Research is equivocal on whether attention orienting is atypical in autism. This study investigated two types of attention orienting in autistic people and accounted for the potential confounders of alerting level, co-occurring symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety, age, and sex. Twenty-seven autistic participants…

The ability to discriminate social signals from faces is a fundamental component of human social interactions whose developmental origins are still debated. In this study, 5-year-old (N = 29) and 7-year-old children (N = 31) and adults (N = 34) made perceptual similarity and trustworthiness judgments on a set of female faces varying in level of…

Humans perceptually extract quantity information from our environments, be it from simple stimuli in isolation, or from relational magnitudes formed by taking ratios of pairs of simple stimuli. Some have proposed that these two types of magnitude are processed by a common system, whereas others have proposed separate systems. To test these…

The present study examined mnemonic discrimination in 5- and 6-yr-old children, 8- and 9-yr-old children, 11- and 12-yr-old children, and young adults. Participants incidentally encoded pictorial stimuli and subsequently judged whether targets (i.e., repeated stimuli), lures (i.e., mnemonically related stimuli), and foils (i.e., novel stimuli)…

Two experiments examined conditional discrimination in 4- to 6-year-olds. Children learned to choose one of two objects (e.g., circle) when the background was, say, red and to choose the other object (e.g., triangle) when the background was, say, blue. Awareness was assessed and interpreted as a marker of relational processing. In Experiment 1,…

Time perception is important for many aspects of human behavior, and a large literature documents that adults represent intervals and that their ability to discriminate temporal intervals is ratio dependent. Here we replicate a recent study by vanMarle and Wynn (2006 ) that used the visual habituation paradigm and demonstrated that temporal…

A go/no-go conditioned head-turn paradigm was used to examine the abilities of 6- and 12-month-olds to discriminate changes in temporal grouping and their perception of absolute and relative timing information when listening to patterns of white-noise bursts. (Author/RH)

Recognition memory, defined by novelty preferences, was found to vary over 4 discrimination tasks as a function of length of familiarization for 5-6-month-old infants. (ST)

Two experiments are reported that reveal the sources of the developmental difference reported by Crane and Ross that second graders learned more than sixth graders about attributes made relevant after solution of a discrimination task. Experiments use technique whereby children verbalize their hypotheses during solution of a discrimination…

Four hundred children ages 5, 9, and 12 were given a component selection task with stimuli differing in color and shape. Results indicate a greater tendency for older than younger children to withdraw attention from a normally dominant component when advantageous to adopt another feature as the primary functional cue. (Author/SB)

If learning is viewed in terms of the tendency to approach a stimulus that has been rewarded and to avoid a stimulus that has not been rewarded, then it must be concluded that the subjects in this study did not learn. (Author)

Though increasing complexity increased the difficulty of discrimination of form, nursery school, kindergarten, and first grade children were all above chance in performance, older children being superior. The results are discussed in relation to developmental perceptual theory. Portions of this paper were presented at the American Psychological…