Recent research shows that deaf signers show increased behavioral and neural sensitivity to certain types of movement, such as biological motion, human actions, and signing avatars. However, other work suggests that in deaf signers exposed to signed language before age five, the mirror mechanism has minimal involvement during the perception of…

The capacities of detecting visual regularities were tested among twenty typical (age 11.1 ± 0.32), and twenty poor (age 11.03 ± 0.28) native-Arab readers. Two stages were implemented, passive exposure to visual regularities and forced decision task. In the first stage, the participants were passively presented with four shapes; each shape was…

Autism spectrum disorder is a pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder that has been linked to a range of perceptual processing alterations, including hypo- and hyperresponsiveness to sensory stimulation. A recently proposed theory that attempts to account for these symptoms, states that autistic individuals have a decreased ability to anticipate…

The development of visual expertise is accompanied by enhanced visual object recognition memory within an expert domain. We aimed to understand the relationship between expertise and memory by modeling cognitive mechanisms. Participants with a measured range of birding expertise were recruited and tested on memory for birds (expert domain) and…

Objective: This study aims at investigating the relationship between agility performance and perception and decision-making mechanisms of female basketball players. Materials and Methods: A total of seventeen elite female basketball player playing in Second League in Turkey Basketball Federation participated in this study voluntarily. The mean age…

Although infants begin learning about their environment before they are born, little is known about how the infant brain changes during learning. Here, we take the initial steps in documenting how the neural responses in the brain change as infants learn to associate audio and visual stimuli. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNRIS) to…

Although relational reasoning has been described as a process at the heart of human cognition, the exact character of relational representations remains an open debate. Symbolic-connectionist models of relational cognition suggest that relations are structured representations, but that they are ultimately grounded in feature sets; thus, they…

In human children and adults, familiar face types--typically own-age and own-species faces--are discriminated better than other face types; however, human infants do not appear to exhibit an own-age bias but instead better discriminate adult faces, which they see more often. There are two possible explanations for this pattern: Perceptual…

Limits in visual working memory (VWM) strongly constrain human performance across many tasks. However, the nature of these limits is not well understood. In this article we develop an ideal observer analysis of human VWM by deriving the expected behavior of an optimally performing but limited-capacity memory system. This analysis is framed around…

Visually mediated processes including, exposure to print (e.g. reading) as well as orthographic transcription and coding skills, have been found to contribute to individual differences in literacy development. The current study examined the role of visuospatial working memory (WM) in underpinning this relationship and emergent writing. One hundred…

Environmental perception is prerequisite to most vertebrate behavior and its modern investigation initiated the founding of experimental psychology. Navigation costs may affect environmental perception, such as overestimating distances while encumbered (Solomon, 1949). However, little is known about how this occurs in real-world navigation or how…

In this study, 7-19-year-olds performed an interrupted visual search task in two experiments. Our question was whether the tendency to respond within 500 ms after a second glimpse of a display (the "rapid resumption" effect ["Psychological Science", 16 (2005) 684-688]) would increase with age in the same way as overall search efficiency. The…

Multiple object tracking (MOT) is an attentional task wherein observers attempt to track multiple targets among moving distractors. Contour interpolation is a perceptual process that fills-in nonvisible edges on the basis of how surrounding edges (inducers) are spatiotemporally related. In five experiments, we explored the automaticity of…

The capacity to reason about the false beliefs of others is classically considered the benchmark for a fully fledged understanding of the mental lives of others. Although much is known about the developmental origins of our understanding of others' beliefs, we still know much less about the evolutionary origins of this capacity. Here, we examine…

In this study of the project DyAdd, three aspects of visual attention were investigated in adults (18-55 years) with dyslexia (n = 35) or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD, n = 22), and in healthy controls (n = 35). Temporal characteristics of visual attention were assessed with Attentional Blink (AB), capacity of visual attention…