Perceptual expertise is typically domain-specific and rarely generalises beyond an expert's domain of experience. Forensic feature-comparison examiners outperform the norm in domain-specific visual comparison, but emerging research suggests that they show advantages on other similar tasks outside their domain of expertise. For example, fingerprint…

The purpose of the present investigation was to evaluate a rapid assessment procedure to identify effective instructional strategies to teach auditory-visual conditional discriminations to children diagnosed with autism. We replicated and extended previous rapid skills assessments (Lerman, Vorndran, Addison, & Kuhn, 2004) by evaluating the effects…

Perceptual processing in autism is associated with both "strengths" and "weaknesses" but within a literature that varies widely in terms of the assessments used. We report data from 12 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 12 age and IQ matched neurotypical controls tested on a set of tasks using the same stimuli…

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…

Schizophrenia patients exhibit perceptual and cognitive deficits, including in visual motion processing. Given that cognitive systems depend upon perceptual inputs, improving patients' perceptual abilities may be an effective means of cognitive intervention. In healthy people, motion perception can be enhanced through perceptual learning, but it…

Can infants use interposition and line junction cues to infer three-dimensional (3D) structure? Previous work has shown that in a task that required 4-month-olds to discriminate between static two-dimensional (2D) pictures of possible and impossible cubes, infants exhibited a spontaneous preference for displays of the impossible cube but left open…

This study examined whether color perception is atypical in children with autism. In experiment 1, accuracy of color memory and search was compared for children with autism and typically developing children matched on age and non-verbal cognitive ability. Children with autism were significantly less accurate at color memory and search than…

Even though it is undisputed that prior information regarding the location of a target affects visual selection, the issue of whether information regarding nonspatial features, such as color and shape, has similar effects has been a matter of debate since the early 1980s. In the study described in this article, measures derived from signal…

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…

Data suggest that young infants (110-130 days old) process distinctive features of objects that continuously change orientation. The importance of these findings for theories of cognitive and perceptual development of infants is discussed. (Author/DB)

Object substitution masking (OSM) is said to occur when a perceptual object is hypothesized that is mismatched by subsequent sensory evidence, leading to a new hypothesized object being substituted for the first. For example, when a brief target is accompanied by a longer lasting display of nonoverlapping mask elements, reporting of target…

One- and two-month-old infants were shown schematic drawings of a human face with features arranged (1) naturally, (2) symmetrically but scrambled, and (3) asymmetrically and scrambled. Two-month-olds discriminated among all arangements and preferred the natural arrangement; one-month-olds showed no discrimination or preference. (Author/DB)

Investigated infants' integration of visual information across space and time. In four experiments, infants aged 12 months and 6 months viewed objects after watching light trace similar and dissimilar shapes. Infants looked longer at novel shapes, although six-month-olds did not recognize figures taking more than 10 seconds to trace. One-year-old…

Reports a study in which the letters F, G, and K were presented in normal and backward versions, in varying angular orientations, in left and right visual fields. (Author/NH)

Investigates the sensitivity of children aged 6 to 10 to stylistic properties of line drawings. Subjects were asked to judge the similarity of 12 drawings which varied along the dimensions of clarity, expressiveness, and line thickness. In contrast to previous research, the youngest children had the ability to make multidimensional…