Biomarkers for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are lacking but would facilitate drug development for the core deficits of the disorder. We evaluated markers proposed for characterization of differences in social communication and interaction in adults with ASD versus healthy controls (HC) for utility as biomarkers. Data pooled from an observational…

Pigeons pecked left versus right keys contingent upon the color presented at 1 of those locations. Spatial-response latencies were shorter when the color appeared at the same location as the required response than at the opposite location. This Simon effect occurred when the stimulus on the alternative key was constant, varied from trial to trial,…

Accidents caused by human errors illustrate the fragility of cognitive processing and its coordination by executive functions against stress. To better understand how core executive functions change over time, influence each other, and are affected by chronic stress exposure, a prospective cohort study was conducted from 2016 to 2019. Five hundred…

Visual categorization is ubiquitous in many professions, yet training programs are typically time- and effort-intensive. This work focuses on developing methods to improve human learning and performance on challenging visual categorization tasks, e.g., bird species identification, diagnostic dermatology. As part of the general approach, we infer…

Behavioural and recent neural evidence indicates that young infants discriminate broad stimulus categories. However, little is known about the categorical perception of humans represented as full bodies with heads and their discrimination from inanimate objects. This study compares infants' brain processing of human and furniture pictures, probing…

Purpose: Overuse injuries are common in sport, but complete understanding of injury risk factors remains incomplete. Although biomechanical studies frequently examine musculoskeletal injury mechanisms, human movement variability studies aim to better understand neuromotor functioning, with proposed connections between overuse injury mechanisms and…

A fundamental question for human memory research relates to the role of attention during the binding of distinct components into an integrated representation. A number of important differences exist between the working memory and episodic memory literature in terms of methodological implementation and empirical outcomes. For instance, episodic…

How do infants learn the sounds of their native language when there are many simultaneous sounds competing for their attention? Adults and children detect when speech sounds change in complex scenes better than when other sounds change. We examined whether infants have similar biases to detect when human speech changes better than nonspeech sounds…

Background: Household air pollution adversely affects human health and the environment, yet more than 40% of the world still depends on solid cooking fuels. The House Air Pollution Intervention Network (HAPIN) randomized controlled trial is assessing the health effects of a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) stove and 18-month supply of free fuel in…

Background: Medical research involving human subjects must be evaluated by a research ethics committee (REC) before a study is initiated. However, knowledge of REC decision processes, particularly in relation to evaluating the risk-benefit balance in various study types, appears scant. Methods: The study protocols and records of a Finnish…

Programming education has recently received increased attention due to growing demand for programming and information technology skills. However, a lack of teaching materials and human resources presents a major challenge to meeting this demand. One way to compensate for a shortage of trained teachers is to use machine learning techniques to…

Although the positive effects of congruency between stimuli are well replicated in face memory paradigms, mixed findings have been found in face matching. Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, face masks are now very common during daily life outdoor activities. Thus, the present study aims to further explore congruency effects in matching faces…

Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here,…

Background: A promising way to obtain vocal economy and efficiency is by semi-occluding the vocal tract while phonating. Current knowledge about the immediate effects of semi-occluded vocal tract (SOVT) phonation on the laryngeal function and configuration is based mainly on computer modelling or excised larynges studies. In in vivo SOVT studies,…

Developing attention skills allow children to parse their complex world by orienting to a subset of especially salient or meaningful inputs. Infants and children are biased to orient to faces and have difficulty ignoring faces when they appear as distractors. Although these past findings suggest that faces are more salient than nonsocial stimuli,…