BACKGROUND: Psychoacoustics is a fascinating developing field concerned with the evaluation of the hearing sensation as an outcome of a sound or speech stimulus. Neuroaudiology with electrophysiologic testing, records the electrical activity of the auditory pathways, extending from the 8th cranial nerve up to the cortical auditory centers as a result of external auditory stimuli. Central Audito...

Is the encoding of content and format necessary for representing beliefs? In three experiments using ”false-representation” tasks, we explored whether beliefs were processed like non-mental representations, under the assumption that non-mental representations require both content and format to be processed. First, beliefs were compared to sentences (linguistic medium) while keeping representati...

This study investigated three aspects of processing materials with emotional content in patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD): the ability to produce affective prosody, to discriminate affectively loaded speech, and to detect the surprise element in humorous sketches. Study aims were the characterization of an emotional processing deficit, and to test whether impaired emotional proc...

This article investigates the relation between history of intrafamilial violence and self-regulatory capacity, cognitive processing, and mental health adjustment in incarcerated adolescents. Adolescents were incarcerated at the time of the study for various violent offenses, ranging from persistent delinquency to sexual assault (n = 115). A model is proposed that posits that self-regulation, co...

Does theory of mind depend on a capacity to reason about representations generally or on mechanisms selective for the processing of mental state representations? In four experiments, participants reasoned about beliefs (mental representations) and notes (non-mental, linguistic representations), which according to two prominent theories are closely matched representations because both are repres...

At one time it was believed that thought was instantaneous and therefore attempts to measure its speed were futile. This belief was overthrown in 1850 when Herman von Helmholtz measured the speed of neural transmission and showed that nerve impulses travel at speeds that are not particularly fast (around 30 m/s or about 100 kilometers per hour). Because the physical substrate of thought is pres...

AbstructThe impact of pictorial knowledge representation is demonstrated for two examples of time series analysis in seismology. The approaches perform a) automated recognition of known event signatures and b) high-resolution onset timing of later phases. Both methods work well under extreme conditions of noise and achieved human-like performance in recognizing known situations. Crucial for thi...

The theory of simulation semantics (Bergen & Chang 2005) posits that understanding language, in part, requires activation of mental imagery. This allows understanders to mentally recreate the scene or event to facilitate understanding and prepare for situated action (Glenberg & Kashak 2002). The idea that understanding action language relies on neural circuitry involved in action execution is s...

There is mounting evidence that language comprehension involves the activation of mental simulations (Barsalou 1999a) of the content of utterances (Barsalou 1999b, Stanfield and Zwaan 2001, Zwaan et al. 2002, Richardson et al. 2003, Bergen et al. 2003, Narayanan et al. 2004, Bergen et al. 2004). These simulations can have motor or perceptual content. Three main questions about the process remai...

Mathematical cognition researchers have studied the mental representations of natural numbers, integers, and fractions extensively. We investigated the representations of irrational and perfect square numbers in a laboratory setting. Eighty participants performed (1) a magnitude comparison task (MC) by indicating which of two numbers is greater or lesser, (2) a number line estimation task (NLE)...