Background: Many adults who stutter presenting for speech treatment experience social anxiety disorder. The presence of mental health disorders in adults who stutter has been implicated in a failure to maintain speech treatment benefits. Contemporary theories of social anxiety disorder propose that the condition is maintained by negative…

Classic theories emphasized the role of expectations in the intentional control of attention and action. However, recent theorizing has implicated experience-dependent, online adjustments as the primary basis for cognitive control--adjustments that appear to be implicit (Blais, Harris, Guerrero, & Bunge, 2012). The purpose of the current study…

Perceptual tasks such as object matching, mammogram interpretation, mental rotation, and satellite imagery change detection often require the assignment of correspondences to fuse information across views. We apply techniques developed for machine translation to the gaze data recorded from a complex perceptual matching task modeled after…

Decision-makers effortlessly balance the need for urgency against the need for caution. Theoretical and neurophysiological accounts have explained this tradeoff solely in terms of the "quantity" of evidence required to trigger a decision (the "threshold"). This explanation has also been used as a benchmark test for evaluating…

In schools, learning spatial geometry is usually dependent upon a student's ability to visualize three dimensional geometric configurations from two dimensional drawings. Such a process, however, often creates visual obstacles which are unique to spatial geometry. Useful software programs which realistically depict three dimensional geometric…

The type of visual information needed for categorizing faces and nonface objects was investigated by manipulating spatial frequency scales available in the image during a category verification task addressing basic and subordinate levels. Spatial filtering had opposite effects on faces and airplanes that were modulated by categorization level. The…

The aim of the present study was to examine executive dysfunctioning and decreased processing speed as potential mediators of age-related differences in episodic memory. We compared the performances of young and elderly adults in a free-recall task. Participants were also given tests to measure executive functions and perceptual processing speed…

External noise methods and observer models have been widely used to characterize the intrinsic perceptual limitations of human observers and changes of the perceptual limitations associated with cognitive, developmental, and disease processes by highlighting the variance of internal representations. The authors conducted a comprehensive review of…

Schizophrenia may be associated with a fundamental disturbance in the temporal coordination of information processing in the brain, leading to classic symptoms of schizophrenia such as thought disorder and disorganized and contextually inappropriate behavior. Although a variety of behavioral studies have provided strong evidence for perceptual…

In an increasingly aging population, a number of adults are concerned about declines in their cognitive abilities. Online computer-based cognitive training programs have been proposed as an accessible means by which the elderly may improve their cognitive abilities; yet, more research is needed in order to assess the efficacy of these programs. In…

Open-ended tasks are rarely used to investigate cognition in autism. No known studies have directly examined whether increased attention to the perceptual level of speech in autism might contribute to a reduced tendency to process language meaningfully. The present study investigated linguistic versus perceptual speech processing preferences.…

This study compared emotion perception accuracy between children with Asperger's syndrome (AS) and high-functioning autism (HFA). Thirty children were diagnosed with AS or HFA based on empirically supported diagnostic criteria and administered an emotion perception test consisting of facial expressions and tone of voice cues that varied in…

Previous research has shown that the appearance of task-irrelevant abrupt onsets influences saccadic eye movements during visual search and may slow down manual reactions to target stimuli. Analysis of reaction time distributions in the present study offers evidence suggesting that top-down inhibition processes actively suppress oculomotor or…

Previous studies show that following disorientation children use the geometry of an enclosed space to locate an object hidden in one of the corners [e.g. (Harmer, L., & Spelke, E. (1996). Modularity and development: A case of spatial reorientation. "Cognition, 61," 195-232)]. These studies have used a disorientation procedure that involves…

Four papers on perceptual processes, by (1) W. Ahlbrand; (2) E. Elenbogen, S. Sperry and G. A. Thompson; (3) B. Randhawa; and (4) T. Sticht and D. Glasnapp, which were presented at the 55th annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, are critiqued here. Emphasis is upon the relevance of the papers to issues in perceptual…