Evidence suggests that people with autism rely less on holistic visual information than typical adults. The current studies examine this by investigating core visual processes that contribute to holistic processing--namely, individuation and element grouping--and how they develop in participants with autism and typically developing (TD)…

The present study investigated cognitive abilities in children with difficulties in mathematics only (n = 48, M = 8 years and 5 months), combined mathematical and language difficulty (n = 27, M = 8 years and 1 month) and controls (n = 783, M = 7 years and 11 months). Cognitive abilities were measured with seven subtests, tapping visual perception,…

To what degree does our representation of the immediate world depend solely on its relevance to what we are currently doing? We examined whether relevance per se can cause "blindness," even when there is no resource limitation. In a novel paradigm, people looked at a colored circle surrounded by a differently colored ring--the task…

Serial attention models of eye-movement control during reading were evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment that examined how lexical activation combines with visual information in the parafovea to affect word skipping (where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading). Lexical activation was manipulated by repetition priming created through…

One of the words that readers of English skip most often is the definite article "the". Most accounts of reading assume that in order for a reader to skip a word, it must have received some lexical processing. The definite article is skipped so regularly, however, that the oculomotor system might have learned to skip the letter string…

Developmental precursors to children's early understanding of gratitude were examined. A diverse group of 263 children was tested for emotion and mental state knowledge at ages 3 and 4, and their understanding of gratitude was measured at age 5. Children varied widely in their understanding of gratitude, but most understood some aspects of…

The current research was aimed mainly at exploring the reliability of a short-screening tool developed to self-evaluate visuospatial abilities in children. We presented 290 Italian third, fourth, and fifth graders with the 16-item Shortened Visuospatial questionnaire and several objective measures of intellectual efficiency, such as Raven's…

We investigated whether preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit the shape bias in word learning: the bias to generalize based on shape rather than size, color, or texture in an object naming context ("This is a wek; find another wek") but not in a non-naming similarity classification context ("See this?…

The purpose of this paper is to report a summary of the results of a study which examined the appropriateness of using business school students as surrogates for IT professionals by comparing cognitive styles, physiological characteristics, and basic demographic data among the two groups. Cognitive style refers to the way individuals think,…

When the auditory and visual components of spoken audiovisual nonsense syllables are mismatched, perceivers produce four different types of perceptual responses, auditory correct, visual correct, fusion (the so-called "McGurk effect"), and combination (i.e., two consonants are reported). Here, quantitative measures were developed to account for…

Objective: To document high rates and clinical correlates of nonauditory hallucinations in childhood onset schizophrenia (COS). Method: Within a sample of 117 pediatric patients (mean age 13.6 years), diagnosed with COS, the presence of auditory, visual, somatic/tactile, and olfactory hallucinations was examined using the Scale for the Assessment…

Little empirical data are available concerning the cognitive abilities of gifted individuals in general and especially those who excel in mathematics. We examined visual processing abilities distinguishing between general giftedness (G) and excellence in mathematics (EM). The research population consisted of 190 students from four groups of 10th-…

The ultimate aim of artistic exploration is to explore the claim that objects are different from experience and beauty is just a by-product of the exploration. In other words, the truth in the eyes of each person may quite literally not be the same. This indicates that differences in the visual apparatus influence the viewing body's mastery of the…

Difficulty with literacy acquisition is only one of the symptoms of developmental dyslexia. Dyslexic children also show poor motor coordination and postural control. Those problems could be associated with automaticity, i.e., difficulty in performing a task without dispending a fair amount of conscious efforts. If this is the case, dyslexic…

Working memory is typically defined as a system devoted to the simultaneous maintenance and processing of information. However, the interplay between these 2 functions is still a matter of debate in the literature, with views ranging from complete independence to complete dependence. The time-based resource-sharing model assumes that a central…