The present study was designed to evaluate the effect of HIV/AIDS on cognitive control and to determine if the effect is modified by familial risk for either alcohol or mood disorders. Sixty HIV-1 seropositive and 75 seronegative volunteers were assigned to four subgroups defined by the crossing of a diagnosis of alcohol dependence in the…

To test whether epistemically unproblematic ways of thinking and talking about science could be transformed during preservice teacher training, we designed a system of learning activities based on a set of "heuristics for progressive disciplinary discourse" (HPDD). The HPDD outline six design principles of learning environments where the aim is to…

This study demonstrates an existence proof for "productive failure": engaging students in solving complex, ill-structured problems without the provision of support structures can be a productive exercise in failure. In a computer-supported collaborative learning setting, eleventh-grade science students were randomly assigned to one of two…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has identified distinct brain regions in ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC) and lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC) that are differentially activated by pictures of faces and bodies. Recent work from our laboratory has shown that the strong LOTC activation evoked by bodies in which the face is…

There is growing evidence that Parkinson's disease patients without dementia exhibit cognitive deficits in some executive, memory and selective attention tasks. However, the impact of these deficits on their everyday cognitive functioning remains largely unknown. This issue was explored using self-report questionnaires. Twenty-four Parkinson's…

Cognition in schizophrenia seems to be characterized by impaired performance on most tests of explicit or declarative learning contrasting with relatively intact performance on most tests of implicit or procedural learning. At the same time there have been conflicting results for studies that have used the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task to…

Existing models of laterality, while often successful at describing circumscribed domains, have not been successful as explanations of the overall patterns of hemispheric asymmetries. It is therefore suggested that a new approach is needed based on shared contributions to adaptive hemispheric roles rather than functional and structural…

In this paper, we describe the development of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). We trace the history of sorting tasks from the studies of Narziss Ach on the psychology of thinking, via the work of Kurt Goldstein and Adhemar Gelb on brain lesioned patients around 1920 and subsequent developments, up to the actual design of the WCST by Harry…

Selective attention has durable consequences for behavior and neural activation. Negative priming (NP) effects are assumed to reflect a critical inhibitory component of selective attention. The performance of adolescents with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) was assessed across two conceptually based NP tasks within a selective…

Although neuropsychological studies of lateralization of emotion have emphasized valence (positive vs. negative) or type (basic vs. complex) dimensions, the interaction between the two dimensions has yet to be elucidated. The purpose of the current study was to test the hypothesis that recognition of basic emotions is processed preferentially by…

The ability to plan and search ahead is essential for problem solving in most situations in everyday life. To investigate the development of planning and related processes, a sample of four- and five-year-old children was examined in a variant of the Tower of London, a frequently used neuropsychological assessment tool of planning abilities. The…

Previous literature suggests that Parkinson's disease is marked by deficits in timed behaviour. However, the majority of studies of central timing mechanisms in patients with Parkinson's disease have used timing tasks with a motor component. Since the motor abnormalities are a defining feature of the condition, the status of timing in Parkinson's…

The relative advantage of the left (LH) over the right hemisphere (RH) in processing of verbal material for most individuals is well established. Nevertheless, several studies have reported the ability of positively and negatively valenced stimuli to enhance and reverse, respectively, the usual LH greater than RH asymmetry. These studies, however,…

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…

Asperger's disorder is one of autistic spectrum disorders; sharing clinical features with autism, but without developmental delay in language acquisition. There have been some studies of intellectual functioning in autism so far, but very few in Asperger's disorder. In the present study, we investigated abstract reasoning ability, whose form of…