A signal-detection task was used to assess sex differences in emotional face recognition under conditions of uncertainty. Computer images of Ekman faces showing sad, angry, happy, and fearful emotional states were presented for 50ms to thirty-six men and thirty-seven women. All participants monitored for presentation of either happy, angry, or sad…

Suitable normative information on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is not currently available, though it is clear that there is great individual variability in performance on this assessment tool. Given that the task is presumed to measure the emotion-based learning systems that are thought to form the biological basis of "intuition," there is some…

This paper presents preliminary results of pre- and post-treatment error analysis from an aphasic patient with anomia. The Interactive Activation (IA) model of word production (Dell, Schwartz, Martin, Saffran, & Gagnon, 1997) is utilized to make predictions about the anticipated changes on a picture naming task and to explain emerging patterns.…

The present investigation examined the functioning of inhibitory mechanisms in younger and older bilinguals using a bilingual version of the Stroop test. The study predicted different patterns of age related decline in inhibitory mechanisms (inter- and intralingual interference) in bilinguals depending on their level of proficiency. Consistent…

The clinical features of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) suggest that a fundamental deficit of inhibitory control is intrinsic to the disorder. In this preliminary study, we sought to examine cognitive disinhibition in OCD by using an established laboratory technique. The stop signal task was administered to a higher functioning, untreated…

Information processing limit is a fundamental issue in cognitive psychology. One particular way of studying it is to adopt a temporal span perspective. In this experiment, Weber fractions based on thresholds for duration discrimination are used for adopting this perspective. The results showed that, contrary to the constant predicted by Weber's…

Ten Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients and 10 control participants were tested using a task-switching paradigm in which there was a random task sequence, and the task was cued in every trial. Five PD patients showed a unique error profile. Their performance approximated guessing when accuracy was dependent on correct task identification, and was…

Slowness in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been attributed to intrusive thoughts or meticulousness. Recent research suggests that slowness in OCD may be particularly evident on tests of executive function subserved by frontostriatal circuitry. In the present study, the speed and accuracy of responding on neuropsychological tests of…

Large and reliable laterality effects have been found using a dichotic target detection task in a recent experiment using word stimuli pronounced with an emotional component. The present study tested the hypothesis that the magnitude and reliability of the laterality effects would increase with the removal of the emotional component and variations…

The majority of the models which attempt to explain category-specific deficits are based on the assumption that the conceptual knowledge is represented in a permanent way in memory (abstractive view). Carbonnel, Charnallet, David, and Pellat (1997) showed that a non-abstractive view would be more suitable to account for some of these cases. The…

Subjects had to judge the size of a tactile stimulus held in the unseen hand, while a visible phantom hand representing that unseen hand held a tactile stimulus of same or different size. No asymmetries in interference effects were found that could be related to hand or handedness. The method lends itself to quantification of virtual reality box…

Voice is the carrier of speech but is also an ''auditory face'' rich in information on the speaker's identity and affective state. Three experiments explored the possibility of a ''voice inversion effect,'' by analogy to the classical ''face inversion effect,'' which could support the hypothesis of a voice-specific module. Experiment 1 consisted…

Handedness cannot be predicted using a single performance measure, and preference measures of handedness are unreliable because of their subjectivity. This report was designed to examine the relationship between hand performance and hand preference using six different measures: the Waterloo Handedness Questionnaire (a measure of hand preference),…

Do people tend to underestimate time when their attention is engaged? Studies supporting this idea have routinely confounded attentional manipulations with changes in other factors, such as response complexity and memory load. The aim of the present study was to obtain the first direct evidence that attentional engagement mediated by cortical…

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…