This study examined the use of an antecedent-based intervention to reduce the vocal stereotypy of a student diagnosed with Autism within the general education classroom. The student displayed frequent nonfunctional speech and disruptive vocal sounds. An antecedent-based intervention, involving the use of qualitatively different cards--to cue the…

Discrimination and recognition are often poorer for other-race than own-race faces. These other-race effects (OREs) have traditionally been attributed to reduced perceptual expertise, resulting from more limited experience, with other-race faces. However, recent findings suggest that sociocognitive factors, such as reduced motivation to…

The type of visual information needed for categorizing faces and nonface objects was investigated by manipulating spatial frequency scales available in the image during a category verification task addressing basic and subordinate levels. Spatial filtering had opposite effects on faces and airplanes that were modulated by categorization level. The…

We report three experiments that investigate whether faces are capable of capturing attention when in competition with other non-face objects. In Experiment 1a participants took longer to decide that an array of objects contained a butterfly target when a face appeared as one of the distracting items than when the face did not appear in the array.…

Primates can learn to categorize complex shapes, but as yet it is unclear how this categorization learning affects the representation of shape in visual cortex. Previous studies that have examined the effect of categorization learning on shape representation in the macaque inferior temporal (IT) cortex have produced diverse and conflicting results…

The visual system rapidly extracts information about objects from the cluttered natural environment. In 5 experiments, the authors quantified the influence of orientation and semantics on the classification speed of objects in natural scenes, particularly with regard to object-context interactions. Natural scene photographs were presented in an…

Two experiments investigated categorical perception (CP) effects for affective facial expressions and linguistic facial expressions from American Sign Language (ASL) for Deaf native signers and hearing non-signers. Facial expressions were presented in isolation (Experiment 1) or in an ASL verb context (Experiment 2). Participants performed ABX…

During the second year of life, infants develop a preference to attach novel labels to novel objects. This behavior is commonly known as "mutual exclusivity" (Markman, 1989). In an intermodal preferential looking experiment with 19.5- and 22.5-month-olds, stimulus repetition was critical for observing mutual exclusivity. On the first…

The processes of overall similarity sorting were investigated in 5 free classification experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that increasing time pressure can reduce the likelihood of overall similarity categorization. Experiment 3 showed that a concurrent load also reduced overall similarity sorting. These findings suggest that overall…

During language comprehension, information about the world is exchanged and processed. Two essential ingredients of everyday cognition that are employed during language comprehension are the ability to reason counterfactually, and the ability to understand and predict other peoples' behaviour by attributing independent mental states to them…

Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three- to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1 and 3). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not…

Configural/holistic processing, a key property of face recognition, has previously been examined only for front views of faces. Here, 6 experiments tested front (0 degree), three-quarter (45 degree), and profile views (90 degree), using composite and peripheral inversion tasks. Results showed an overall disadvantage in identifying profiles. This…

Identifying 2 target stimuli in a rapid stream of visual symbols is much easier if the 2nd target appears immediately after the 1st target (i.e., at Lag 1) than if distractor stimuli intervene. As this phenomenon comes with a strong tendency to confuse the order of the targets, it seems to be due to the integration of both targets into the same…

The effects of response topography on stimulus class formation were studied in two experiments. In Experiment 1, 32 college students were assigned to 2 response topographies and 2 stimulus sets, in a 2 x 2 design. Students selected stimuli by either moving a mouse to lace an arrow-shaped cursor on the stimulus or pressing a key corresponding to…

Distinctiveness effects in children's (5-, 7-, and 11-year-olds) false memory illusions were examined using visual materials. In Experiment 1, developmental trends (increasing false memories with age) were obtained using Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists presented as words and color photographs but not line drawings. In Experiment 2, when items were…