Previous studies found an impact of language familiarity on face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. Own race faces are better recognized when associated with native language, whereas for other race faces, it is with non-native language. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical visual perception both in the social and nonsocial domain. In order to measure a reliable visual response, visual evoked potentials were recorded during a passive pattern-reversal stimulation in adolescents and adults with and without ASD. While the present results show the same…

This study investigated the neural correlates of experts and novices during biological object pattern detection using an fMRI approach in order to reveal the neural correlates of a biologist's superior pattern discovery ability. Sixteen healthy male participants (8 biologists and 8 non-biologists) volunteered for the study. Participants were shown…

This study used eyetracking to investigate the ability of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to recognize social (faces) and nonsocial (simple objects and complex block patterns) stimuli using the visual paired comparison (VPC) paradigm. Typically developing (TD) children showed evidence for recognition of faces and simple…

Several propositions deduced from the discrepancy hypothesis were tested with four-month-old infants using random shapes in a habituation/discrepancy paradigm. (JMB)

Preschool, third grade and fifth grade children were presented with two choice-reaction time experiments in which probe stimulus quality was manipulated, to measure the effects of probe stimulus degradation at three developmental levels. Results support the hypothesis that children and adults employ similar strategies in preprocessing degraded…

Three experiments employed rectangles in stimulus identification tasks. It was concluded that the initial perceptual processing of rectangles is accomplished by separate dimensional analyzers operating in parallel. Observers adopt different decision strategies for negatively correlated sets and for single dimension sets when the number of…

This report is the first in a two-part series introducing an interactive activation model of context effects in perception. A model for the perception of letters in words and other contexts is described and applied to a number of experiments. It is proposed that the model accounts for (1) the perceptual advantage for letters in words compared to…

This report is the second in a two-part series introducing an interactive activation model of context effects in perception. In the first part, a model for the perception of letters in words and other contexts was described and applied to a number of experiments. This second part applies the same model to a number of new experiments designed to…

A model of context effects in perception is applied to perception of letters. Perception results from excitatory and inhibitory interactions of detectors for visual features, letters, and words. The model produces facilitation for letters in pronounceable pseudowords as well as words and accounts for rule-governed performance without any rules.…

The processing of mental structures in perception appears to be serial, in that viewers can fill in missing parts from an impoverished stimulus following a top down process. To investigate the effects of unfamiliarity, complexity, and legibility on object and layout perception of unfamiliar stimuli, ten subjects were shown one of four ribbon…

The theory is developed and contrasted with other theories of pattern recognition in which concepts such as stimulus generalization, tuned detectors, and preprocessing play major roles. A relation of this theory to problems encountered among disabled readers ("dyslexics") is also brought out. (Author/BJG)

Study was carried out to examine the feasibility of identifying by a short test whether or not any particular profoundly deaf school child uses a speech code in short-term memory for verbal material. (Author)

Three experiments evaluated color specificity knowledge and related semantic effects on recognition memory. (Author/SB)

Earlier research with the lexical decision task led to the hypothesis that semantic context facilitates the encoding of words related to the context. Six experiments which employed different tasks (e.g., making a lexical decision) and different experimental paradigms (e.g., tachistoscopic exposures with masking stimuli) further investigated this…