Previous research has presented conflicting evidence regarding whether Chinese characters are processed holistically. In past work, we applied Systems Factorial Technology (SFT) and discovered that native speakers exhibited limited capacity when processing words. To pinpoint the source of this limitation, our current delved further into mental architecture involved in English words, taking cons...

This study used functional MRI (fMRI) to examine the neural effects of willfully allocating one's attention to one of two ongoing tasks. In a dual task paradigm, participants were instructed to focus either on auditory sentence comprehension, mental rotation, or both. One of the major findings is that the distribution of brain activation was amenable to strategic control, such that the amount o...

A new view of mental rotation in humans is presented. Rather than being a perceptual phenomenon, mental rotation of objects is supposed to be an imagined action in the sense that its only difference to real action is the absence of motor output. A series of experiments is reported which shows that the difference in speed between mental and manual rotation are negligible and that performing rota...

Drawing an inspiration from behavioral studies of human decision making, we propose here a general parametric framework for multi-armed bandit problem, which extends the standard Thompson Sampling approach to incorporate reward processing biases associated with several neurological and psychiatric conditions, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disord...

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that imagery ability and figural complexity interact to affect the choice of mental rotation strategies. Participants performed the Shepard and Metzler (1971) mental rotation task. On half of the trials, the 3-D figures were manipulated to create "fragmented" figures, with some cubes missing. Good...

Text comprehension requires readers to mentally simulate the described situation by reactivating previously acquired sensory and motor information from (episodic) memory. Drawing upon research demonstrating gender differences, favouring girls, in tasks involving episodic memory retrieval, the present study explores whether gender differences exist in mental simulation in children (Grades 4 to 6...