In three experiments (N = 123; 148; 28), children observed a video in which two speakers offered alternative labels for unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds endorsed the label given by a speaker who had previously labeled familiar objects accurately, rather than that given by a speaker with a history of inaccurate labeling, even…

Background: Are persons with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) slower than typically developing individuals to read the meaning of a symbolic cue in a visual orienting paradigm? Methods: Participants with ASD (n = 18) and performance mental age (PMA) matched typically developing children (n = 16) completed two endogenous orienting conditions in…

In this study, we examined developmental changes in infants' processing of own- versus other-race faces. Caucasian American 8-month-olds (Experiment 1) and 4-month-olds (Experiment 2) were tested in a habituation-switch procedure designed to assess holistic (attending to the relationship between internal and external features of the face) versus…

The simplest attentional task, detecting a cued stimulus in an otherwise empty visual field, produces complex patterns of performance. Attentional cues interact with backward masks and with spatial uncertainty, and there is a dissociation in the effects of these variables on accuracy and on response time. A computational theory of performance in…

Background: The phenomenon of change blindness illustrates that a limited number of items within the visual scene are attended to at any one time. It has been suggested that individuals with autism focus attention on less contextually relevant aspects of the visual scene, show superior perceptual discrimination and notice details which are often…

We comment on Goldstein, Davidoff, and Roberson's replication and extension ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102", 219-238 [2009]) of our study of the effect of toddlers' color term knowledge on their categorical perception (CP) of color ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 90", 114-141 [2005]). First, we discuss how best to…

Children who begin kindergarten with stronger skills learn faster than do those who enter with lower skills. Minority children tend to enter kindergarten already at a disadvantage, and the gap widens across time. However, little is known about cognitive development among American Indian young children. In this study, 110 American Indian infants…

Aim: To describe neuropsychological disturbances and the developmental course associated with cerebellar cortical dysplasia (CCD). Method: The neuroimaging findings from 10 children (five males, five females; aged 3-10y) with CCD were reviewed and classified. These children all underwent clinical neurological examination and neuropsychological…

The relationships of sense modalities included in the broad term "perception" are explored. Vision is a transmission from external world to brain. Ocular mobility and spatial organization abilities are important to vision as it is involved in the perceptual-cognitive process. Kinesthetic and visual behaviors are interrelated and are supplemented…

Behavioural, neuroimaging and neurophysiological approaches emphasise the active and constructive nature of visual perception, determined not solely by the environmental input, but modulated top-down by prior knowledge. For example, degraded images, which at first appear as meaningless "blobs", can easily be recognized as, say, a face, after…

The article presents a usage-based analysis of color attribution, i.e. the construal of the relation between color property and an entity to which it is attributed in painting descriptions. The study is based on the corpus of 100 catalog entries written for American art museums. It focuses on the two most frequent morpho-syntactic patterns in the…

Aim: The study investigated the relationships between handwriting, visuomotor integration, and neurological condition. We paid particular attention to the presence of minor neurological dysfunction (MND). Method : Participants were 200 children (131 males, 69 females; age range 8-13y) of whom 118 received mainstream education (mean age 10y 5mo, SD…

Objective: To determine whether 7- to 12-year-old boys with ADHD, relative to non-ADHD age-mates, exhibit greater difficulty learning and remembering object locations. The second purpose was to examine the functional utility of mnemonic strategies, specifically speech-to-self, used by boys with and without ADHD. Method: Boys with and without ADHD…

The present study examined the cognitive profile in Fragile X Syndrome (FXS) males, and investigated whether cognitive profiles are similar for FXS males at different levels of intellectual functioning. Cognitive abilities in non-verbal, verbal, memory and executive functioning domains were contrasted to both a non-verbal and verbal mental age…

Arithmetic and cognitive skills of children with mathematical difficulties (MD-only), with comorbid reading difficulties (MD-RD), with reading difficulties (RD-only), and normally achieving children were examined at 3 points from Grades 3-4 to Grades 5-6 (age range, 9-13 years). Both MD groups displayed severe weaknesses in 4 domain-specific…