This study aimed to test the assumption drawn from weak central coherence theory that a central cognitive mechanism is responsible for integrating information at both conceptual and perceptual levels. A visual semantic memory task and a face recognition task measuring use of holistic information were administered to 15 children with autism and 16…

Recent work has shown that Whorf effects of language on color discrimination are stronger in the right visual field than in the left. Here we show that this phenomenon is not limited to color: The perception of animal figures (cats and dogs) was more strongly affected by linguistic categories for stimuli presented to the right visual field than…

This paper surveys some major trends from research on visual and spatial thinking coming from cognitive science, developmental psychology, science literacy, and science studies. It explores the role of visualisation in creativity, in building mental models, and in the communication of scientific ideas, in order to place these findings in the…

What role does the initial glimpse of a scene play in subsequent eye movement guidance? In 4 experiments, a brief scene preview was followed by object search through the scene via a small moving window that was tied to fixation position. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the scene preview resulted in more efficient eye movements compared with a…

Young children find meaning in the drawings they create that may not be apparent to an adult observer. The purpose of this study is to access the children's views using a drawing change task. Seventy-three pre-schoolers were asked to draw a person and then draw a person with a belly button. It was anticipated that tadpole (no separate body)…

Nine experiments examined the means by which visual memory for individual objects is structured into a larger representation of a scene. Participants viewed images of natural scenes or object arrays in a change detection task requiring memory for the visual form of a single target object. In the test image, 2 properties of the stimulus were…

Background: Individual differences in complex working memory tasks reflect simultaneous processing, executive functions, and attention control. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show a deficit in verbal working memory tasks that involve simultaneous processing of information. Aims: The purpose of the study was to examine executive…

This study investigated the relationship between 3 ability-based cognitive styles (verbal deductive, spatial imagery, and object imagery) and performance on geometry problems that provided different types of clues. The purpose was to determine whether students with a specific cognitive style outperformed other students, when the geometry problems…

The authors compared 6- to 11-year-olds with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and those with specific language impairment (SLI) on measures of memory (verbal and visuospatial short-term and working memory) and learning (reading and mathematics). Children with DCD with typical language skills were impaired in all four areas of memory…

This research tested the hypothesis that initial efforts at executive control temporarily undermine subsequent efforts at executive control. Four experiments revealed that controlling the focus of visual attention (Experiment 1), inhibiting predominant writing tendencies (Experiment 2), taking a working memory test (Experiment 3), or exaggerating…

Reminder cues can impact remembering in infancy in multiple ways. Infants typically show highly specific remembering following a reminder, or reactivation procedure, but in some instances, (such as size perception) have demonstrated an ability to remember when given a cue or prime that differs in certain specific characteristics, relative to the…

We hypothesized that the right hemisphere would be superior to the left hemisphere in remembering having seen a specific picture before, given its superiority in perceptually encoding specific aspects of visual form. A large set of pictures (N=1500) of animals, human faces, artifacts, landscapes, and art paintings were shown for 2 s in central…

The current study provides evidence for the existence of an other-age effect (OAE), analogous to the well-documented other-race effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults are better at recognizing adult faces compared with faces of newborns and children. Results from Experiment 3 indicate that the OAE obtained with child faces can be…

High functioning autistic individuals (N=16) were compared with age-matched normal control subjects on a visual recognition matching task. Autistic subjects performed particularly poorly on meaningless material, but were able to utilize meaning to aid their visual memory. Results did not support a simple parallel between autism and mediotemporal…

Children with high-functioning autism earned above normal scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition (WISC-IV) Perceptual Reasoning and Verbal Comprehension Indexes and below normal scores on the Working Memory and Processing Speed Indexes and Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-Second Edition (WIAT-II) Written…