Dimly lit targets in the dark are perceived as located about an implicit slanted surface that delineates the visual system's intrinsic bias (Ooi, Wu, & He, 2001). If the intrinsic bias reflects the internal model of visual space--as proposed here--its influence should extend beyond target localization. Our first 2 experiments demonstrated that…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have different automatic responses to faces than typically developing (TD) individuals. We recorded visual evoked potentials (VEPs) in 10 individuals with high-functioning ASD (HFASD) and 10 TD individuals. Visual stimuli consisted of upright and inverted faces (fearful and neutral) and objects…

Previous research has suggested that people are unable to correctly choose which unfamiliar voice and static image of a face belong to the same person. Here, we present evidence that people can perform this task with greater than chance accuracy. In Experiment 1, participants saw photographs of two, same-gender models, while simultaneously…

Readers continuously receive parafoveal information about the upcoming word in addition to the foveal information about the currently fixated word. Previous research (Inhoff, Radach, Starr, & Greenberg, 2000) showed that the presence of a parafoveal word that was similar to the foveal word facilitated processing of the foveal word. We used the…

Perceptual processing in autism is associated with both "strengths" and "weaknesses" but within a literature that varies widely in terms of the assessments used. We report data from 12 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 12 age and IQ matched neurotypical controls tested on a set of tasks using the same stimuli…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit alterations in sensory processing, including changes in the integration of information across the different sensory modalities. In the current study, we used the sound-induced flash illusion to assess multisensory integration in children with ASD and typically-developing (TD) controls.…

Young and nondemented older adults completed a visual object continuous recognition memory task in which some stimuli (lures) were similar but not identical to previously presented objects. The lures were hypothesized to result in increased interference and increased pattern separation demand. To examine variability in object pattern separation…

We compared judgements of the simultaneity or asynchrony of visual stimuli in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and typically-developing controls using Magnetoencephalography (MEG). Two vertical bars were presented simultaneously or non-simultaneously with two different stimulus onset delays. Participants with ASD distinguished…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were utilized in an investigation of 21 six-month-olds' attention to and processing of global and local properties of hierarchical patterns. Overall, infants demonstrated an advantage for processing the overall configuration (i.e., global properties) of local features of hierarchical patterns; however,…

In two experiments we investigated the relationship between eye movements and performance in visual search tasks of varying difficulty. Experiment 1 provided evidence that a single process is used for search among static and moving items. Moreover, we estimated the functional visual field (FVF) from the gaze coordinates and found that its size…

Perceptual tasks such as object matching, mammogram interpretation, mental rotation, and satellite imagery change detection often require the assignment of correspondences to fuse information across views. We apply techniques developed for machine translation to the gaze data recorded from a complex perceptual matching task modeled after…

Reading fluency is often predicted by rapid automatized naming (RAN) speed, which as the name implies, measures the automaticity with which familiar stimuli (e.g., letters) can be retrieved and named. Readers with dyslexia are considered to have less "automatized" access to lexical information, reflected in longer RAN times compared with…

Plants, to many, are simply not as interesting as animals. Students typically prefer to study animals rather than plants and recall plants more poorly, and plants are underrepresented in the classroom. The observed paucity of interest for plants has been described as "plant blindness," a term that is meant to encapsulate both the…

This study was inspired by the more locally oriented processing style in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A modified multiple object tracking (MOT) task was administered to a group of children with and without ASD. Participants not only had to distinguish moving targets from distracters, but they also had to track targets when they were visually…

The day-night paradigm, where children respond to a pair of pictures with opposite labels for a series of trials, is a widely used measure of interference control. Recent research has shown that a happy-sad variant of the day-night task was significantly more difficult than the standard day-night task. The present research examined whether the…