To examine whether enantiomorphy (i.e., the ability to discriminate lateral mirror images) is influenced by the acquisition of a written system that incorporates mirrored letters (e.g., b and d), unschooled illiterate adults were compared with people reading the Latin alphabet, namely, both schooled literate adults and unschooled adults…

Attentional capture for distractors is enhanced by increasing the difficulty of discrimination between the standard and the target in the three-stimulus oddball paradigm. In this study, we investigated the cognitive mechanism of this modulation of attentional capture. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from participants while they…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants (n=13) were presented with mirrored and normal letters at different orientations and were asked to make mirror-normal letter discriminations. As it has been suggested that a mental rotation out of the plane might be necessary to decide on mirrored letters, we wanted to…

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a developmental disorder typified by deficits in visuospatial cognition. To understand the nature of this deficit, we characterized how people with WS perceive visual orientation, a fundamental ability related to object identification. We compared WS participants to typically developing children (3-6 years of age) and…

Five experiments examined 79 newborns' ability to discriminate and categorize a spatial relation, defined by the left-right spatial position of a blinking object-target with respect to a vertical landmark-bar. Three-day-old infants discriminated the up versus low position of an object located on the same side of the landmark-bar (Experiment 1) and…

When participants control the horizontal movements of a stimulus and indicate its vanishing point after it unexpectedly vanishes, the perceived vanishing point is displaced beyond the actual vanishing point, and the size of the displacement is directly related to the action-effect anticipation one has to generate to successfully control the…

Six tree shrews and 8 rats were tested for their ability to infer transitively in a spatial discrimination task. The apparatus was a semicircular radial-arm maze with 8 arms labeled A through H. In Experiment 1, the animals were first trained in sequence on 4 discriminations to enter 1 of the paired adjacent arms, AB, BC, CD, and DE, with right…

Two experimental series are reported using both reaction time (RT) and a data-limited perceptual report to examine the effects of perceptual load on object-based attention. Perceptual load was manipulated across 3 levels by increasing the complexity of perceptual judgments. Data from the RT-based experiments showed object-based effects when the…

The environment contains considerable information that is distributed across space and time, and the visual system is remarkably sensitive to such information via the operation of visual statistical learning (VSL). Previous VSL studies have focused on establishing what kinds of statistical relationships can be learned but have not fully explored…

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder, which stems from a genetic deletion on chromosome 7 and causes a profound weakness in visuospatial cognition. Our current study explores how orientation perception may contribute to the visuospatial deficits in WS. In Experiment 1, we found that WS individuals and normal 3-4 year olds…

There is evidence that, from an early age, humans are sensitive to spatial information such as simple landmarks and the size of objects. This study concerns the ability to represent a particular kind of spatial information, namely, the "geometry" of an enclosed layout--an ability present in older children, adults, and nonhuman animals (e.g.,…

The type of visual information needed for categorizing faces and nonface objects was investigated by manipulating spatial frequency scales available in the image during a category verification task addressing basic and subordinate levels. Spatial filtering had opposite effects on faces and airplanes that were modulated by categorization level. The…

Four experiments revealed arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures. After an incidental encoding task, participants were more likely to remember the locations of positive and negative arousing pictures than the locations of non-arousing pictures, indicating better binding of location to picture. This arousal-enhanced binding effect did not…

The purpose of this study was to examine predictors of music sight-reading ability. The authors hypothesized that speed and accuracy of music sight-reading would be predicted by a combination of aural pattern discrimination, spatial-temporal reasoning, and technical proficiency. Participants (N = 70) were wind players in concert bands at a…

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…