Autism is characterized by deficits in attention. However, no study has investigated the dynamics of attentional processes in autistic patients yet. The attentional blink (AB) paradigm provides information about the temporal dynamics of attention in particular about the allocation and the duration of an attentional episode. We compared 11 high…

Infant's face preferences have previously been assessed in displays containing 1 or 2 faces. Here we present 6-month-old infants with a complex visual array containing faces among multiple visual objects. Despite the competing objects, infants direct their first saccade toward faces more frequently than expected by chance (Experiment 1). The…

Perceived order of two consecutive stimuli may not correspond to the order of their physical onsets. Such a disagreement presumably results from a difference in the speed of stimulus processing toward central decision mechanisms. Since previous evidence suggests that the right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) plays a role in modulating the…

The purpose of this study was to examine, using a modified visual cliff apparatus, possible perceptual differences at crawling age between infants born preterm and infants born at term without documented visual or motor impairments. Sixteen infants born at term and 16 born preterm were encouraged to crawl to their caregivers on a modified visual…

The aim of the study was to examine the temporal characteristics of information processing in individuals with high-functioning autism and Asperger's disorder using a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. The results clearly showed that such people demonstrate an attentional blink of similar magnitude to comparison groups. This supports the…

Like faces, bodies are significant sources of social information. However, research suggests that infants do not develop body representation (i.e., knowledge about typical human bodies) until the second year of life, although they are sensitive to facial information much earlier. Yet, previous research only examined whether infants are sensitive…

The study examined the effects of mirror feedback information on neuromuscular activation during bimanual coordination in eight children with spastic hemiparetic cerebral palsy (SHCP) and a matched control group. The "mirror box" creates a visual illusion, which gives rise to a visual perception of a zero lag, symmetric movement between the two…

A wealth of empirical evidence has now accumulated concerning animals' categorizing photographs of real-world objects. Although these complex stimuli have the advantage of fostering rapid category learning, they are difficult to manipulate experimentally and to represent in formal models of behavior. We present a solution to the representation…

We show that perceptual sensitivity to visual stimuli can be modulated by matches between the contents of working memory (WM) and stimuli in the visual field. Observers were presented with an object cue (to hold in WM or to merely attend) and subsequently had to identify a brief target presented within a colored shape. The cue could be…

Aim: The cognitive deficits present in the Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) are not yet well characterized. Attention, considered to be the brain mechanism responsible for the selection of sensory stimuli, could be disturbed in DMD, contributing, at least partially, to the observed global cognitive deficit. The aim of this study was to…

Everyday experience affords us many opportunities to learn about objects through multiple senses using physical interaction. Previous work has shown that active motor learning of unisensory items enhances memory and leads to the involvement of motor systems during subsequent perception. However, the impact of active motor learning on subsequent…

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a developmental disorder typified by deficits in visuospatial cognition. To understand the nature of this deficit, we characterized how people with WS perceive visual orientation, a fundamental ability related to object identification. We compared WS participants to typically developing children (3-6 years of age) and…

Are resources in visual working memory allocated in a continuous or a discrete fashion? On one hand, flexible resource models suggest that capacity is determined by a central resource pool that can be flexibly divided such that items of greater complexity receive a larger share of resources. On the other hand, if capacity in working memory is…

The present study was aimed at exploring newborns' ability to recognize configural changes within real face images by testing newborns' sensitivity to the Thatcher illusion. Using the habituation procedure, newborns' ability to discriminate between an unaltered face image and the same face with the eyes and the mouth 180 degrees rotated (i.e.…

Combining theoretical hypotheses of infant cognition and adult perception, we present evidence that infants can maintain visual representations despite their failure to detect a change. Infants under 12 months typically fail to notice a change to an object's height in a covering event. The present experiments demonstrated that 11-month-old infants…