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431
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Introduction
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April 2014 - present
Publications
Publications (25)
A recent study by Baltiansky et al. (2021), which was published in HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research tested two hypotheses related to system justification and the perception of stereotypical humor. They reported to have found evidence for a cross-over interaction, with judgments of jokes being contingent on a combination of the social...
Difficulties in processing humor have been associated with individuals with autism. The current study investigated whether humor comprehension and appreciation could be augmented in children with autism by providing contextual support suggesting that humor was to be expected. A verbally presented riddle task was used in which participants were asse...
There has been an increase in cognitive assessment via the Internet, especially since the coronavirus disease 2019 surged the need for remote psychological assessment. This is the first study to investigate the appropriability of conducting cognitive assessments online with children with a neurodevelopmental condition and intellectual disability, n...
Humor appreciation and understanding is important for children's social relationships. The current study examined the associations among riddle comprehension, riddle appreciation, and smiling/laughter in children from a wide age range (4-11 years) as well as how cognitive processing style relates to riddle comprehension. Style was distinguished bet...
Williams Syndrome (WS) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder associated with a specific cognitive profile of strengths and impairments. It has been argued that studying cognitive development of this disorder would not only allow improved knowledge of WS but also provide insight into alternative pathways in development. However, due to the rarity an...
Financial risky decisions and evaluations pervade many human everyday activities. Scientific research in such decision-making typically explores the influence of socio-economic and cognitive factors on financial behavior. However, very little research has explored the holistic influence of contextual, emotional, and hormonal factors on preferences...
Is it acceptable and moral to sacrifice a few people's lives to save many others? Research on moral dilemmas in psychology, experimental philosophy, and neuropsychology has shown that respondents judge utilitarian personal moral actions (footbridge dilemma) as less appropriate than equivalent utilitarian impersonal moral actions (trolley dilemma)....
Cross-sectional methodologies are typically adopted in the field of developmental psychology when assessing the impact of developmental age or stage on some cognitive measure. Here, we describe the statistical techniques that form the foundation of cross-sectional studies and illustrate their use through recent examples from the literature. We pres...
Background:
Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) and individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) have poor navigation skills, which impact their potential to become independent. Two aspects of navigation were investigated in these groups, using virtual environments (VE): route knowledge (the ability to learn the way from A to B by following a fixed seq...
Working memory (WM) skills of individuals with Down's syndrome (DS) tend to be very poor compared to typically developing children of similar mental age. In particular, research has found that in individuals with DS visuo-spatial WM is better preserved than verbal WM. This study investigated whether it is possible to train short-term memory (STM) a...
The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to inve...
In this chapter, we consider the origin of uneven cognitive profiles in individuals with developmental disorders, including accounts from cognitive, brain, and genetic levels of description. We begin by introducing the main types of developmental disorder. We then discuss what is meant by the idea of modularity and the key issues surrounding it, ou...
Individuals with Down syndrome tend to have a marked impairment of verbal short-term memory. The chief aim of this study was to investigate whether phonemic discrimination contributes to this deficit. The secondary aim was to investigate whether phonological representations are degraded in verbal short-term memory in people with Down syndrome relat...
We argue that are no such things as literal categories in human cognition. Instead, we argue that there are merely temporary coalescences of dimensions of similarity, which are brought together by context in order to create the similarity structure in mental representations appropriate for the task at hand. Fodor (2000) contends that context-sensit...
One emphasis of this volume is on the use of developmental trajectories in the study of developmental disabilities. This chapter focuses on theoretical, methodological, and analytical issues surrounding trajectories, but it is grounded in examples drawn from one aspect of research on Williams syndrome (WS), that of figurative language development....
This article presents an investigation of the relationship between lesioning and neuroimaging methods of assessing functional specialisation, using synthetic brain imaging (SBI) and lesioning of a connectionist network of past-tense formation. The model comprised two processing 'routes': one was a direct route between layers of input and output uni...
Williams syndrome (WS) is associated with relatively strong language abilities despite mild to moderate intellectual disability, particularly when language is indexed by vocabulary.
The aim of the study was twofold: (1) to investigate whether reported lexical anomalies in WS can be explained with reference to anomalous semantic development; and (2)...
The domain of figurative language comprehension was used to probe the developmental relation between language and cognition in typically developing individuals and individuals with Williams syndrome. Extending the work of Vosniadou and Ortony, the emergence of nonliteral similarity and category knowledge was investigated in 117 typically developing...
An empirical study is presented that tests a novel prediction generated by the Metaphor-by-Pattern-Completion (MPC) connectionist model of metaphor comprehension (Thomas & Mareschal, 2001). The MPC model predicts a developmental progression in the way that children process metaphors, from a preference for basic-level metaphors to a preference for s...
A long-standing body of research supports the existence of separable short- and long-term memory systems, relying on phonological and semantic codes, respectively. The aim of the current study was to measure the contribution of long-term knowledge to short-term memory performance by looking for evidence of phonologically and semantically coded stor...
Individuals with Down syndrome suffer from relatively poor verbal short-term memory. Recent work has indicated that this deficit is not caused by problems of audition, speech, or articulatory rehearsal within the phonological loop component of Baddeley and Hitch's working memory model. Given this, two experiments were conducted to investigate wheth...
Projects
Project (1)
Recent cultural shifts have highlighted the potential horseshoe-like nature of political orientation. That is, the extreme left and extreme right of the political spectrum may have more in common (psychologically) with each other than with those in the political centre. In this project we are aiming to elucidate some of the psychological mechanisms that may explain this phenomenon, and to work on methods for decreasing political polarisation.
