People's forecasts from time series underestimate future values for upward trends and overestimate them for downward ones. This trend damping may occur because (a) people anchor on the last data point and make insufficient adjustment to take the trend into account, (b) they adjust toward the average of the trends they have encountered within the…

We examined the effects of a brief period of limb immobilization on the cognitive level of action control. A splint placed on the participants' left hand was used as a means of immobilization. We used a hand mental rotation task to investigate the immobilization-induced effects on motor imagery performance (Experiments 1 and 2) and a number mental…

Learning a new word involves integration with existing lexical knowledge. Previous work has shown that sleep-associated memory consolidation processes are important for the engagement of novel items in lexical competition. In 3 experiments we used spaced exposure regimes to investigate memory for novel words and whether lexical integration can…

Serial attention models of eye-movement control during reading were evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment that examined how lexical activation combines with visual information in the parafovea to affect word skipping (where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading). Lexical activation was manipulated by repetition priming created through…

Several neuropsychological studies have reported that patients with memory deficits exhibit a dissociation of effects attributed to semantic and lexical-phonological information in verbal working memory (e.g., Reilly, Martin, & Grossman, 2005; Romani & Martin, 1999). The present study reports on 3 experiments conducted with individuals without…

One of the words that readers of English skip most often is the definite article "the". Most accounts of reading assume that in order for a reader to skip a word, it must have received some lexical processing. The definite article is skipped so regularly, however, that the oculomotor system might have learned to skip the letter string "t-h-e"…

Both emotional reactivity and categorization have long been studied within the framework of hemispheric asymmetry. However, little attempt has been made to integrate both research areas using any form of neuropsychological research, despite behavioral data suggesting a consistent relationship between affective and categorization processes. The…

Samar and Parasnis [Samar, V. J., & Parasnis, I. (2005). Dorsal stream deficits suggest hidden dyslexia among deaf poor readers: correlated evidence from reduced perceptual speed and elevated coherent motion detection thresholds. "Brain and Cognition, 58," 300-311.] reported that correlated measures of coherent motion detection and perceptual…

The aim of this study was to investigate deficits in planning ability using an adapted version of the Modified Six Elements Test, from the Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome--BADS [Wilson, B. A., Alderman, N., Burgess, P. W., Emslie, H., & Evans, J. J. (1996). "Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS)." Bury St…

The effects of saccadic bilateral (horizontal) eye movements on gist based false recognition was investigated. Following exposure to lists of words related to a critical but non-studied word participants were asked to engage in 30s of bilateral vs. vertical vs. no eye movements. Subsequent testing of recognition memory revealed that those who…

Two tasks hypothesized to assess the efficiency of route selection were administered to 328 adults ranging from 18 to 93 years of age. Increased age was associated with slower completion of mazes, even after adjusting for differences in perceptual-motor speed, and with longer and less accurate routes in a task in which participants were asked to…

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and healthy controls were administered a flanker task that consisted of the presentation of colored targets and distractors. Participants were required to attend to the center target and identify its color. The stimulus displays were either congruent (i.e., the target and flankers were the same color) or…

Ideomotor (IM) theory suggests that observing someone else perform an action activates an internal motor representation of that behaviour within the observer. Evidence supporting the case for an ideomotor theory of imitation has come from studies that show imitative responses to be faster than the same behavioural measures performed in response to…

Fragile X and Turner syndromes are two X-chromosome-related disorders associated with executive function and visual spatial deficits. In the present study, we used ocular motor paradigms to examine evidence that disruption to different neurological pathways underlies these deficits. We tested 17 females with fragile X, 19 females with Turner…

Previous research has shown that the appearance of task-irrelevant abrupt onsets influences saccadic eye movements during visual search and may slow down manual reactions to target stimuli. Analysis of reaction time distributions in the present study offers evidence suggesting that top-down inhibition processes actively suppress oculomotor or…