The acquisition of reading has an extensive impact on the developing brain and leads to enhanced abilities in phonological processing and visual letter perception. Could this expertise also extend to early visual abilities outside the reading domain? Here we studied the performance of illiterate, ex-illiterate and literate adults closely matched…

The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to…

During the first year of life, infants' face recognition abilities are subject to "perceptual narrowing", the end result of which is that observers lose the ability to distinguish previously discriminable faces (e.g. other-race faces) from one another. Perceptual narrowing has been reported for faces of different species and different races, in…

Pointing, like eye gaze, is a deictic gesture that can be used to orient the attention of another person towards an object or an event. Previous research suggests that infants first begin to follow a pointing gesture between 10 and 13 months of age. We investigated whether sensitivity to pointing could be seen at younger ages employing a technique…

We recently proposed a multi-channel, image-filtering model for simulating the development of visual selective attention in young infants (Schlesinger, Amso & Johnson, 2007). The model not only captures the performance of 3-month-olds on a visual search task, but also implicates two cortical regions that may play a role in the development of…

Recent evidence suggests those with autism may be generally impaired in visual motion perception. To examine this, we investigated both coherent and biological motion processing in adolescents with autism employing both psychophysical and fMRI methods. Those with autism performed as well as matched controls during coherent motion perception but…

Recent studies indicate that young children preferentially attend to snakes, spiders, and lions compared with nondangerous species, but these results have yet to be replicated in populations that actually experience dangerous animals in nature. This multi-site study investigated the visual-detection biases of southern Indian children towards two…

Plaisted, O'Riordan and colleagues (Plaisted, O'Riordan & Baron-Cohen, 1998; O'Riordan, 2004) showed that school-age children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are faster at finding targets in certain types of visual search tasks than typical controls. Currently though, there is very little known about the visual search skills of very…

Visual working memory (VWM) is the facility to hold in mind visual information for brief periods of time. Developmental studies have suggested an increase during childhood in the maximum number of complete items that can simultaneously be stored in VWM. Here, we exploit a recent theoretical and empirical innovation to investigate instead the…

We measured Chinese dyslexic and control children's eye movements during rapid automatized naming (RAN) with alphanumeric (digits) and symbolic (dice surfaces) stimuli. Both types of stimuli required identical oral responses, controlling for effects associated with speech production. Results showed that naming dice was much slower than naming…

Two experiments examined the hypothesis that developing visual attentional mechanisms influence infants' Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM) in the context of multiple items. Five- and 10-month-old infants (N = 76) received a change detection task in which arrays of three differently colored squares appeared and disappeared. On each trial one square…

It is still unclear how the visual system perceives accurately the size of objects at different distances. One suggestion, dating back to Berkeley's famous essay, is that vision is calibrated by touch. If so, we may expect different mechanisms involved for near, reachable distances and far, unreachable distances. To study how the haptic system…

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) have impairments in visuospatial tasks and in manual visuomotor control, consistent with parietal and cerebellar abnormalities. Here we examined whether individuals with WS also have difficulties in visually controlling whole-body movements. We investigated visual control of stepping down at a change of…

We investigated whether preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit the shape bias in word learning: the bias to generalize based on shape rather than size, color, or texture in an object naming context ("This is a wek; find another wek") but not in a non-naming similarity classification context ("See this?…

Integrating the multisensory features of talking faces is critical to learning and extracting coherent meaning from social signals. While we know much about the development of these capacities at the behavioral level, we know very little about the underlying neural processes. One prominent behavioral milestone of these capacities is the perceptual…