This article reports 3 experiments in which effects of orthographic and phonological word length on memory were examined for short lists shown at rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and short-term memory (STM) rates. Only visual-orthographic length reduced RSVP serial recall, whereas both orthographic and phonological length lowered recall for…

This experiment investigated relational complexity and relational shift in judgments of auditory patterns. Pitch and duration values were used to construct two-note perceptually similar sequences (unary relations) and four-note relationally similar sequences (binary relations). It was hypothesized that 5-, 8- and 11-year-old children would perform…

When a visual target is identified, there is a period of several hundred milliseconds when the processing of subsequent targets is impaired, a phenomenon labeled the attentional blink (AB). The emerging consensus is that the identification of a visual target temporarily occupies a limited attentional resource that is essential for all visual…

Global information processing and perception of facial age and emotional expression was studied in children with autism, language disorders, mental retardation, and a clinical control group. Children were given a global-local task and asked to recognize age and emotion in human and canine faces. Children with autism made fewer global responses and…

In two experiments we investigated the automatic adjusting of the attentional focus to simple geometric shapes. The participants performed a visual search task with four stimuli (the target and three distractors) presented always around the fixation point, inside an outlined frame not related to the search task. A cue informed the subject only…

Visual discrimination tasks are increasingly used to explore the neurobiology of vision in rodents, but it remains unclear how the animals solve these tasks: Do they process shapes holistically, or by using low-level features such as luminance and angle acuity? In the present study we found that when discriminating triangles from squares, rats did…

Negative priming refers to slowed down reactions when the distractor on one trial becomes the target on the next. Following two popular accounts, the effect might be due either to inhibitory processes associated with the frontal cortex, or to an ambiguity in the retrieval of episodic information. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to…

Eight experiments were conducted to examine 3- and 3.5-month-old infants' responses to occlusion events. The results revealed two developments, one in infants' knowledge of when objects should and should not be occluded and the other in infants' ability to posit additional objects to make sense of events that would otherwise violate their…

When participants follow spoken instructions to pick up and move objects in a visual workspace, their eye movements to the objects are closely time-locked to referential expressions in the instructions. Two experiments used this methodology to investigate the processing of the temporary ambiguities that arise because spoken language unfolds over…

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests a gradual, experience-dependent specialization of cortical face processing systems that takes place largely in the 1st year of life. To further investigate these findings, event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from typically developing 9-month-old infants presented with pictures of…

In order to explain the cognitive and cerebral mechanisms responsible for the visuospatial peak in autism, and to document its specificity to this condition, a group of eight high-functioning individuals with autism and a visuospatial peak (HFA-P) performed a modified block-design task (BDT; subtest from Wechsler scales) at various levels of…

Three divided visual field experiments tested current hypotheses about the types of visual shape representation tasks that recruit the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying face recognition. Experiment 1 found a right hemisphere advantage for subordinate but not basic-level face recognition. Experiment 2 found a right hemisphere advantage for…

Bilingual reading can require more than knowing two languages. Learners must acquire also the writing conventions of their second language, which can differ in its deep mapping principles (writing system) and its visual configurations (script). We review ERP (event-related potential) and fMRI studies of both Chinese-English bilingualism and…

In this age of proliferating visual communications, there is a permissiveness in subject matter, content, and meaning that is exhilarating, yet overwhelming to interpret in a meaningful or consensual way. By recognizing visual statements, whether a piece of sculpture, an advertisement, a video, or a building, as communication, one can approach…

Similarity plays a central role in cognitive theories. Research has demonstrated that the similarity of a pair increases with its commonalities and decreases with its differences. These common and distinctive elements can take the form of parts of objects, relations between parts of properties of whole objects. Previous work has been unable to…