Adult literacy training is known to be difficult in terms of teaching and maintenance (Abadzi, 2003), perhaps because adults who recently learned to read in their first language have not acquired reading automaticity. This study examines fast word recognition process in neoliterate adults, to evaluate whether they show evidence of perceptual…

The authors evaluated age-related variations in contextual cueing, which reflects the extent to which visuospatial regularities can facilitate search for a target. Previous research produced inconsistent results regarding contextual cueing effects in young children and in older adults, and no study has investigated the phenomenon across the life…

Evidence suggests that people with autism rely less on holistic visual information than typical adults. The current studies examine this by investigating core visual processes that contribute to holistic processing--namely, individuation and element grouping--and how they develop in participants with autism and typically developing (TD)…

We investigated whether preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit the shape bias in word learning: the bias to generalize based on shape rather than size, color, or texture in an object naming context ("This is a wek; find another wek") but not in a non-naming similarity classification context ("See this?…

We live in a dynamic environment in which objects change location over time. To maintain stable object representations the visual system must determine how newly sampled information relates to existing object representations, the "correspondence problem". Spatiotemporal information is clearly an important factor that the visual system takes into…

Biological motion is easily perceived by neurotypical observers when encoded in point-light displays. Some but not all relevant research shows significant deficits in biological motion perception among those with ASD, especially with respect to emotional displays. We tested adults with and without ASD on the perception of masked biological motion…

There is a paucity of research studying comprehensive neurocognitive profiles of adolescents with higher functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This study compared the neurocognitive profiles of higher functioning adolescents with ASD (n = 30, mean age 13.5) with that of typically developing adolescents (n = 30; mean age 13.7). Adolescents…

This study investigated emotion recognition abilities and visual scanning of emotional faces in 16 Fragile X syndrome (FXS) individuals compared to 16 chronological-age and 16 mental-age matched controls. The relationships between emotion recognition, visual scan-paths and symptoms of social anxiety, schizotypy and autism were also explored.…

Despite the large number of people with visual impairments in Australia, all Western Australian secondary students are required to complete their secondary exams using handwriting, unless they qualify for special provisions. Students with visual impairments do not necessarily qualify for special provisions on the basis of their visual impairment…

Purpose: To determine whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate impaired visual fast mapping skills compared with unimpaired peers and to test components of visual working memory that may contribute to a visual working memory deficit. Methods: Fifty children (25 SLI) played 2 computer-based visual fast mapping games…

This study used the modality shift experiment, a relatively simple reaction time measure to visual and auditory stimuli, to examine attentional shifting within and across modalities in 33 children and 42 adults with high-functioning autism as compared to matched numbers of age- and ability-matched typical controls. An exaggerated "modality shift…

Paired associates learning is impaired in both schizophrenia and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), which may reflect hippocampal pathology. In addition, schizophrenia is characterized by the dysfunction of the retino-geniculo-striatal magnocellular (M) visual pathway. The purpose of this study was to investigate the interaction between…

It has been established that typically developing individuals have a bias to attend to facial information in the left visual field (LVF) more than in the right visual field. This bias is thought to arise from the right hemisphere's advantage for processing facial information, with evidence suggesting it to be driven by the configural demands of…

Colored filters are used to treat Irlen syndrome (IS), a controversial disorder posited to be the cause of a substantial proportion of reading difficulties. Previously, we found that Irlen colored filters do not produce any short-term alleviation of reading difficulties in schoolchildren aged 7-12. Here, we tested whether colored filters show…

This paper aims to investigate whether--and how--consonant sonority (obstruent vs. sonorant) and status (coda vs. onset) within syllable boundaries modulate the syllable-based segmentation strategies. Here, it is questioned whether French dyslexic children, who experience acoustic-phonetic (i.e., voicing) and phonological impairments, are…