Predictive coding theories suggest that core symptoms in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may stem from atypical mechanisms of perceptual inference (i.e., inferring the hidden causes of sensations). Specifically, there would be an imbalance in the precision or weight ascribed to sensory inputs relative to prior expectations. Using three tactile…

Purpose: Robust improvements in intelligibility following familiarization, a listener-targeted perceptual training paradigm, have been revealed for talkers diagnosed with spastic, ataxic, and hypokinetic dysarthria but not for talkers with hyperkinetic dysarthria. While the theoretical explanation for the lack of intelligibility improvement…

Purpose: The extant literature suggests that individual differences in speech perception can be linked to broad receptive language phenotype. For example, a recent study found that individuals with a smaller receptive vocabulary showed diminished lexically guided perceptual learning compared to individuals with a larger receptive vocabulary. Here,…

We recently proposed a multi-channel, image-filtering model for simulating the development of visual selective attention in young infants (Schlesinger, Amso & Johnson, 2007). The model not only captures the performance of 3-month-olds on a visual search task, but also implicates two cortical regions that may play a role in the development of…

Autistic people are better at perceiving details. Major theories explain this in terms of bottom-up sensory mechanisms or in terms of top-down cognitive biases. Recently, it has become possible to link these theories within a common framework. This framework assumes that perception is implicit neural inference, combining sensory evidence with…

We explored the perceptual structure of facial expressions of six basic emotions, varying systematically in intensity, in adults and children aged 7 and 14 years. Multidimensional scaling suggested that three- or four-dimensional structures were optimal for all groups. Two groups of adults demonstrated nearly identical structure, which had…

The term synaesthesia has been applied to a range of different sensory-perceptual and cognitive experiences, yet how these experiences are related to each other is not well understood. Not only are there disparate types of synaesthesia, but even within types there are vast individual differences in the way that stimuli induce synaesthesia and in…

Current work has yielded differential findings regarding infants' ability to perceptually detect the causal structure of a means-end support sequence. Resolving this debate has important implications for perception-action dissociations in this domain of object knowledge. In Study 1, 12-month-old infants' ability to perceive the causal structure of…

Two experiments studied whether and how 5-year-olds integrate single facial features to identify faces. Results indicated that children could evaluate and integrate information from eye and mouth features to identify a face when salience of features was varied. A weighted Fuzzy Logical Model of Perception fit better than a Single Channel Model,…

Used realistic models of turning situations to study second, fourth, and sixth graders' concepts of turning and bending. Found that young students viewed turning (knob, doll, and door) as a movement, and bending (road bends) as a configuration. Many did not spontaneously interpret turning as a configuration or bending as a movement. Explored…

The performance of eight adults with Asperger syndrome was compared with the performance of controls on a range of perceptual tasks designed to test two models of perceptual deficit: the central coherence deficit model and the hierarchization deficit model. Tentative support for the hierarchization deficit model was demonstrated. (Contains ten…

Based on a prior model on modularity of the brain, a new modular model of intrapersonal communication was developed which focuses on brain processing, encompassing both the structures and the functions of those structures in the creation of messages. The modular mind is a bio-social model of communication which presupposes a relationship between…

Describes two experiments that examined the effects of quantity and depth of processing on elementary school children's time perception. (HOD)

This experiment investigated the effect of children's successive encounters with a large scale environment on their subsequent reconstructions of that environment. Twenty children (10 boys, 10 girls) at each of three grade levels (kindergarten, two, and five) reconstructed from memory the spatial layout of buildings in a large model town. All…

Spatial abilities are fundamental to human functioning in the physical world. Spatial reasoning allows people to use concepts of shape, features, and relationships in both concrete and abstract ways, to make and use things in the world, to navigate, and to communicate. Surgeons, pilots, architects, engineers, mechanics, builders, farmers, trades…