In order to explore the possible contribution of the motor system to the representation of verbs, we studied the relative preservation of the capacity of Parkinson disease patients to name matched sets of object and action pictures. The performance of this group of participants was compared with that of a group of healthy seniors, and a group of Alzheimer disease patients. Generalized linear mixed-effects analyses showed that, whereas the two control groups had similar accuracy scores in response to objects and actions, Parkinson disease patients presented a significant impairment in their capacity to name actions compared to objects. The results of this study support the idea that verb representations are grounded in neural networks to which brain areas involved in motor control contribute.

We investigated picture naming in Spanish-speaking patients with probable Alzheimer's disease using coloured line drawings of actions and objects matched on several key psycholinguistic variables. The patients were less accurate than healthy controls but we found no significant evidence for an effect of grammatical class. Generalized linear mixed-effects analyses indicated that patient naming accuracy was affected by lexical frequency and age of acquisition, and by the name agreement of the pictures. These observations support the view that, while the effect of grammatical class is not an important influence, accurate picture naming in dementia is determined by the impact of lesions on a lexico-semantic mapping structured by experience.

Causal illusion has been proposed as a cognitive mediator of pseudoscientific beliefs. However, previous studies have only tested the association between this cognitive bias and a closely related but different type of unwarranted beliefs, those related to superstition and paranormal phenomena. Participants (n = 225) responded to a novel questionnaire of pseudoscientific beliefs designed for this study. They also completed a contingency learning task in which a possible cause, infusion intake, and a desired effect, headache remission, were actually non-contingent. Volunteers with higher scores on the questionnaire also presented stronger causal illusion effects. These results support the hypothesis that causal illusions might play a fundamental role in the endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs. Previous studies have aimed to identify the mechanisms underlying unwarranted beliefs related to paranormal phenomena (

Our results provide compelling evidence of the relevance of brain areas related to planning and execution of movements in the retrieval of motion-related semantic content.

In an opaque orthography like English, phonological coding errors are a prominent feature of dyslexia. In a transparent orthography like Spanish, reading difficulties are characterized by slower reading speed rather than reduced accuracy. In previous research, the reading speed deficit was revealed by asking children to read lists of words. However, speed in list reading sums the time required to initiate an utterance (reaction time, RT) with the time required to say it (response duration, RD).Thus, the dyslexic speed deficit in transparent orthographies could be driven by slow RTs, by slow RDs or both. The distinction is especially important if developmental readers rely on phonological coding to achieve lexical access because the whole word would have to be encoded before it could be identified. However, while the factors that affect reading RT have been extensively investigated, no attention has been paid to RD. We studied the performance of typically developing and dyslexic Spanish children in an oral reading task. We analyzed the impact of word frequency and length on reading accuracy, RT and RD. We found that both RT and RD were affected by word frequency and length for both control and dyslexic readers. We observed interactions between effects of reader group (dyslexic, typically developing (TD) younger or TD older readers) and effects of lexicality, frequency and word length.Our results show that in transparent orthographies children are capable of reading strategy flexibility, using lexical and non-lexical coding processes.