This study examined adults' evaluations of likeability and attractiveness of children's faces from infancy to early childhood. We tested whether Lorenz's baby schema hypothesis ("Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie" (1943), Vol. 5, pp. 235-409) is applicable not only to infant faces but also to faces of children at older ages. Adult participants were…

Background: The ComFor study has indicated that individuals with intellectual disability (ID) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced visual local processing compared with individuals with ID only. Items of the ComFor with meaningless materials provided the best discrimination between the two samples. These results can be explained by the…

Right-handed participants respond more quickly and more accurately to written words presented in the right visual field (RVF) than in the left visual field (LVF). Previous attempts to identify the neural basis of the RVF advantage have had limited success. Experiment 1 was a behavioral study of lateralized word naming which established that the…

Objective: To examine whether participants with ADHD showed a deficit in Stroop/reverse-Stroop interference by comparing them to non-ADHD participants. Method: A group with ADHD, primarily inattentive type (n = 15), and a paired non-ADHD group (n = 15) completed the group version of the Stroop/reverse-Stroop test. Results: Asymmetric interference…

In a recent paper, Chiarello, Welcome, Halderman, and Leonard (2009) reported positive correlations between word-related visual field asymmetries and reading performance. They argued that strong word processing lateralization represents a more optimal brain organization for reading acquisition. Their empirical results contrasted sharply with those…

Background: Williams syndrome (WMS) is a rare genetic disorder with an estimated prevalence of 1 in 20,000 live births. Among other characteristics, WMS has a distinctive cognitive profile with spared face processing and language skills that contrasts with impairment in the cognitive domains of spatial cognition, problem solving and planning. It…

Learning movement sequences is thought to develop from an initial controlled attentive phase to a more automatic inattentive phase. Furthermore, execution of sequences becomes faster with practice, which may result from changes at a general motor processing level rather than at an effector specific motor processing level. In the current study, we…

Representing the spatial appearance of objects and scenes in drawings is a difficult task for young children in particular. In the present study, the relationship between spatial drawing and cognitive flexibility was investigated. Seven- to 11-year-olds (N = 60) were asked to copy a three-dimensional model in a drawing. The use of depth cues as an…

Psychological studies of face recognition have typically ignored within-person variation in appearance, instead emphasising differences "between" individuals. Studies typically assume that a photograph adequately captures a person's appearance, and for that reason most studies use just one, or a small number of photos per person. Here we show that…

Is it easier to detect angry or happy facial expressions in crowds of faces? The present studies used several variations of the visual search task to assess whether people selectively attend to expressive faces. Contrary to widely cited studies (e.g., Ohman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001) that suggest angry faces "pop out" of crowds, our review of…

What accounts for the Right Hemisphere (RH) functional superiority in visual change detection? An original task which combines one-shot and divided visual field paradigms allowed us to direct change information initially to the RH or the Left Hemisphere (LH) by deleting, respectively, an object included in the left or right half of a scene…

Atypical development of face processing is a major characteristic in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which could be due to atypical interactions between subcortical and cortical face processing. The current study investigated the saccade planning towards faces in ASD. Seventeen children with ASD and 17 typically developing (TD) children observed a…

This study aimed to explore the recognition of emotional and non-emotional biological movements in children with severe and profound deafness. Twenty-four deaf children, together with 24 control children matched on mental age and 24 control children matched on chronological age, were asked to identify a person's actions, subjective states,…

Research has shown that for acquiring problem-solving skills, instruction consisting of studying worked examples is more effective and efficient for novice learners than instruction consisting of problem-solving. This study investigated whether worked examples would also be a useful instructional format for the acquisition of visual perceptual…

This first Japanese twin study of early literacy development investigated the extent to which genetic and environmental factors influence individual differences in prereading skills in 238 pairs of twins at 42 months of age. Twin pairs were individually tested on measures of phonological awareness, "kana" letter name/sound knowledge,…