Five experiments assessed associative symmetry in pigeons. In Experiments 1A, 1B and 2, pigeons learned two-alternative symbolic matching with identical sample- and comparison-response requirements and with matching stimuli appearing in all possible locations. Despite controlling for the nature of the functional stimuli and insuring all requisite…

World knowledge influences how we perceive the world. This study shows that this influence is at least partly mediated by declarative memory. Dutch and German participants categorized hues from a yellow-to-orange continuum on stimuli that were prototypically orange or yellow and that were also associated with these color labels. Both groups gave…

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends vision screening of all children between 3 and 5 years of age, and states have mandated vision screening for all school children. Participants were three 4-6-year old school children with either a developmental delay or autism who scored "could not test" on the state required vision screening.…

The effects of moving task-irrelevant objects on time-to-contact (TTC) judgments were examined in 5 experiments. Observers viewed a directly approaching target in the presence of a distractor object moving in parallel with the target. In Experiments 1 to 4, observers decided whether the target would have collided with them earlier or later than a…

This study evaluated whether atypical face processing in autism extends from human to cartoon faces for which they show a greater interest. Twenty children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) were compared to two groups of typically developing children, matched on chronological and mental age. They processed the emotional expressions of real…

This four-experiment series sought to evaluate the potential of children with neurosensory deafness and cochlear implants to exhibit auditory-visual and visual-visual stimulus equivalence relations within a matching-to-sample format. Twelve children who became deaf prior to acquiring language (prelingual) and four who became deaf afterwards…

In cross-dimensional visual search tasks, target discrimination is faster when the previous trial contained a target defined in the same visual dimension as the current trial. The dimension-weighting account (DWA; A. Found & H. J. Muller, 1996) explains this intertrial facilitation by assuming that visual dimensions are weighted at an early…

Infants start to interpret completed human actions as goal-directed in the second half of the first year of life. In a series of three studies, the understanding of a goal-directed but uncompleted action was investigated in 6- and 9-month-old infants using a preferential looking paradigm. Infants saw the video of an actor's reaching movement…

Sensitivity to shape changes was measured, in particular detection of convexity and concavity changes. The available data are contradictory. The author used a change detection task and simple polygons to systematically manipulate convexity/concavity. Performance was high for detecting a change of sign (a new concave vertex along a convex contour…

Recent work has shown that Whorf effects of language on color discrimination are stronger in the right visual field than in the left. Here we show that this phenomenon is not limited to color: The perception of animal figures (cats and dogs) was more strongly affected by linguistic categories for stimuli presented to the right visual field than…

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine the degree to which people can process words while devoting central attention to another task. Experiments 1-4 measured the N400 effect, which is sensitive to the degree of mismatch between a word and the current semantic context. Experiment 5 measured the P3 difference between…

Holistic processing of faces is characterized by encoding of the face as a single stimulus. This study employed a composite face task to examine whether holistic processing varies when attention is restricted to the top as compared to the bottom half of the face, and whether evidence of holistic processing would be observed in event-related…

In this study, the authors used a dual-task flanker paradigm to investigate the degree to which flankers are coprocessed with the target as a function of whether flankers have to be used as stimuli for a second task. A series of experiments, in which performance in dual tasks was compared with that in single tasks, revealed that participants had a…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), together with controls matched for age and ability participated in three experiments that assessed the therapeutic benefit of colored overlays. The findings from the first experiment showed that a significantly greater proportion of children with ASD, than controls, increased reading speed when using…

The modality-match effect in recognition refers to superior memory for words presented in the same modality at study and test. Prior research on this effect is ambiguous and inconsistent. The present study demonstrates that the modality-match effect is found when modality is rendered salient at either encoding or retrieval. Specifically, in…