Gestalt grouping in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is selectively impaired for certain organization principles but for not others. Symmetry is a fundamental Gestalt principle characterizing many biological shapes. Sensitivity to symmetry was tested using the Picture Symmetry Test, which requires finding symmetry lines on pictures. Individuals…

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) have impairments in visuospatial tasks and in manual visuomotor control, consistent with parietal and cerebellar abnormalities. Here we examined whether individuals with WS also have difficulties in visually controlling whole-body movements. We investigated visual control of stepping down at a change of…

Forty-four preschoolers completed 2 conditions of a Stroop-like procedure (e.g., saying "boat" for car and "car" for boat) that differed in whether a 3-s delay was imposed before responding. The test card was visible during the delay period for half of the children and occluded for the other children. Preschoolers' interference control was…

We examined the relative contribution of visual abilities, accessibility of letter names, and phonological awareness, to text reading speed and accuracy of Arabic in first, third, and fifth grades. The results revealed that for all levels of skill, phonological awareness contributes significantly to reading accuracy, to the same degree. For…

Diminished episodic memory and diminished use of semantic information to aid recall by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are both thought to result from diminished relational binding of elements of complex stimuli. To test this hypothesis, we asked high-functioning adults with ASD and typical comparison participants to study grids in…

Individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show hallmark deficits in social perception. These difficulties might also reflect fundamental deficits in integrating visual signals. We contrasted predictions of a social perception and a spatial-temporal integration deficit account. Participants with ASD and matched controls performed two…

The aim of this study was to investigate verbal and nonverbal cognitive deficits in Italian students with developmental dyslexia. The performances of 32 dyslexic students, 64 age-matched typically reading controls, and 64 reading age-matched controls were compared on tests of lexical knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming,…

This study compares Singaporean Grade 6 students' performance and strategy preference on two graphic-rich mathematics tasks, presented via pencil-and-paper and iPad modes. There were statistically significant differences between students' performances on the two tasks, one in favour of the paper mode and the other in favour of the iPad. Students…

Adult literacy training is known to be difficult in terms of teaching and maintenance (Abadzi, 2003), perhaps because adults who recently learned to read in their first language have not acquired reading automaticity. This study examines fast word recognition process in neoliterate adults, to evaluate whether they show evidence of perceptual…

Although research has demonstrated impressive face perception skills of young infants, little attention has focused on conditions that enhance versus impair infant face perception. The present studies tested the prediction, generated from the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), that face discrimination, which relies on detection of visual…

The authors evaluated age-related variations in contextual cueing, which reflects the extent to which visuospatial regularities can facilitate search for a target. Previous research produced inconsistent results regarding contextual cueing effects in young children and in older adults, and no study has investigated the phenomenon across the life…

During writing, perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes interact. This study explored the predictive value of several factors on handwriting quality as well as on speed in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Our results showed that, in this population, age, gender, and visual-motor integration significantly predicted handwriting…

Previous studies have shown that the "strength" of connectivity between regions can vary depending upon the cognitive demands of a task. In this study, the "location" of task-dependent connectivity from the primary visual cortex (V1) was examined in 43 children (ages 9-15) performing visual tasks; connectivity maxima were identified for a visual…

Visual speech inputs can enhance auditory speech information, particularly in noisy or degraded conditions. The natural statistics of audiovisual speech highlight the temporal correspondence between visual and auditory prosody, with lip, jaw, cheek and head movements conveying information about the speech envelope. Low-frequency spatial and…

Early visual deprivation impairs some, but not all, aspects of face perception. We investigated the possible developmental roots of later abnormalities by using a face detection task to test infants treated for bilateral congenital cataract within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. The seven patients were between 5 and 12 weeks old…