A promising novel judgement bias test to evaluate affective states in dogs (Canis familiaris).

The judgement bias test represents one of the most applied tools to evaluate animals' optimistic/pessimistic attitude and to infer their emotional and welfare state accordingly. The judgement bias test (JBT) has been used several times with dogs (Canis familiaris), in most cases using a spatial test that evaluates the dog's attitude towards a bowl placed in ambiguous positions (located between two unambiguous trained positions associated with opposite outcomes). Results are contrasting and methodological and statistical caveats emerged: dogs struggled to learn the association between unambiguous positions and their outcomes, they hardly discriminated between adjacent locations and they might be influenced by researchers.

Sensitivity to distributional properties of the orthography in the spelling of Italian children with dyslexia.

The study examines statistical learning in the spelling of Italian children with dyslexia and typically developing readers by studying their sensitivity to probabilistic cues in phoneme-grapheme mappings. In the first experiment children spelled to dictation regular words and words with unpredictable spelling that contained either a high- or a low-frequency (i.e.

Using judgment bias test in pet and shelter dogs (Canis familiaris): Methodological and statistical caveats.

It is now widely agreed that a positive affective state is a crucial component of animal well-being. The judgment bias test represents a widespread tool used to assess animals' optimistic/pessimistic attitude and to evaluate their emotional state and welfare. Judgment bias tests have been used several times with dogs (Canis familiaris), in most cases using a spatial test with a bowl placed in ambiguous positions located between a relatively positive trained location (P) which contains a baited bowl and a relatively negative trained location (N) which contains an empty bowl.

Reading Derived Words by Italian Children With and Without Dyslexia: The Effect of Root Length.

Children with dyslexia are extremely slow at reading long words but they are faster with stimuli composed of roots and derivational suffixes (e.g., CASSIERE, 'cashier') than stimuli not decomposable in morphemes (e.

Word selection processing in Parkinson's disease: When nouns are more difficult than verbs.

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) are impaired in verb production. Interpretations range from grammatical deficits to semantic-conceptual decay of action representation. The verb production deficit in PD can also be considered a dysexecutive disorder, specifically, a deficit of selection processing during word production, due to corticostriatal damage.