We propose that separating rewards into categories can increase motivation, even when those categories are meaningless. Across six experiments, people were more motivated to obtain one reward from one category and another reward from another category than they were to obtain two rewards from a pool that included all items from either reward category. As a result, they worked longer when potenti...

Nineteen people with Asperger syndrome (AS)/High-Functioning Autism (HFA) (ages 7-15) were tested on imitation of two types of meaningless gesture: hand postures and finger positions. The individuals with AS/HFA achieved lower scores in the imitation of both hand and finger positions relative to a matched neurotypical group. The between-group difference was primarily accounted for by performanc...

Meaningful and meaningless hand postures were presented to subjects who had to carry out a semantic discrimination task while electrical brain responses were recorded. Both meaningful and control sets of hand postures were matched as closely as possible. The ERPs elicited by meaningless hand postures showed an anteriorly distributed N300 and a centro-posteriorly distributed N400 component. The ...

Recent studies have supported close interactions between language and action-related processes, suggesting comparable neural mechanisms. However, relatively little is known about the semantics involved in action planning. The present study investigated the activation of semantic knowledge in meaningful actions by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). Subjects prepared meaningful or meaning...

We propose that separating rewards into categories can increase motivation, even when those categories are meaningless. Across six experiments, people were more motivated to obtain one reward from one category and another reward from another category than they were to obtain two rewards from a pool that included all items from either reward category. As a result, they worked longer when potenti...

Recent studies have demonstrated that attractive faces can affect an observer’s time perception. However, it is unclear whether this relationship be generalized to other visual stimuli. Therefore, we conducted two experiments: one with face images and another meaningless figures. In Experiment 1, participants performed a temporal bisection task; they judged randomly presented of attractive, neu...

Apraxia is a symptom on the border between cognition and motor control. It is predominantly caused by left brain damage and frequently accompanied by aphasia. Theories of apraxia have been dominated by a model of the conversion of mental images into motor commands proposed more than 100 years ago by the German psychiatrist Hugo Liepmann and revived for modern cognitive neurology by Norman Gesch...

Apraxia is a symptom on the border between cognition and motor control. It is predominantly caused by left brain damage and frequently accompanied by aphasia. Theories of apraxia have been dominated by a model of the conversion of mental images into motor commands proposed more than 100 years ago by the German psychiatrist Hugo Liepmann and revived for modern cognitive neurology by Norman Gesch...