalities and display a disadvantage in the perception of social threat. According to the anger superiority hypothesis,…

Background/Hypothesis: The degree of attention directed to a stimulus and the presence of anisometric representations can alter the perception of the magnitude of a stimulus. We wanted to learn if normal right-handed subjects' estimates of distance traveled are influenced by the right-left direction or hemispace of movements. Methods: We had…

The ability of apraxic patients to perform gestures in everyday life is a controversial issue. In this paper, we aimed to evaluate the automatic/voluntary dissociation (AVD) in four patients affected by clinically relevant limb apraxia. For this purpose, we sampled different kinds of gestures belonging to patients' motor repertoire and then…

Research indicates that right-hemisphere mechanisms are specifically sensitive to and averse to risk. Research also indicates that mixed degree of handedness is associated with increased access to right hemisphere processing. Accordingly, it was predicted that mixed-handers would exhibit greater risk aversion. Participants were presented with…

Functional MRI was used to investigate brain activation in healthy volunteers during encoding of unfamiliar faces as well as during correct recognition of newly learned faces (CR) compared to correct identification of distractor faces (CF), missed alarms (not recognizing previously presented faces, MA), and false alarms (incorrectly recognizing…