The visual-motor skills of 60 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASDs) and 46 typically developing children were assessed using the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test-Second Edition (BG-II) and Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration, Fifth Edition (VMI-V). Within-group comparisons yielded substantive…

Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three- to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1 and 3). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not…

In this study we demonstrate that Korean (but not English) speakers show Categorical perception (CP) on a visual search task for a boundary between two Korean colour categories that is not marked in English. These effects were observed regardless of whether target items were presented to the left or right visual field. Because this boundary is…

Configural/holistic processing, a key property of face recognition, has previously been examined only for front views of faces. Here, 6 experiments tested front (0 degree), three-quarter (45 degree), and profile views (90 degree), using composite and peripheral inversion tasks. Results showed an overall disadvantage in identifying profiles. This…

People will often look to empty, uninformative locations in the world when trying to recall spoken information. This spatial indexing behaviour occurs when the information had previously been associated with those locations. It remains unclear, however, whether this behaviour is an example of a simple association across perceptual and cognitive…

To examine the development of feedforward control during manual tracking, 117 participants in 5 age groups (6 to 7, 8 to 9, 10 to 11, 12 to 14, and 15 to 17 years) tracked an accelerating dot presented on a monitor by moving an electronic pen on a digitizer. To remain successful at higher target velocities, they had to create a predictive model of…

Two experiments investigated effects of emergent features on perceptual judgments of comparative magnitude in three diagrammatic representations: kiviat charts, bar graphs, and line graphs. Experiment 1 required participants to compare individual values; whereas in Experiment 2 participants had to integrate several values to produce a global…

Eye movements across advertisements express a temporal pattern of bursts of respectively relatively short and long saccades, and this pattern is systematically influenced by activated scene perception goals. This was revealed by a continuous-time hidden Markov model applied to eye movements of 220 participants exposed to 17 ads under a…

Identifying 2 target stimuli in a rapid stream of visual symbols is much easier if the 2nd target appears immediately after the 1st target (i.e., at Lag 1) than if distractor stimuli intervene. As this phenomenon comes with a strong tendency to confuse the order of the targets, it seems to be due to the integration of both targets into the same…

Converging evidence has shown that action observation and execution are tightly linked. The observation of an action directly activates an equivalent internal motor representation in the observer (direct matching). However, whether direct matching is primarily driven by basic perceptual features of the observed movement or is influenced by more…

The goal of this review is to evaluate the literature on binocular coordination during reading and non-reading tasks in adult, child, and dyslexic populations. The review begins with a description of the basic characteristics of eye movements during reading. Then, reading and non-reading studies investigating binocular coordination are evaluated.…

Searching for an object within a cluttered, continuously changing environment can be a very time-consuming process. The authors show that a simple auditory pip drastically decreases search times for a synchronized visual object that is normally very difficult to find. This effect occurs even though the pip contains no information on the location…

The authors examined observers steering through a series of obstacles to determine the role of active gaze in shaping locomotor trajectories. Participants sat on a bicycle trainer integrated with a large field-of-view simulator and steered through a series of slalom gates. Steering behavior was determined by examining the passing distance through…

Intuition denotes the ability to judge stimulus properties on the basis of information that is activated in memory, but not consciously retrieved. In three experiments we show that participants discriminated better than chance fragmented line drawings depicting meaningful objects (coherent fragments) from fragments consisting of randomly displaced…

Visual events are defined by a number of dimensions--their location in space, content (color, shape, etc.), and time tags (onset, duration, etc.). The role of time in infants' performance in the Visual Expectation Paradigm (VExP) was studied to evaluate whether infants encode in their expectation representation the timing of events in addition to…