Temporal perception in closed-skill sports: An experimental study on expert swimmers and runners.

The cognitive benefits of closed-skill sports practice have so far been scantily investigated. Here, we thus focused on the potential impact of swimming and running - two sports that highly rely on a precise control of timing - on time processing. To investigate the impact of these closed-skill sports on time perception and estimation, three groups of participants (for a total of eighty-four young adults) took part in the present study: expert swimmers, expert runners, and non-athletes.

Cognitive Reserve Potential: Capturing Cognitive Resilience Capability in Adolescence.

Cognitive reserve (CR) represents the adaptive response of the cognitive system responsible for preserving normal functioning in the face of brain damage. Experiential factors such as education, occupation, and leisure activities influence the development of CR. Theoretically, such factors build up from childhood and across adulthood.

What does gender has to do with math? Complex questions require complex answers.

Whether mathematics is a gendered domain or not is a long-lasting issue bringing along major social and educational implications. The females' underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has been considered one of the key signs of the math gender gap, although the current view largely attributes the origin of this phenomenon to sociocultural factors. Indeed, recent approaches to math gender differences reached the universal conclusion that nature and nurture exert reciprocal effects on each other, establishing the need for approaching the study of the math gender issue only once its intrinsic complexity has been accepted.

Spatial frequency equalization does not prevent spatial-numerical associations.

There is an intense debate surrounding the origin of spatial-numerical associations (SNAs), according to which small numbers are mapped onto the left side of the space and large numbers onto the right. Despite evidence suggesting that SNAs would emerge as an innate predisposition to map numerical information onto a left-to-right spatially oriented mental representation, alternative accounts have challenged these proposals, maintaining that such a mapping would be the result of a mere spatial frequency (SF) coding of any visual image. That is, any smaller or larger array of objects would naturally contain more low or high SF information and, accordingly, each hemisphere would be preferentially tuned only for one SF range (e.

Nonsymbolic numerosity in sets with illusory-contours exploits a context-sensitive, but contrast-insensitive, visual boundary formation process.

The visual mechanisms underlying approximate numerical representation are still intensely debated because numerosity information is often confounded with continuous sensory cues (e.g., texture density, area, convex hull).

Number is not just an illusion: Discrete numerosity is encoded independently from perceived size.

While seminal theories suggest that nonsymbolic visual numerosity is mainly extracted from segmented items, more recent views advocate that numerosity cannot be processed independently of nonnumeric continuous features confounded with the numerical set (i.e., such as the density, the convex hull, etc.

The ratio effect in visual numerosity comparisons is preserved despite spatial frequency equalisation.

How non-symbolic numerosity is visually extracted remains a matter of intense debate. Most evidence suggests that numerosity is directly extracted on individual objects following Weber's law, at least for a moderate numerical range. Alternative accounts propose that, whatever the range, numerosity is indirectly derived from summary texture-statistics of the raw image such as spatial frequency (SF).

Visual illusions as a tool to hijack numerical perception: Disentangling nonsymbolic number from its continuous visual properties.

The past few years have witnessed a fervent theoretical debate about the exact visual mechanisms supporting nonsymbolic number processing. The idea that quantity information is extracted through a primitive visual segmentation algorithm has been challenged by recent models, which rather tap on low-level features confounded with numerosity (i.e.

Non-symbolic numerosity encoding escapes spatial frequency equalization.

The exact visual mechanisms underpinning the approximate number system are still debated. Recent evidence suggests that numerosity is extracted on segmented visual objects, at least for a moderate numerical range (e.g.

The effects of hemispheric dominance, literacy acquisition, and handedness on the development of visuospatial attention: A study in preschoolers and second graders.

A tendency to over-attend the left side of the space (i.e., pseudoneglect) has been repeatedly reported in Western adult populations and is supposed to reflect a right hemisphere dominance in the control of visuospatial attention.

How difficult is it for adolescents to maintain attention? The differential effects of video games and sports.

Despite a large body of evidence suggests positive effects of playing action video games and practising sports on various visual attentional skills, the impact of these activities on the ability to maintain attention over prolonged periods of time (i.e., sustained attention) has been largely neglected.

Colours + Numbers differs from colours of numbers: cognitive and visual illusions in grapheme-colour synaesthesia.

This study investigates the bi-directionality of synaestesic experience by means of a flanked bisection paradigm in TT, a number-colour synaesthete. Previous studies have shown that bisection is shifted towards the larger digit flanker (e.g.

What makes a word so attractive? Disclosing the urge to read while bisecting.

Expert readers have been repeatedly reported to misperceive the centre of visual stimuli, shifting systematically to the left the bisection of any lines (pseudoneglect) while showing a cross-over effect while bisecting different types of orthographic strings (Arduino et al., 2010, Neuropsychologia, 48, 2140). This difference has been attributed to asymmetrical allocation of attention that visuo-verbal material receives when lexical access occurs (e.

More far is more right: Manual and ocular line bisections, but not the Judd illusion, depend on radial space.

Line bisection studies generally find a left-to-right shift in bisection bias with increasing distance between the observer and the target line, which may be explained by hemispheric differences in the processing of proximo-distal information. In the present study, the segregation between near and far space was further characterized across the motor system and contextual cues. To this aim, 20 right-handed participants were required to perform a manual bisection task of simple lines presented at three different distances (60, 90, 120 cm).

Smelling the space around us: Odor pleasantness shifts visuospatial attention in humans.

The prompt recognition of pleasant and unpleasant odors is a crucial regulatory and adaptive need of humans. Reactive answers to unpleasant odors ensure survival in many threatening situations. Notably, although humans typically react to certain odors by modulating their distance from the olfactory source, the effect of odor pleasantness over the orienting of visuospatial attention is still unknown.

Cultural and biological factors modulate spatial biases over development.

Increasing evidence supports the contribution of both biological and cultural factors to visuospatial processing. The present study adds to the literature by exploring the interplay of perceptual and linguistic mechanisms in determining visuospatial asymmetries in adults (Experiment 1) and children (Experiment 2). In particular, pre-schoolers (3 and 5 year-olds), school-aged children (8 year-old), and adult participants were required to bisect different types of stimuli, that is, lines, words, and figure strings.

Distancing the present self from the past and the future: Psychological distance in anxiety and depression.

Humans show a systematic tendency to perceive the future as psychologically closer than the past. Based on the clinical hypothesis that anxiety would be associated more with future threat life events, whereas depression with past loss events, here we explored whether people with anxiety- and depression-related personality traits perceive differently the psychological distance of temporal events. Results showed that the common tendency to perceive the future as psychologically closer than the past is exaggerated in individuals with anxiety-related personality traits, whereas this asymmetry drastically shrinks in individuals with depression-related personality traits.

Infants' detection of increasing numerical order comes before detection of decreasing number.

Ordinality is a fundamental aspect of numerical cognition. However, preverbal infants' ability to represent numerical order is poorly understood. In the present study we extended the evidence provided by Macchi Cassia, Picozzi, Girelli, and de Hevia (2012), showing that 4-month-old infants detect ordinal relationships within size-based sequences, to numerical sequences.

A Place for Zero in the Brain.

It has long been thought that the primary cognitive and neural systems responsible for processing numerosities are not predisposed to encode empty sets (i.e., numerosity zero).

Manual actions cover symbolic distances at different speed.

A privileged way of representing numbers in the human mind is along an oriented mental number line. Activation of this representation has been proposed to account for the impact of numbers on motor tasks, such as on grasping, pointing, and eye movements. Here we evaluated the impact of numbers on motor control, by exploiting the evidence that the speed reached by the manual connection of two points is correlated with their physical distance.

A helping hand putting in order: Visuomotor routines organize numerical and non-numerical sequences in space.

Theories of embodied cognition emphasize the importance of sensorimotor schemas linked to external world experience for representing conceptual knowledge. Accordingly, some researchers have proposed that the spatial representation of numerical and non-numerical sequences relies on visuomotor routines, like reading habit and finger counting. There is a growing interest in how these two routines contribute to the spatial representation of ordinal sequences, although no investigation has so far directly compared them.

Radial bisection of words and lines in right-brain-damaged patients with spatial neglect.

The bisection of lines positioned radially (with the two ends of the line close and far, with respect to the participant's body) has been less investigated than that of lines placed horizontally (with their two ends left and right, with respect to the body's midsagittal plane). In horizontal bisection, patients with left neglect typically show a rightward bias for both lines and words, greater with longer stimuli. As for radial bisection, available data indicate that neurologically unimpaired participants make a distal error, while results from right-brain-damaged patients with left spatial neglect are contradictory.