The present study investigated developmental trends in response inhibition and preparation by studying behavior and event-related brain activity in a cued go/nogo task, administered to nine-year-old children and young adults. Hits, false alarms, inattention, and impulsivity scores and ERP measures of inhibition (fronto-central nogo-N2 and P3), target selection (parietal go-nogo P3 difference), and response preparation (contingent negative variation; CNV) were collected. Higher false alarm and impulsivity scores and the absence of the fronto-central nogo P3 all suggest a developmental lag in response inhibition in children. A developmental lag in sustained attention processes was suggested by worse target detection and larger parietal target/nontarget P3 effects in children. Cue orientation and response preparation processes were respectively measured by early and late CNV activity. Children displayed smaller early CNV amplitudes at fronto-central locations, but mature late CNV. The smaller early CNV activity might indicate inefficient cue-orientation processes caused by incomplete frontal lobe development.

The present study investigates visual orienting to directional cues (arrow or eyes) in adults with high functioning autism (n = 19) and age matched controls (n = 19). A choice reaction time paradigm is used in which eye- or arrow direction correctly (congruent) or incorrectly (incongruent) cues target location. In typically developing participants, the visual orienting reflex is longer for eyes than for arrows. Right side cueing, but not left side cueing, induced a congruence effect for eyes, while this effect was evident for right as well as for left side arrow cues. In participants with autism the overall visual orienting reflex was not different between arrows and eyes and no laterality effect was found for eyes cueing. These findings suggest that, instead of a specific Eye Direction Detector persons with autism might have a general 'Symbol Direction Detector'.

Two tasks were used to assess the processing of whole versus parts of objects in a group of high-functioning children and adolescents with autism (N = 11) and a comparison group of typically developing peers (N = 11) matched for chronological age and IQ. In the first task, only the children with autism showed a global advantage, and the two groups showed similar interference between levels. In the second task, the children with autism, despite longer RTs, showed similar performance to the comparison group with regard to the effect of goodness on visual parsing. Contrary to expectations based on the central coherence and hierarchisation deficit theories, these findings indicate intact holistic processing among persons with autism. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to apparently discrepant evidence from other studies.

This study aims at disentangling the causal effects of unemployment on physical and mental health from the selection of the unhealthy into unemployment. To identify causal effects, it explores hypotheses concerning how physical and mental health deterioration gain additional momentum with a longer duration of unemployment. In contrast, mere selection into unemployment implies time-constant effects of unemployment on physical and mental health. Fixed-effects models are applied to data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP, 2002-2014, 74,572 observations). Pointing at causal effects of unemployment, the findings show that physical health does not deteriorate before, during or immediately after the period in which individuals lose their jobs, but that deterioration gains momentum later. The effect further depends on age at transition to unemployment. In contrast, a large part of the poorer mental health of the unemployed might be due to the selection of the unhealthy into unemployment; mental health declines even before job loss. Only for people who experience unemployment early in life, mental health deterioration gains some momentum in the time after the transition, indicating a (weak) causal effect of unemployment on mental health for younger individuals.