Goal-directed behavior requires cognitive control to effect online adjustments in response to ongoing processing demands. How signaling for these adjustments occurs has been a question of much interest. A basic question regarding the architecture of the cognitive control system is whether such signaling for control is specific to task context or…

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.…

During perception, people segment continuous activity into discrete events. They do so in part by monitoring changes in features of an ongoing activity. Characterizing these features is important for theories of event perception and may be helpful for designing information systems. The three experiments reported here asked whether the body…

The origin of color categories has been debated by psychologists, linguists and cognitive scientists for many decades. Here, we present the first electrophysiological evidence for categorical responding to color before color terms are acquired. Event-related potentials were recorded on a visual oddball task in 7-month old infants. Infants were…

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…

Both classical and recent reports suggest a right-hemisphere superiority for color discrimination. Testing highly-trained normal subjects and taking care to eliminate asymmetries from the testing situation, we found no significant differences between left and right hemifields or between upper and lower hemifields. This was the case for both of the…

We present data indicating that visual awareness for a basic perceptual feature (colour) can be influenced by the relation between the feature and the semantic properties of the stimulus. We examined semantic interference from the meaning of a colour word ("RED") on simple colour (ink related) detection responses in a patient with simultagnosia…

The influence of stimulus salience on over-selective responding was investigated in the context of a comparator theory of over-selectivity. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were presented with two cards, each displaying two colors. In comparison to matched control participants, participants with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) demonstrated…

Previous psychophysical studies have shown that the adult human visual system makes use of form information such as occlusion to determine whether to integrate or segregate local motion signals (J. McDermott, Y. Weiss, & E. H. Adelson, 2001). Using the displays developed by McDermott et al., these experiments examined whether occlusion and amodal…

Cross-modal illusions such as the McGurk-MacDonald effect have been used to illustrate the automatic, encapsulated nature of multisensory integration. This characterization is based in the widespread assumption that the illusory percept arising from intersensory conflict reflects only the end-product of the multisensory integration process, with…

Background: Recent studies of infant siblings of children diagnosed with autism have allowed for a prospective approach to examine the emergence of symptoms and revealed behavioral differences in the broader autism phenotype within the early years. In the current study we focused on a set of functions associated with visual attention, previously…

The Visual-Spatial Chemistry Specific (VSCS) assessment tool was developed to test students' visual-perceptual skills, which are required to form a mental image of an object. The VSCS was designed around the theoretical framework of Rochford and Archer that provides eight distinct and well-defined visual-perceptual skills with identified problems…

The "other-race effect" (ORE), or the finding that same-race faces are better recognized than other-race faces, is one of the best replicated phenomena in face recognition. The current article reviews existing evidence and theory and proposes a new theoretical framework for the ORE, which argues that the effect results from a confluence of social…

The present research explores young children's extension of novel labels to novel animate items. Three experiments were performed by means of the intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm. In Experiment 1, after repeated exposure to novel word-object associations, 24- and 36-month-olds extend novel labels on the basis of shape similarity, in…

We investigated procedural learning in 18 children with basal ganglia (BG) lesions or dysfunctions of various aetiologies, using a visuo-motor learning test, the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task, and a cognitive learning test, the Probabilistic Classification Learning (PCL) task. We compared patients with early (less than 1 year old, n=9), later…