Previous research on smart phone use while driving has primarily focused on phone calls and texting. Drivers are now increasingly using their phone for other activities during driving, in particular social media, which have different cognitive demands. The present study compared the effects of four different smart phone tasks on car-following performance in a driving simulator. Phone tasks were...

We studied the activation and interaction of cortical motor regions during simple, internally paced and externally paced right-hand finger extensions in healthy volunteers. We recorded EEGs from 28 scalp electrodes and analysed task-related coherence, task-related power and movement-related cortical potentials. Task-related coherence reflects inter-regional functional coupling of oscillatory ne...

Killing appears to perpetuate itself even in the absence of retaliation. This phenomenon may occur in part as a means to justify prior killing and so ease the threat of prior killing. In addition, this effect should arise particularly when a killer perceives similarity to the victims because similarity should exacerbate threat from killing. To examine these ideas, the authors developed a bug-ki...

This paper investigates the nature of verbal working memory (WM) in sentence comprehension and provides evidence for overlapping pools of verbal WM resources between on-line sentence comprehension and other verbally-mediated tasks. We report the results of two dual-task experiments. In Experiment 1, participants simultaneously performed a selfpaced reading task and a self-paced arithmetic addit...

Previous research shows that children with language impairments (LI) are significantly less rhythmic during motor tasks than typically developing children who are chronologically and linguistically agematched. This study aims to explore a speech rhythm task and to shed new light on the rhythmic abilities of children with LI. Specifically, the authors investigate whether children with LI are imp...

Although there is now substantial evidence that developmental change occurs in implicit learning abilities over the lifespan, disparate results exist regarding the specific developmental trajectory of implicit learning skills. One possible reason for discrepancies across implicit learning studies may be that younger children show an increased sensitivity to variations in implicit learning task ...

The Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT) is a neuropsychological instrument designed to measure attention, working memory and speed of information processing in complex manner. It currently used evaluate different neurological diseases. the purpose this study was establish PASAT normative data for healthy Italian population using standardized methodology Equivalents Scores. brief auditor...

Maintaining cognitive control while pursuing several tasks at the same time is hard, especially when the current problem states of these tasks need to be represented in memory. We are investigating the mutual influence of a self-paced and a reactive task with regard to completion time and error rates. Against initial expectations, the interruptions from the reactive task did not lead to more er...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is associated with disturbances in sentence processing, particularly for noncanonical sentences. The present study aimed to analyse sentence processing in PD patients and healthy control participants, using a word-by-word self-paced reading task and an auditory comprehension task. Both tasks consisted of subject relative (SR) and object relative (OR) sentences, with com...