In Experiment 1, human participants were pre-exposed to two similar checkerboard grids (AX and X) in alternation, and to a third grid (BX) in a separate block of trials. In a subsequent test, the unique feature A was better detected than the feature B when they were presented in the same location during the pre-exposure and test phases. However,…

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

Learning from visual representations is enhanced when learners appropriately integrate corresponding visual and verbal information. This study examined the effects of two methods of promoting integration, color coding and labeling, on learning about probabilistic reasoning from a table and text. Undergraduate students (N = 98) were randomly…

Autistic people are better at perceiving details. Major theories explain this in terms of bottom-up sensory mechanisms or in terms of top-down cognitive biases. Recently, it has become possible to link these theories within a common framework. This framework assumes that perception is implicit neural inference, combining sensory evidence with…

The "body inversion effect" refers to superior recognition of upright than inverted images of the human body and indicates typical configural processing. Previous research by Reed et al. using static images of the human body shows that people with autism fail to demonstrate this effect. Using a novel task in which adults, adolescents…

In 4 experiments, we intermixed trials in which the stimulus color was relevant with trials where participants had to judge the stimulus shape or parity and found that the logical-recoding rule (Hedge & Marsh, 1975) applied to the relevant dimension in a task can generalize to the irrelevant dimension of the other task. The mapping…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of multimodal information on learning performance and judgment of learning (JOL). Experiment 1 examined the effects of representation type (word-only versus word-plus-picture) and presentation channel (visual-only versus visual-plus-auditory) on recall and immediate-JOL in fixed-rate…