We investigated the phonological and surface subtypes of developmental dyslexia in light of competing predictions made by two computational models of single word reading, the Dual-Route Cascaded Model (DRC; Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) and Harm and Seidenberg's connectionist model (HS model; Harm & Seidenberg, 1999). The…

Same-race (SR) faces are recognized better than other-race (OR) faces, and this other-race effect (ORE) is correlated with experience. SR faces are also processed more holistically than OR faces, suggesting one possible mechanism for poorer performance on OR faces. Studies of object expertise have shown that individuating experiences are necessary…

Visual processing breaks the world into parts and objects, allowing us not only to examine the pieces individually, but also to perceive the relationships among them. There is work exploring how we perceive spatial relationships within structures with existing representations, such as faces, common objects, or prototypical scenes. But strikingly,…

The aim of the present study was to explore the spatial organization of auditory time and the effects of the manipulation of spatial attention on such a representation. In two experiments, we asked 28 adults to classify the duration of auditory stimuli as "short" or "long". Stimuli were tones of high or low pitch, delivered left or right of the…

Humans have an unparalleled ability to represent objects as members of multiple categories. A given object, such as a pillow may be--depending on current task demands--represented as an instance of something that is soft, as something that contains feathers, as something that is found in bedrooms, or something that is larger than a toaster. This…

Several psychophysical and neuropsychological investigations have suggested that the mental representation of numbers takes the form of a number line along which magnitude is positioned in ascending order according to our reading habits. A longstanding debate is whether this spatial frame is triggered automatically as intrinsic part of the number…

We asked whether infants are sensitive to causal relations between objects and outcomes and whether this sensitivity supports categorization. Fourteen- and 18-month-old infants were familiarized with objects from a novel category. For some, the objects caused an electronic toy to activate. For others, the objects were present during activation of…

It has been claimed that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by a limited ability to process perceptual stimuli in reference to the contextual information of the percept. Such a connection between a nonholistic processing style and behavioral traits associated with ASD is thought to exist also within the neurotypical population albeit…

Examined whether 2-year-olds can learn a novel part name of an unfamiliar object when adult demonstrates action upon object. Asked 24 Japanese 2-year-olds to choose referent for a whole object and part of the object in forced choice tests. Found that young children are able to override whole object assumption when actions of parts of objects are…