The processes of overall similarity sorting were investigated in 5 free classification experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that increasing time pressure can reduce the likelihood of overall similarity categorization. Experiment 3 showed that a concurrent load also reduced overall similarity sorting. These findings suggest that overall…

During language comprehension, information about the world is exchanged and processed. Two essential ingredients of everyday cognition that are employed during language comprehension are the ability to reason counterfactually, and the ability to understand and predict other peoples' behaviour by attributing independent mental states to them…

Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three- to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1 and 3). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not…

Within the time-based resource-sharing (TBRS) model, we tested a new conception of the relationships between processing and storage in which the core mechanisms of working memory (WM) are time constrained. However, our previous studies were restricted to adults. The current study aimed at demonstrating that these mechanisms are present and…

Researchers have used several composite face paradigms to assess holistic processing of faces. In the selective attention paradigm, participants decide whether one face part (e.g., top) is the same as a previously seen face part. Their judgment is affected by whether the irrelevant part of the test face is the same as or different than the…

Background: Impaired face processing is a widely documented deficit in autism. Although the origin of this deficit is unclear, several groups have suggested that a lack of perceptual expertise is contributory. We investigated whether individuals with autism develop expertise in visuoperceptual processing of faces and whether any deficiency in such…

This study evaluated whether atypical face processing in autism extends from human to cartoon faces for which they show a greater interest. Twenty children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) were compared to two groups of typically developing children, matched on chronological and mental age. They processed the emotional expressions of real…

In cross-dimensional visual search tasks, target discrimination is faster when the previous trial contained a target defined in the same visual dimension as the current trial. The dimension-weighting account (DWA; A. Found & H. J. Muller, 1996) explains this intertrial facilitation by assuming that visual dimensions are weighted at an early…

Auditory word comprehension was assessed in a series of 289 acute left hemisphere stroke patients. Participants decided whether an auditorily presented word matched a picture. On different trials, words were presented with a matching picture, a semantic foil, or a phonemic foil. Participants had significantly more trouble with semantic foils…

Infants start to interpret completed human actions as goal-directed in the second half of the first year of life. In a series of three studies, the understanding of a goal-directed but uncompleted action was investigated in 6- and 9-month-old infants using a preferential looking paradigm. Infants saw the video of an actor's reaching movement…

Sensitivity to shape changes was measured, in particular detection of convexity and concavity changes. The available data are contradictory. The author used a change detection task and simple polygons to systematically manipulate convexity/concavity. Performance was high for detecting a change of sign (a new concave vertex along a convex contour…

Background: Standardised neuropsychological and cognitive measures present some limitations in their applicability and generalisability to individuals with intellectual disability (ID). Alternative approaches to defining the cognitive signatures of various forms of ID are needed to advance our understanding of the profiles of strengths and…

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine the degree to which people can process words while devoting central attention to another task. Experiments 1-4 measured the N400 effect, which is sensitive to the degree of mismatch between a word and the current semantic context. Experiment 5 measured the P3 difference between…

Holistic processing of faces is characterized by encoding of the face as a single stimulus. This study employed a composite face task to examine whether holistic processing varies when attention is restricted to the top as compared to the bottom half of the face, and whether evidence of holistic processing would be observed in event-related…

The modality-match effect in recognition refers to superior memory for words presented in the same modality at study and test. Prior research on this effect is ambiguous and inconsistent. The present study demonstrates that the modality-match effect is found when modality is rendered salient at either encoding or retrieval. Specifically, in…