Some theories have proposed that autistic individuals have difficulty learning predictive relationships. We tested this hypothesis using a serial reaction time task in which participants learned to predict the locations of a repeating sequence of target locations. We conducted a large-sample online study with 61 autistic and 71 neurotypical…

We explore different ways in which the human visual system can adapt for perceiving and categorizing the environment. There are various accounts of supervised (categorical) and unsupervised perceptual learning, and different perspectives on the functional relationship between perception and categorization. We suggest that common experimental…

Prior research has shown that interruptions lead to a variety of performance costs. However, these costs are heterogenous and poorly understood. Under some circumstances, interruptions lead to large decreases in accuracy on the primary task, whereas in others task duration increases, but task accuracy is unaffected. Presently, the underlying cause…

Children and adult learners benefit from viewing hand gestures at instruction across domains (Cook, Duffy, & Fenn, 2013; Huang, Kim, & Christianson, 2019; Ping & Goldin-Meadow, 2008). Within the domain of mathematical learning, gesture at instruction has been shown to benefit children and adults in laboratory and classroom settings…

The purpose of this follow-up study was to determine the specific contribution of phonological processing abilities, including phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and verbal short-term memory (VSTM), as well as visual perception (VP), in word reading accuracy. A sample of 62 native Arabic speaking children from Grade 1…

Skill acquisition theorists conceptualize second language (L2) learning as the acquisition of a set of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills. The dominant view in skill acquisition theory is to regard L2 skill acquisition as a three-stage process "from initial representation of knowledge through initial changes in behavior to eventual…

The entorhinal-hippocampal circuit is one of the earliest sites of cortical pathology in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Visuospatial memory paradigms that are mediated by the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit may offer a means to detect memory impairment during the early stages of AD. In this study, we developed a 4-min visuospatial memory paradigm called…

Efficient visual exploration in infancy is essential for cognitive and language development. It allows infants to participate in social interactions by attending to faces and learning about objects of interest. Visual scanning of scenes depends on a number of factors, and early differences in efficiency are likely contributing to differences in…

The "familiarity effect" (Shen and Reingold, "Perception & Psychophysics" 63(3):464-475, 2001) is a phenomenon in which unfamiliar symbols perceptually "pop-out" when placed among familiar symbols (e.g., letters). In contrast, searching for familiar symbols among unfamiliar symbols is more challenging. Failure to…

Although relational reasoning has been described as a process at the heart of human cognition, the exact character of relational representations remains an open debate. Symbolic-connectionist models of relational cognition suggest that relations are structured representations, but that they are ultimately grounded in feature sets; thus, they…

In human children and adults, familiar face types--typically own-age and own-species faces--are discriminated better than other face types; however, human infants do not appear to exhibit an own-age bias but instead better discriminate adult faces, which they see more often. There are two possible explanations for this pattern: Perceptual…

Harsh environments are known to predict deficits in children's cognitive abilities. Life history theory approaches challenge this interpretation, proposing stressed children's cognition becomes specialized to solve problems in fitness-enhancing ways. The goal of this study was to examine associations between early environmental harshness and…

Limits in visual working memory (VWM) strongly constrain human performance across many tasks. However, the nature of these limits is not well understood. In this article we develop an ideal observer analysis of human VWM by deriving the expected behavior of an optimally performing but limited-capacity memory system. This analysis is framed around…

This research investigated whether text reading and copying involve visual attention-processing skills. Children in grades 3 and 5 read and copied the same text. We measured eye movements while reading and the number of gaze lifts (GL) during copying. The children were also administered letter report tasks that constitute an estimation of the…

In this study, 7-19-year-olds performed an interrupted visual search task in two experiments. Our question was whether the tendency to respond within 500 ms after a second glimpse of a display (the "rapid resumption" effect ["Psychological Science", 16 (2005) 684-688]) would increase with age in the same way as overall search efficiency. The…