Evidence suggests that people with autism rely less on holistic visual information than typical adults. The current studies examine this by investigating core visual processes that contribute to holistic processing--namely, individuation and element grouping--and how they develop in participants with autism and typically developing (TD)…

It is well established that visual search becomes harder when the similarity between target and distractors is increased and the similarity between distractors is decreased. However, in models of visual search, similarity is typically treated as a static, time-invariant property of the relation between objects. Data from other perceptual tasks…

Children's performance on face identification tests improves dramatically between age 4 and adolescence, yet the source of this improvement is controversial. We used face identity aftereffects to examine whether changes in the organization of face-space during childhood could be a source of this improvement. Specifically we tested whether 7- to…

Inattentional blindness is the failure to detect unexpected events when attention is otherwise engaged. Previous research indicates that inattentional blindness increases as perceptual demands intensify. The authors present 6 cuing experiments that manipulated both the perceptual demands of a primary letter-naming task and the expectations of the…

The current study provides evidence for the existence of an other-age effect (OAE), analogous to the well-documented other-race effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults are better at recognizing adult faces compared with faces of newborns and children. Results from Experiment 3 indicate that the OAE obtained with child faces can be…