Greater eyes-focused eye movement pattern during face recognition is associated with better performance in adults but not in children. We test the hypothesis that higher eye movement consistency across trials, instead of a greater eyes-focused pattern, predicts better performance in children since it reflects capacity in developing visual…

Background: Individuals with developmental language disorder or Williams syndrome are reported to use more gestures than individuals with typical development. However, these two groups differ considerably in visuospatial and language skills, two skills that are hypothesized to shape gesture rate. Aims: We first examined whether children with both…

Excessive crowding in the visual periphery has been demonstrated in children with developmental dyslexia (DD). However, less is known about crowding in the fovea, even though foveal crowding is at least equally important, as reading is mostly accomplished through foveal vision. Here we used a special set of digit stimuli (Pelli fonts) to measure…

Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here,…

We applied a trajectory-based analysis to eye tracking data in order to quantify individualized patterns of pupil response in the context of global-local processing that may be associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) features. Multiple pupil response trajectories across both global and local conditions were identified. Using the combined…

Background and aims: Developmental disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and Developmental Dyslexia (DD) are reported to have more visual problems, oral language difficulties, and diminished reading skills in addition to their different diagnostic features. Moreover, these conditions…

Differences in audiovisual integration are commonly observed in autism. Temporal binding windows (TBWs) of audiovisual speech can be trained (i.e., narrowed) in non-autistic adults; this study evaluated a computer-based perceptual training in autistic youth and assessed whether treatment outcomes varied according to individual characteristics.…

Observers experience complex patterns of visual motion in daily life due to their own movements through space, the movement of objects, and the geometry of surfaces in the visible world. Motion information shapes behavior and brain activity beginning in infancy. And yet most prior behavioral research has focused on how children process only one…

It has been suggested that attenuated adaptation to visual stimuli in autism is the result of atypical perceptual priors (e.g., Pellicano and Burr in "Trends Cogn Sci" 16(10):504-510, 2012. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2012.08.009). This study investigated adaptation to color in autistic adults, measuring both strength of afterimage and the…

Within the framework of the theory of visual attention (TVA), the visual attention span (VAS) deficit among individuals with developmental dyslexia has been ascribed to the problems entailed by bottom-up (BotU) and top-down (TopD) attentional processes. The former involves two VAS subcomponents: the visual short-term memory storage and perceptual…

We sought to evaluate the efficacy of successive matching training for establishing generalized reflexive matching across 4 children with autism. In Experiment 1, differential reinforcement with delay fading was efficacious in establishing "yes" and "no" matching and nonmatching responses in 2 participants when 2 identical or…

Dyslexia has been associated with a problem in visual-audio integration mechanisms. Here, we investigate for the first time the contribution of unisensory cues on multisensory audio and visual integration in 32 dyslexic children by modelling results using the Bayesian approach. Non-linguistic stimuli were used. Children performed a temporal task:…

Previous studies show that newborn infants and adults orient their attention preferentially toward human faces. However, the developmental changes of visual attention captured by face stimuli remain unclear, especially when an explicit top-down process is involved. We capitalized on a visual search paradigm to assess how the relative strength of…

Handwriting and spelling problems are often associated in dyslexia. However, the nature of their association is still unclear, and most of the existing research in this area is on deep orthographies (mainly English). The extent to which findings are applicable across languages is uncertain. This article examines the effects of script…

Emotional competence (EC) refers to a set of skills to identify, understand, and respond to one's own emotions and those of others. It plays a fundamental role in socialization processes, where children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI) show marked deficits. However, due to the similarities between these…