We assessed 18 children with unilateral amblyopia and 30 age-matched controls on one low-level and three high-level motion tasks. Children with amblyopia showed similar performance to controls in both amblyopic and fellow eyes on a low-level global motion task and on a high-level 2-dot apparent motion task. Performance on both single-object and multiple-object attentive tracking tasks was significantly depressed in both amblyopic and fellow eyes relative to controls. These findings suggest that binocular regions of posterior parietal cortex likely contribute to a deficit in voluntary, spatial attention that is a component of amblyopia.

In many offline studies, children show selectively better comprehension of sentences with the focus particle only when it modifies the object argument (Jane only ate an apple) than they do when it modifies the subject argument (Only Jane ate an apple). Here we explore the nature of this asymmetry by examining performance in a different kind of task: the moment-to-moment comprehension of unambiguous sentences. If past errors reflect a fundamental difference in representation or complexity of computation, we would expect the same asymmetry in this task. We observed that adults were able to successfully predict the target referent for both types of only-sentences, as indicated by anticipatory looks, while 6- to 8-year-old children could do so only for subject-modifying only-sentences. These findings suggest that much of the asymmetry in past work may be due to task demands. We discuss the implications of these results for children’s syntactic and pragmatic development.

In recent years, visible-light promoted reactions have become a powerful tool for organic synthesis by activating small molecules. This review presents an overview of the catalyst-free synthesis of heterocyclic compounds with one or more than one heteroatoms under visible-light irradiation in various solvents or solvent-free conditions reported from 2013 on.

Discrete infnity was identifed as a central feature of human language by Humboldt who famously spoke of making infnite use of fnite means. Later Chomsky refocused attention on this property starting with Chomsky (1957). In a number of works since, Chomsky has repeatedly stressed the centrality of infnity for understanding language. For example, Chomsky (2007) writes that “An I-language is a computational system that generates infnitely many internal expressions”. Chomsky also noted that the property of discrete infnity is shared by the natural numbers and language. This connection has also caught the interest of others in cognitive science (e.g. Dehaene 1999, Dehaene et al. 1999). In this squib, we want to discuss concrete reductions of discrete infnity of the natural number. Specifcally, we want to investigate the extent to which this connection is compatible with current views of the syntax-semantics interface. We argue that merge alone is not enough to derive infnity, but a minimal lexicon is necessary, as Chomsky (2007) has noted in passing. We furthermore show that Chomsky’s assertion that a single lexical item is sufcient to generate the natural numbers depends on two assumptions -- an untyped lambda calculus, and a specifc interpretation of the syntactic Merge operation.

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