This study was inspired by the more locally oriented processing style in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A modified multiple object tracking (MOT) task was administered to a group of children with and without ASD. Participants not only had to distinguish moving targets from distracters, but they also had to track targets when they were visually…

Learning from visual representations is enhanced when learners appropriately integrate corresponding visual and verbal information. This study examined the effects of two methods of promoting integration, color coding and labeling, on learning about probabilistic reasoning from a table and text. Undergraduate students (N = 98) were randomly…

Autistic people are better at perceiving details. Major theories explain this in terms of bottom-up sensory mechanisms or in terms of top-down cognitive biases. Recently, it has become possible to link these theories within a common framework. This framework assumes that perception is implicit neural inference, combining sensory evidence with…

We measured Chinese dyslexic and control children's eye movements during rapid automatized naming (RAN) with alphanumeric (digits) and symbolic (dice surfaces) stimuli. Both types of stimuli required identical oral responses, controlling for effects associated with speech production. Results showed that naming dice was much slower than naming…

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)…

Statistical learning is characterized by detection of regularities in one's environment without an awareness or intention to learn, and it may play a critical role in language and social behavior. Accordingly, in this study we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of visual statistical learning in young children with autism…

Previous studies have asked whether visual sensitivity and attentional processing in deaf signers are enhanced or altered as a result of their different sensory experiences during development, i.e., auditory deprivation and exposure to a visual language. In particular, deaf and hearing signers have been shown to exhibit a right visual field/left…

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…

Although traditional methods to collect similarity data (for multidimensional scaling [MDS]) are robust, they share a key shortcoming. Specifically, the possible pairwise comparisons in any set of objects grow rapidly as a function of set size. This leads to lengthy experimental protocols, or procedures that involve scaling stimulus subsets. We…

Reaction time (RT), thought to be important for acquiring a full understanding of the establishment of equivalence classes, has been reported in a number of studies within the area of stimulus equivalence research. In this study, we trained 3 classes of potentially 3 members, with arbitrary stimuli in a one-to-many training structure in 5 adult…

Bortoloti and de Rose (2009) found evidence that the level of functional transfer is higher in equivalence classes generated by delayed matching to sample (DMTS) than in classes generated by simultaneous matching (SMTS). We attempted to replicate these findings with the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP). Two experimental groups…

Recent studies have demonstrated that central cues, such as eyes and arrows, reflexively trigger attentional shifts. However, it is not clear whether the attentional mechanisms induced by these two cues are similar or rather differ in some important way. We investigated hemispheric lateralization of the orienting effects induced by the two cue…

Stimulus overselectivity is widely accepted as a stimulus control abnormality in autism spectrum disorders and subsets of other populations. Previous research has demonstrated a link between both chronological and mental age and overselectivity in typical development. However, the age at which children are developmentally ready to respond to…

Six-month-olds reliably discriminate different monkey and human faces whereas 9-month-olds only discriminate different human faces. It is often falsely assumed that perceptual narrowing reflects a permanent change in perceptual abilities. In 3 experiments, ninety-six 12-month-olds' discrimination of unfamiliar monkey faces was examined. Following…

In the present study the effects of visual, auditory, and audio-visual presentation formats on memory for thematically constructed lists were assessed in individuals with intellectual disability and mental age-matched children. The auditory recognition test included target items, unrelated foils, and two types of semantic lures: critical related…