Is it advantageous to be strongly lateralized? The current study investigated this question by examining the relationship between visual field asymmetries for lexical tasks and reading performance in a sample of 200 young adults. Larger visual field asymmetries were associated with better reading performance, but this relationship was obtained primarily in those with strong and consistent hand ...

The present study examined individual differences in the automaticity of visual word recognition. Specifically, we examined whether people can recognize words while central attention is devoted to another task and how this ability depends on reading skill. A lexical-decision Task 2 was combined with either an auditory or visual Task 1. Regardless of the Task 1 modality, Task 2 word recognition ...

OBJECTIVES Occupational therapy authors frequently emphasize the importance of the use of objects in the development of motor skill. This study investigated the use of object-produced visual input in learning control of flexion and extension of an above-elbow training prosthesis. METHOD Fifty-two male college students were randomly assigned to two training procedures: (a) two 1.5-min periods ...

Low-skill golfers coordinate the movements of their head and putter with an allocentric, isodirectional coupling, which is opposite to the allocentric, antidirectional coordination pattern used by experts (Lee, Ishikura, Kegel, Gonzalez, & Passmore, 2008). The present study investigated the effects of four vision conditions (full vision, no vision, target focus, and ball focus) on head-putter c...

Human behavior and cognition result from a complex pattern of interactions between brain regions. The flexible reconfiguration of these patterns enables behavioral adaptation, such as the acquisition of a new motor skill. Yet, the degree to which these reconfigurations depend on the brain's baseline sensorimotor integration is far from understood. Here, we asked whether spontaneous fluctuations...

The badminton serve is an important shot for winning a rally in a match. It combines good technique with the ability to accurately integrate visual information from the shuttle, racket, opponent, and intended landing point. Despite its importance and repercussive nature, to date no study has looked at the visual search behaviors during badminton service in the singles discipline. Unlike anticip...

Haptics research has begun implementing haptic feedback in tasks of great precision and skill, such as robotic surgery. Haptic displays can represent task environments with arbitrary scaling. Fitts’ Law suggests differences in the scale of a workspace rendered on a visual display and in a haptic display should not affect performance of those tasks. However, interactions of great precision and s...

We employed brain-behavior analyses to explore the relationship between performance on tasks measuring phonological awareness, pseudoword decoding, and rapid auditory processing (all predictors of reading (dis)ability) and brain organization for print and speech in beginning readers. For print-related activation, we observed a shared set of skill-correlated regions, including left hemisphere te...

Learning novel skills involves reorganization and optimization of cognitive processing involving a broad network of brain regions. Previous work has shown asymmetric costs of switching to a well-trained task vs. a poorly-trained task, but the neural basis of these differential switch costs is unclear. The current study examined the neural signature of task switching in the context of acquisitio...