Although research has focused primarily on the wide range of variability in the cognitive phenotype between individuals with velo-cardio-facial syndrome (VCFS), we know relatively little about the extent to which within-individual expressions of the cognitive phenotype remain stable throughout development. General cognitive functioning in the low…

Evidence suggests that visual processing is divided into the dorsal ("how") and ventral ("what") streams. We examined the normal development of these streams and their breakdown under neurological deficit by comparing performance of normally developing children and Williams syndrome individuals on two tasks: a visually guided action ("how") task,…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic disorder associated with severe visuocognitive impairment. Individuals with WS also report difficulties with everyday wayfinding. To study the development of body-, environment-, and object-based spatial frames of reference in WS, we tested 45 children and adults with WS on a search task in which the participant…

Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping…

Are children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but normal-range intelligence, impaired on theory of mind skills measured by responses to abstract animations in the form of a computerized cartoon? Fifty-six cases and closely matched comparisons were tested. We rated verbal responses according to the length of their descriptions, their…

This study examined and compared the control of posture during bilateral stance in ten boys with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) of 6-8 years old and ten matched typically developing boys in four sensory conditions (with or without vision, on a firm or complaint surface). In all conditions mean postural sway velocity was larger for the…

The current study provides evidence for the existence of an other-age effect (OAE), analogous to the well-documented other-race effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults are better at recognizing adult faces compared with faces of newborns and children. Results from Experiment 3 indicate that the OAE obtained with child faces can be…

The authors investigated whether differences in facial stimuli could explain the inconsistencies in the facial attractiveness literature regarding whether adults prefer more masculine- or more feminine-looking male faces. Their results demonstrated that use of a female average to dimorphically transform a male facial average produced stimuli that…

Using an attentional blink paradigm, we show that the typical enhancement of perception for emotionally arousing events is significantly reduced in Asperger's syndrome (AS) at short inter-target intervals. Control experiments demonstrate that this finding cannot be attributed to differences in the perceived arousal of the stimuli, or to a global…

The aim of this study was to determine what visual information expert soccer players encode when they are asked to make a decision. We used a repetition-priming paradigm to test the hypothesis that experts encode a soccer pattern's structure independently of the players' physical characteristics (i.e., posture and morphology). The participants…

Alerting, orienting and executive control of attention are investigated in five adult cases of dyslexia. In comparison with a control group, alerting and executive control were found to be generally intact for each case. Two spatial cueing tasks were employed. For the task requiring target detection, orienting difficulties were evident only in…

Several forms of eye movement dysfunction (EMD) are regarded as promising candidate endophenotypes of schizophrenia. Discrepancies in individual study results have led to inconsistent conclusions regarding particular aspects of EMD in relatives of schizophrenia patients. To quantitatively evaluate and compare the candidacy of smooth pursuit,…

This screening and diagnostic procedure is intended to identify Level 1 adults with specific learning problems. The adults not meeting criteria on the assessments for visual and auditory functions should be referred to proper medical services for full evaluations. A prescriptive teaching program should be specifically designed to meet needs of…

Research on central processing dysfunctions in children is reviewed in three major areas. The first, dysfunctions in the analysis of sensory information, includes auditory, visual, and haptic processing. The second, dysfunction in the synthesis of sensory information, covers multiple stimulus integration and short-term memory. The third area of…

A compilation of ideas and teaching methods to be used for remediation of learning problems is presented with skills coded to four different colors of paper. Auditory skills, visual skills, and auditory-visual association (all three both receptive and expressive) are discussed as are non-verbal skills. The stated purposes of this type of…