Deaf and hearing adults perceive faces differently. This study investigates whether these differences are acquired during childhood development. We characterized facial perception in deaf and hearing children aged 7-17 using a perceptual discrimination task. Configural and featural information was manipulated in the eye and mouth facial regions.…

Previous research on training auditory-visual conditional discriminations (AVCDs) have compared several prompt types including gestural, positional, and identity-matching prompts. Other prompting procedures, such as those that involve the manipulation of the comparison array, have received less attention in the applied literature. For example, the…

This study purports to bridge the gap in research directed at people with Low Functioning Autism (LFA) by exploring if sensory discrimination ability can be used to assess cognitive functioning in children with LFA. The study was done in two phases: (i) a pilot phase (with 4 male participants; mean age = 3 years 6.5 months)--which tried to…

One of the world's most famous pyramids is not located in Egypt but is on a music album cover by the band Pink Floyd. However, not a pyramid but a prism, the iconic image of a beam of light turning into a rainbow is a powerful symbol that captures the complexities of colour perception across cultures and individuals. This study examines how…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are taught conditional discriminations often during early intervention. Auditory-visual conditional discrimination (AVCD) training requires the presentation of multiple antecedent stimuli, and the order of stimulus presentation varies in the literature. This series of studies replicated previous…

The performance of children and young adults with Down syndrome (DS) on reading subskills and nonword reading was investigated. The performance of the participants with DS (N = 42) was compared to that of typically developing (N = 36) peers matched on fluid intelligence abilities. The study accounted for the different depths in orthography…

We evaluated two procedures to teach auditory-visual conditional discriminations (receptive labeling) to children with autism. The procedures evaluated a modified Structured Mix (SM) procedure and a modified Counterbalanced Random Rotation (RR) procedure. The modified SM procedure was based on the logic of simplifying the task by breaking it down…

Children with autism spectrum disorder are typically taught conditional discriminations using a match-to-sample arrangement. Consideration should be given to the temporal order in which antecedent stimuli (the sample and comparison stimuli) are presented during match-to-sample trials, as various arrangements have been used in the extant…

Few studies have evaluated the use of assessment to identify the most efficient instructional practices for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. This is problematic as these individuals often have difficulty acquiring skills, and the procedures that may be efficient with one individual may not be for others. The experimenters conducted…

Children who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often fail to show equivalence class formation. This may be related to their difficulty in learning the programmed baseline conditional discriminations. The present study investigated equivalence class formation after training visual identity-matching performance with auditory…

We explore the following two cognitive questions regarding crosslinguistic variation in lexical semantic systems: Why are some linguistic categories--that is, the associations between a term and a portion of the semantic space--harder to learn than others? How does learning a language-specific set of lexical categories affect processing in that…

The susceptibility to gaze cueing in deaf children aged 7-14 years old (N = 16) was tested using a nonlinguistic task. Participants performed a peripheral shape-discrimination task, whereas uninformative central gaze cues validly or invalidly cued the location of the target. To assess the role of sign language experience and bilingualism in deaf…

We extended past observational learning research by incorporating stimuli already known to participants into training. We used a multiple-baseline design across three participants to determine the effects of discrimination training on the discrimination of consequences applied to modeled responses using both known and unknown pictures. During…

Authenticity is often supposed to play an important role in natural history museums. Yet we know very little about how it affects the perception and appreciation of museum objects. In the present study, we examined children's perceptions of real fossils and replicas. We explored four potential explanations underlying the appreciation of authentic…

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often excel on visual search and crowding tasks; however, inconsistent findings suggest that this 'islet of ability' may not be characteristic of the entire spectrum. We examined whether performance on these tasks changed as a function of motor proficiency in children with varying levels of ASD…