This study aims to examine the developmental changes in young children's perception. A matching completion task consisting of three geometric figures and one bird-like figure were completed by children 3-5 years of age ("N" = 99). The rotation effect, in which the correct response decreased with orientation (45°, 90° 135°, and 180°), was…

Autistic people are better at perceiving details. Major theories explain this in terms of bottom-up sensory mechanisms or in terms of top-down cognitive biases. Recently, it has become possible to link these theories within a common framework. This framework assumes that perception is implicit neural inference, combining sensory evidence with…

Congruency effects were examined using a manual response version of the Stroop task in which the relationship between the colour word and its hue on incongruent trials was either kept constant or varied randomly across different pairings within the stimulus set. Congruency effects were increased in the condition where the incongruent hue-word…

In human adults, visual dominance emerges in several multisensory tasks. In children, auditory dominance has been reported up to 4 years of age. To establish when sensory dominance changes during development, 41 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were tested on the Colavita task (Experiment 1) and 32 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were…

In the world, the manners and paths of motion events take place together, but in language, these features are expressed separately. How do infants learn to process motion events in linguistically appropriate ways? Forty-six English-learning 7- to 9-month-olds were habituated to a motion event in which a character performed both a manner and a…

The primary focus of this research study was to examine the benefit of a using a multimodal approach to speech sound correction with preschool children. The approach uses the auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic modalities and includes a unique, interactive visual focus that attempts to provide a visual representation of a phonemic category. The…

Autism is currently one of the most prominent and widely discussed human conditions. Its increased prevalence has intensified the demand for effective educational and therapeutic services, and intervention science is providing mounting evidence about practices that positively impact outcomes. The purpose of this report is to describe a set of…

While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages…

Although some evidence indicates that even very young children engage in rudimentary forms of strategic behavior, the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. This study tested the hypothesis that uncertainty monitoring underlies such behaviors. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children ("N" = 88) completed a perceptual…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by differences in unimodal and multimodal sensory and proprioceptive processing, with complex biases towards local over global processing. Many of these elements are implicated in versions of the rubber hand illusion (RHI), which were therefore studied in high-functioning individuals with ASD and a…

Available evidence indicates that experience with one face from a specific age group improves face-processing abilities if acquired within the first 3 years of life but not in adulthood. In the current study, we tested whether the effects of early experience endure at age 6 and whether the first 3 years of life are a sensitive period for the…

Over their 1st year of life, infants' "universal" perception of the sounds of language narrows to encompass only those contrasts made in their native language (J. F. Werker & R. C. Tees, 1984). This research tested 40 infants in an eyetracking paradigm and showed that this pattern also holds for infants exposed to seen language--American Sign…

This paper describes the FAB (Functionally Alert Behavior) Strategies approach to improve behavior in children and adolescents with complex behavioral challenges. FAB Strategies include evidence-based environmental adaptations, sensory modulation, positive behavioral support, and physical self-regulation strategies. FAB Strategies can be used by…

Previous studies have shown that infants, including newborns, can match previously unseen and unheard human faces and vocalizations. More recently, it has been reported that infants as young as 4 months of age also can match the faces and vocalizations of other species raising the possibility that such broad multisensory perceptual tuning is…

Practicing a visual task commonly results in improved performance. Often the improvement does not transfer well to a new retinal location, suggesting that it is mediated by changes occurring in early visual cortex, and indeed neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies both demonstrate that perceptual learning is associated with altered activity…