How are scene representations stored in memory? Researchers have often posited that scene representations have a hierarchical structure with background elements providing a scaffold for more detailed foreground elements. To further investigate scene representation and the role of background and foreground information, we introduced a new stimulus…

Recent studies have suggested that individuals who exhibit heightened sensitivity also exhibit higher rates and severity of restricted interests and repetitive behaviours. This line of research has been conducted almost exclusively through caregiver reports of sensitivity. Here, a more rigorous psychophysics paradigm was applied to assess sensory…

This exploratory study used eye-tracking methodology to examine how elementary teachers study a multimedia model of reading development. Seven experienced teachers and 11 pre-service teachers participated. Visual attention, prior knowledge, and post-task scores were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods. Significant differences…

In this article, the authors focus on children's and adults' analyses and interpretations of the artwork and design of Peter Brown's "Mr. Tiger Goes Wild." Sipe (2008b) noted how the body of research on "children's visual meaning making from picturebooks" would benefit from "more studies combining careful and theoretically…

Naming speed (NS) refers to how quickly and accurately participants name a set of familiar stimuli (e.g., letters). NS is an established predictor of reading ability, but controversy remains over why it is related to reading. We used three techniques (stimulus manipulations to emphasize phonological and/or visual aspects, decomposition of NS times…

Early visual deprivation impairs some, but not all, aspects of face perception. We investigated the possible developmental roots of later abnormalities by using a face detection task to test infants treated for bilateral congenital cataract within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. The seven patients were between 5 and 12 weeks old…

Two experiments investigated 9-month-old infants' abilities to recognize the correspondence between an actual three-dimensional (3D) object and its two-dimensional (2D) representation, looking specifically at representations that did not literally depict the actual object: schematic line drawings. In Experiment 1, infants habituated to a line…

Report of a second target (T2) is impaired when presented within 500 ms of the first (T1). This attentional blink (AB) is known to cause a delay in T2 processing during which T2 must be stored in a labile memory buffer. We explored the buffer's characteristics using different types of masks after T2. These characteristics were inferred by…

In the present study, we examined if young infants can extract information regarding the directionality of biological motion. We report that 6-month-old infants can differentiate leftward and rightward motions from a movie depicting the sagittal view of an upright human point-light walker, walking as if on a treadmill. Inversion of the stimuli…

When observers try to identify successive targets in a visual stream at a rate of 100 ms per item, accuracy for the 2nd target is impaired for intertarget lags of 100-500 ms. Yet, when the same stream is presented more rapidly (e.g., 50 ms per item), this pattern reverses and a 1st-target deficit is obtained. M. C. Potter, A. Staub, and D. H.…

Two experiments combined a spatial cueing manipulation (valid vs. invalid spatial cues) with a stimulus repetition manipulation (repeated vs. nonrepeated) in order to assess the hypothesis that familiar items need less spatial attention than less familiar ones. The magnitude of the effect of cueing on reading aloud time for items that were…

Humans have an extremely flexible ability to categorize regularities in their environment, in part because of attentional systems that allow them to focus on important perceptual information. In formal theories of categorization, attention is typically modeled with weights that selectively bias the processing of stimulus features. These theories…

The authors examined priming within the test sequence in 3 recognition memory experiments. A probe primed its successor whenever both probes shared a feature with the same studied item ("interjacent priming"), indicating that the study item like the probe is central to the decision. Interjacent priming occurred even when the 2 probes did…

Neurologically normal individuals exhibit strong leftward response biases during free-viewing perceptual judgments of brightness, quantity, and size. When participants view two mirror-reversed objects and they are forced to choose which object appears darker, more numerous, or larger, the stimulus with the relevant feature on the left side is…

Preschool children's awareness of distinctions between animate and inanimate objects was assessed by showing stimulus films of animate and inanimate objects that moved in different ways. Results indicated that five- and some four-year-olds performed near adult levels, whereas three-year-olds did not, although the animate-inanimate distinction did…