Empirical attempts to understand connections between abstract cognition and sensori-motor processes have pointed toward an embodied view of cognition, where cognitive activity is strongly tied to sensori-motor activity. Here the authors test the ability of the cognitive system to impose structure on the world using a well-established phenomenon in…

Optic ataxia (OA) is generally thought of as a disorder of visually guided reaching movements that cannot be explained by any simple deficit in visual or motor processing. In this paper we offer a new perspective on optic ataxia; we argue that the popular characterisation of this disorder is misleading and is unrepresentative of the pattern of…

Previous studies with adult human participants revealed that motor activities can influence mental rotation of body parts and abstract shapes. In this study, we investigated the influence of a rotational hand movement on mental rotation performance from a developmental perspective. Children at the age of 5, 8, and 11 years and adults performed a…

Online students face challenges with communication and socialization in the asynchronous distance-learning classroom because of a missing face-to-face, nonverbal communications. With the increased demand for online education and the high attrition rate, online educational leaders may consider opportunities for improvement in the areas of…

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…

Purpose: Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) has been associated with a wide variety of diagnostic descriptions and has been shown to involve different symptoms during successive stages of development. In the present study, the authors attempted to associate the symptoms of CAS in a particular developmental stage with particular…

The present study investigates the relation between spatial ability and visuo-spatial and verbal working memory in spatial text processing. In two experiments, participants listened to a spatial text (Experiments 1 and 2) and a non-spatial text (Experiment 1), at the same time performing a spatial or a verbal concurrent task, or no secondary task.…

Patterns and correlates of comorbidity, as well as differences in manifest depressive profiles were investigated in a sample of depressed adolescents. A sub-sample of the youth were characterized as belonging to either a "Pure" depression group, an "Internalizing" group (depression and co-occurring internalizing disorders), or an "Externalizing"…

Apraxia of Speech (AOS) is an impairment of motor programming. However, the exact nature of this deficit remains unclear. The present study examined motor programming in AOS in the context of a recent two-stage model [Klapp, S. T. (1995). Motor response programming during simple and choice reaction time: The role of practice. "Journal of…

Neural correlates of intrasubject variability (ISV) were studied using functional magnetic resonance imaging in 25 children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and typically developing(TD) children performing simple go/no-go tasks. Results concluded that in children with ADHD, dysfunction of premotor systems resulted in increased…

Recent neurophysiological and brain imaging studies have shown that the motor system is involved in language processing. However, it is an open question whether this involvement is a necessary requisite to understand language or rather a side effect of distinct cognitive processes underlying it. In order to clarify this issue we carried out three…

When an observed action (e.g., kicking) is compatible to a to be produced action (e.g., a foot-key response as compared to a finger-key response), then the self-produced action is more fluent, that is, it is more accurate and faster. A series of experiments explore the notion that vision-action compatibility effects can influence personal-trait…

Choosing which teaching approach to use and when to use it is a complex decision, especially for preservice teachers learning to teach individuals with a variety of skill levels and abilities. One source of information that teachers can use to help select an approach is motor-learning theory. This article describes an early field experience in…

This paper reports a study investigating the degree of dissociation between performance shown by children with or without Down's syndrome (DS), matched on non-verbal MA-level, following an implicit or explicit learning procedure. Task-specific factors were tightly controlled using the same task for both modes of learning. The implicit learning…

This article discusses a study to determine whether primary grade students can learn comprehension processes via hand motions to portray these mental processes. Comprehension Process Motions (CPMs) were designed to provide students with a way to make abstract comprehension processes more consciously accessible and also to give teachers a way to…