The goal of this study was to gain a better understanding of the relationship between non-verbal auditory disorders and developmental dyslexia. This question has led to conflicting results in the literature, which we argued might be due to a failure to consider the heterogeneity of dyslexic profiles. This study included three groups of adult…

Although holistic processing is thought to underlie normal face recognition ability, widely discrepant reports have recently emerged about this link in an individual differences context. Progress in this domain may have been impeded by the widespread use of subtraction scores, which lack validity due to their contamination with control condition…

Spatial memories are often organized around reference frames, and environmental shape provides a salient cue to reference frame selection. To date, however, the environmental cues responsible for influencing reference frame selection remain relatively unknown. To connect research on reference frame selection with that on orientation via…

Increasing interest is being shown in how children develop an understanding of reciprocity in social exchanges and fairness in resource distribution, including social exchanges between third parties. Although there are descriptions of reciprocity on a one-to-one basis in other species, whether nonhumans detect reciprocity and violations of…

The development of fMRI techniques has generated a boom of neuroscience research across the psychological sciences, and revealed neural correlates for many psychological phenomena seen as central to the human experience (e.g., morality, agency). Meanwhile, the rise of neuroscience has reignited old debates over mind-body dualism and the soul.…

Several studies have demonstrated that affective states influence the number of associations formed between remotely related concepts. Someone in a neutral or negative affective state might draw the association between "cold" and "hot", whereas someone in a positive affective state might spontaneously form the more distant association between…

Experienced mental abacus (MA) users are able to perform mental arithmetic calculations with unusual speed and accuracy. However, it remains unclear whether their extraordinary gains in mental arithmetic ability are accompanied by an improvement in numerical processing efficiency. To address this question, the present study, using a numerical…

The present research aimed to investigate whether, as previously observed with pictures, background auditory rhythm would also influence visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with bisyllabic visual words, segmented into two successive groups of letters, while an irrelevant strongly metric auditory…

Written production studies investigating central processing have ignored research on the peripheral components of movement execution, and vice versa. This study attempts to integrate both approaches and provide evidence that central and peripheral processes interact during word production. French participants wrote regular words (e.g. FORME),…

The belief that one can exert intentional control over behavior is deeply rooted in virtually all human beings. It has been shown that weakening such belief--e.g. by exposure to "anti-free will" messages--can lead people to display antisocial tendencies. We propose that this cursory and irresponsible behavior may be facilitated by a breakdown of…

Norm-based coding, in which faces are coded as deviations from an average face, is an efficient way of coding visual patterns that share a common structure and must be distinguished by subtle variations that define individuals. Adults and school-aged children use norm-based coding for face identity but it is not yet known if pre-school aged…

Language comprehenders can mentally simulate perceptual and motor features of scenes they hear or read about (Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002; Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). Recent research shows that these simulations adopt a particular perspective (Borghi, Glenberg & Kaschak, 2004; Brunye, Ditman, Mahoney, Augustyn, & Taylor, 2009).…

Jax and Buxbaum [Jax and Buxbaum (2010). Response interference between functional and structural actions linked to the same familiar object. "Cognition, 115", 350-355] demonstrated that grasp-to-transport actions (handing an object to someone, i.e., a receiver) are initiated more quickly than grasp-to-use actions. A possible interpretation of…

When viewers are shown sets of similar objects (for example circles), they may extract summary information (e.g., average size) while retaining almost no information about the individual items. A similar observation can be made when using sets of unfamiliar faces: Viewers tend to merge identity or expression information from the set exemplars into…

In situations where an agent unintentionally causes harm to a victim, the agent's (harmless) intention typically carries "more" weight than his/her (harmful) causal role. Therefore, healthy adults typically judge leniently agents responsible for an accident. Using animated cartoons, we show, however, that in the presence of a difficult concurrent…