Recent work has investigated the origin of infant colour categories, showing pre-linguistic infants categorise colour even in the absence of colour words. These infant categories are similar but not identical to adult categories, giving rise to an important question about how infant colour perception changes with the learning of colour words. Here…

Perception is not an independent, in-the-moment event. Instead, perceiving involves integrating prior expectations with current observations. How does this ability develop from infancy through adulthood? We examined how prior visual experience shapes visual perception in infants, children, and adults. Using an identical task across age groups, we…

One of the world's most famous pyramids is not located in Egypt but is on a music album cover by the band Pink Floyd. However, not a pyramid but a prism, the iconic image of a beam of light turning into a rainbow is a powerful symbol that captures the complexities of colour perception across cultures and individuals. This study examines how…

Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non-human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non-human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that…

Enhanced low-level perception, although present in individuals with autism, is not seen in individuals with high, but non-clinical, levels of autistic traits (Brock et al.in "Percept Lond" 40(6):739. doi:10.1068/p6953, 2011). This is surprising, as many of the higher-level visual differences found in autism have been shown to correlate…

Previous studies indicate that at least some aspects of audiovisual speech perception are impaired in children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, whether audiovisual processing difficulties are also present in older children with a history of this disorder is unknown. By combining electrophysiological and behavioral measures, we…

Although infants and children show impressive face-processing skills, little research has focused on the conditions that facilitate versus impair face perception. According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), face discrimination, which relies on detection of visual featural information, should be impaired in the context of…

A procedure to effectively and efficiently train moderately and severely retarded individuals to make fine visual discriminations is described. Results suggest that expectancies for such individuals are in need of examination. Implications for sheltered workshops, work activity centers and classrooms are discussed. [This article appeared…

In quantity discrimination tasks, adults, infants and animals have been sometimes observed to process number only after all continuous variables, such as area or density, have been controlled for. This has been taken as evidence that processing number may be more cognitively demanding than processing continuous variables. We tested this hypothesis…

Five experiments were performed to identify the basic Spanish colour categories (BCCs) and to locate them in the CIE L*u*v* space. The existence of 11 BCCs was confirmed using an elicited list task and a free monolexemic naming task. From the results provided by a synonymicity estimation task, it was concluded that, in Spanish, 2 synonymous terms…

Human adults are more accurate at discriminating faces from their own race than faces from another race. This "other-race effect" (ORE) has been characterized as a reflection of face processing specialization arising from differential experience with own-race faces. We examined whether 3.5-month-old infants exhibit ORE using morphed faces on which…