Adults and children easily distinguish between fine-grained variations in trustworthiness intensity based on facial appearance, but the developmental origins of this fundamental social skill are still debated. Using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) oddball paradigm coupled with electroencephalographic (EEG) recording, we investigated…

To date, studies have not established whether autistic and non-autistic individuals differ in emotion recognition from facial motion cues when matched in terms of alexithymia. Here, autistic and non-autistic adults (N = 60) matched on age, gender, non-verbal reasoning ability and alexithymia, completed an emotion recognition task, which employed…

Visuospatial processing speed underlies several cognitive functions critical for successful completion of everyday tasks, including driving and walking. While it is widely accepted that visuospatial processing speed peaks in early adulthood, performance across the lifespan remains incompletely characterized. Additionally, there remains a lack of…

Behavior analysts typically teach conditional discriminations in a mixed-trial format but may switch to a blocked-trial format for learners displaying limited acquisition. No known research has shown that mixed-trial methods are more effective or efficient than blocked-trial methods for teaching discriminations, so it is not clear why this format…

We explore the following two cognitive questions regarding crosslinguistic variation in lexical semantic systems: Why are some linguistic categories--that is, the associations between a term and a portion of the semantic space--harder to learn than others? How does learning a language-specific set of lexical categories affect processing in that…

Purpose: Studies on reading in individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss (deaf) raise the possibility that, due to deficient phonological coding, deaf individuals may rely more on orthographic-semantic links than on orthographic-phonological links. However, the relative contribution of phonological and semantic information to visual word…

Humans and other animals are able to make rough estimations of quantities using what has been termed the "approximate number system" (ANS). Much evidence suggests that sensitivity to numerosity correlates with symbolic math capacity, leading to the suggestion that the ANS may serve as a start-up tool to develop symbolic math. Many…

Although superior visual search skills have been repeatedly reported for individuals with autism spectrum disorder, the underlying mechanisms remain controversial. To specify the locus where individuals with autism spectrum disorder excel in visual search, we compared the performance of autism spectrum disorder adults and healthy controls in…