Purpose: The purpose of this review article is to describe characteristics of auditory processing disorders (APD) by evaluating the literature in which children with suspected or diagnosed APD were compared with typically developing children and to determine whether APD must be regarded as a deficit specific to the auditory modality or as a…

Impairments in postural control affect the development of motor and social skills in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This review compared the effect of different sensory conditions on static standing postural control between ASD and neurotypical individuals. Results from 19 studies indicated a large difference in postural control…

The aim of the present study was to compare visuospatial working memory performance in 18 individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) and 18 typically developing (TD) children matched for nonverbal mental age. Two aspects were considered: task presentation format (i.e., spatial-sequential or spatial-simultaneous), and level of attentional control…

An important issue for understanding visual perception in autism concerns whether individuals with this neurodevelopmental disorder possess an advantage in processing local visual information, and if so, what is the nature of this advantage. Perception of movement speed is a visual process that relies on computation of local spatiotemporal signals…

Almost all locomotor animals are sensitive to optical expansion (visual looming) and for most animals this sensitivity is evident very early in their development. In humans there is evidence that responses to looming stimuli begin in the first 6 weeks of life, but here we demonstrate that as children become independent their perceptual acuity…

Increased motivation towards social stimuli in Williams syndrome (WS) led us to hypothesize that a face's human status would have greater impact than face's orientation on WS' face processing abilities. Twenty-nine individuals with WS were asked to categorize facial emotion expressions in real, human cartoon and non-human cartoon faces presented…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with impaired visuospatial representations subserved by the dorsal stream and relatively strong object recognition abilities subserved by the ventral stream. There is conflicting evidence on whether this uneven pattern in WS extends to working memory (WM). The present studies…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder often described as being characterized by a dissociative cognitive architecture, in which profound impairments of visuo-spatial cognition contrast with relative preservation of linguistic, face recognition and auditory short-memory abilities. This asymmetric and dissociative cognition…

The authors examined the relationships between reading comprehension, visual attention, and magnocellular processing in 42 Grade 7 students. The goal was to quantify the sensitivity of visual attention and magnocellular visual processing as concomitants of poor reading comprehension in the absence of either vision therapy or cognitive…

This annual report presents six research articles on child development. The articles and their authors are: (1) "Beyond Psychological Limits: Applying Human Development in Education" (John Kirkland); (2) "Beyond Reductionism: Directions toward Understanding Children" (Frank Self); (3) "A Psychometric Examination of the…

Visual selective attention is the ability to attend to relevant visual information and ignore irrelevant stimuli. Little is known about its typical and atypical development in early childhood. Experiment 1 investigates typically developing toddlers' visual search for multiple targets on a touch-screen. Time to hit a target, distance between…