Memory performance in linear order reasoning tasks (A > B, B > C, C > D, etc.) shows quicker, and more accurate responses to queries on wider (AD) than narrower (AB) pairs on a hypothetical linear mental model (A -- B -- C -- D). While indicative of an analogue representation, research so far did not provide positive evidence for spatial…

It has been shown that the left and right cerebral hemispheres (LH and RH) respectively process qualitative or "categorical" spatial relations and metric or "coordinate" spatial relations. However, categorical spatial information could be thought as divided into two types: semantically-coded and visuospatially-coded categorical information. We…

Rapidly changing environments in day-to-day activities, enriched with stimuli competing for attention, require a cognitive control mechanism to select relevant stimuli, ignore irrelevant stimuli, and shift attention between alternative features of the environment. Such attentional orchestration is essential to the acquisition of reading skills. In…

The perceived distance between touches on a single skin surface is larger on regions of high tactile sensitivity than those with lower acuity, an effect known as "Weber's illusion". This illusion suggests that tactile size perception involves a representation of the perceived size of body parts preserving characteristics of the somatosensory…

Choice reactions to a property of an object stimulus are often faster when the location of a graspable part of the object corresponds with the location of a keypress response than when it does not, a phenomenon called the object-based Simon effect. Experiments 1-3 examined this effect for variants of teapot stimuli that were oriented to the left…

Motor overflow refers to involuntary movement or muscle activity that may coincide with voluntary movement. This study examined factors influencing motor overflow in 17 children (8-11 years), and 17 adults (18-35 years). Participants performed a finger pressing task by exerting either 33% or 66% of their maximal force output using their dominant…

Numbers are thought to be represented in space along a mental left-right oriented number line. Number magnitude has also been associated with the size of grip aperture, which might suggest a connection between number magnitude and intensity. The present experiment aimed to confirm this possibility more directly by using force as a response…

The neural bases of prosody during the production of literal and idiomatic interpretations of literally plausible idioms was investigated. Left- and right-hemisphere-damaged participants and normal controls produced literal and idiomatic versions of idioms ("He hit the books.") All groups modulated duration to distinguish the interpretations. LHD…

This study examined the differences in processing between regular and dyslexic readers in a lexical decision task in different visual field presentations (left, right, and center). The research utilized behavioral measures that provide information on accuracy and reaction time and electro-physiological measures that permit the examination of brain…

Why do people with right hemisphere damage (RHD) have difficulty with pragmatics and communication? One hypothesis has been that pragmatic impairment in RHD is the result of an underlying impairment in Theory of Mind (ToM): the ability to infer the mental states of others. In previous studies evaluating ToM abilities in people with RHD,…

Different asymmetries between expansion and contraction (radial motions) have been reported in the literature. Often these patterns have been regarded as implying different channels for each type of radial direction (outward versus inwards) operating at a higher level of visual motion processing. In two experiments (detection and discrimination…

An alternative way of attempting to understand visual hemispheric specialization is presented. A theory of certain high-level processing subsystems is formulated in light of an analysis of problems that must be solved by the visual system and the constraints on the solutions to these problems. (Author/LMO)

Eighty blindfolded healthy female subjects participated in an active and a passive straight-ahead pointing task to study the estimation of the subjective sagittal middle in the presence or absence of an active haptic exploration. Subjects were to point straight-ahead with their left or right index finger starting from different right- or…

A non-informative cue (C) elicits an inhibition of manual reaction time (MRT) to a visual target (T). We report an experiment to examine if the spatial distribution of this inhibitory effect follows Polar or Cartesian coordinate systems. C appeared at one out of 8 isoeccentric (7[degrees]) positions, the C-T angular distances (in polar…