The effects of moving task-irrelevant objects on time-to-contact (TTC) judgments were examined in 5 experiments. Observers viewed a directly approaching target in the presence of a distractor object moving in parallel with the target. In Experiments 1 to 4, observers decided whether the target would have collided with them earlier or later than a…

Background: Impaired face processing is a widely documented deficit in autism. Although the origin of this deficit is unclear, several groups have suggested that a lack of perceptual expertise is contributory. We investigated whether individuals with autism develop expertise in visuoperceptual processing of faces and whether any deficiency in such…

In cross-dimensional visual search tasks, target discrimination is faster when the previous trial contained a target defined in the same visual dimension as the current trial. The dimension-weighting account (DWA; A. Found & H. J. Muller, 1996) explains this intertrial facilitation by assuming that visual dimensions are weighted at an early…

Even though it is undisputed that prior information regarding the location of a target affects visual selection, the issue of whether information regarding nonspatial features, such as color and shape, has similar effects has been a matter of debate since the early 1980s. In the study described in this article, measures derived from signal…

Sensitivity to shape changes was measured, in particular detection of convexity and concavity changes. The available data are contradictory. The author used a change detection task and simple polygons to systematically manipulate convexity/concavity. Performance was high for detecting a change of sign (a new concave vertex along a convex contour…

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…

Background: Standardised neuropsychological and cognitive measures present some limitations in their applicability and generalisability to individuals with intellectual disability (ID). Alternative approaches to defining the cognitive signatures of various forms of ID are needed to advance our understanding of the profiles of strengths and…

The main purpose of this research was to determine three- to six-year-old pre-schoolers' recognition of basic geometric shapes, the criteria they use to distinguish members of a shape class and whether or not those criteria change in relation to age. Participants were 100 children aged three to six. Data were gathered from individual interviews…

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…

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine the degree to which people can process words while devoting central attention to another task. Experiments 1-4 measured the N400 effect, which is sensitive to the degree of mismatch between a word and the current semantic context. Experiment 5 measured the P3 difference between…

Holistic processing of faces is characterized by encoding of the face as a single stimulus. This study employed a composite face task to examine whether holistic processing varies when attention is restricted to the top as compared to the bottom half of the face, and whether evidence of holistic processing would be observed in event-related…

In this study, the authors used a dual-task flanker paradigm to investigate the degree to which flankers are coprocessed with the target as a function of whether flankers have to be used as stimuli for a second task. A series of experiments, in which performance in dual tasks was compared with that in single tasks, revealed that participants had a…

This study examined the ability of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to detect affective correspondences between facial and vocal expressions of emotion using an intermodal matching paradigm. Four-year-old children with ASD (n = 18) and their age-matched normally developing peers (n = 18) were presented pairs of videotaped facial…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), together with controls matched for age and ability participated in three experiments that assessed the therapeutic benefit of colored overlays. The findings from the first experiment showed that a significantly greater proportion of children with ASD, than controls, increased reading speed when using…