This study characterizes the subcortical auditory brainstem response (speech-ABR) and cortical auditory processing (P1 and Mismatch Negativity; MMN) to speech sounds and their relationship to autistic traits and sensory features within the same group of autistic children (n = 10) matched on age and non-verbal IQ to their typically developing (TD)…

Atypical sensory response patterns are common in children with autism and developmental delay. Expanding on previous work, this observational electroencephalogram study assessed auditory event-related potentials and their associations with clinically evaluated sensory response patterns in children with autism spectrum disorder (n = 28),…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of wearing earplugs on classical musicians' pitch perception across three experimental conditions: no earplugs, foam earplugs, and Etymotic earplugs. Participants were graduate and undergraduate music majors attending a large school of music in the southeastern United States (N = 72).…

Purpose: We examined how consonant perception is affected by a preceding speech carrier simulated in the same or a different room, for different classes of consonants. Carrier room, carrier length, and carrier length/target room uncertainty were manipulated. A phonetic feature analysis tested which phonetic categories are influenced by the…

Letter production through handwriting creates visual experiences that may be important for the development of visual letter perception. We sought to better understand the neural responses to different visual percepts created during handwriting at different levels of experience. Three groups of participants, younger children, older children, and…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is commonly conceived as the extreme end of a continuum. Research suggests that autistic individuals outperform typically developing controls in visual search. Thus, enhanced visual search may represent an adaptive trait associated with ASD. Here, using a large general population sample (N = 608, aged 9-14 years), we…

Although item response models have grown in popularity in many areas of educational and psychological assessment, there are relatively few applications of these models in experimental psychopathology. In this article, we explore the use of item response models in the context of a computerized cognitive task designed to assess visual working memory…

Assessing tactile function among children with intellectual, motor, and communication impairments remains a clinical challenge. A case control design was used to test whether children with global developmental delays (GDD; n = 20) would be more/less reactive to a modified quantitative sensory test (mQST) compared to controls (n = 20). Reactivity…

Experience-induced changes associated with odor learning are mediated by a number of signaling molecules, including nitric oxide (NO), which is predominantly synthesized by neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) in the brain. In the current study, we investigated the role of nNOS in the acquisition and retention of conditioned olfactory fear. Mice…

This study investigated the spatial analysis of tactile hierarchical patterns in 110 early-blind children aged 6-8 to 16-18 years, as compared to 90 blindfolded sighted children, in a naming and haptic drawing task. The results revealed that regardless of visual status, young children predominantly produced local responses in both tasks, whereas…

As a large heterogeneity is observed across studies on interference control in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), research may benefit from the use of a cognitive framework that models specific processes underlying reactive and proactive control of interference. Reactive control refers to the expression and suppression of responses and proactive…

This study examines whether deficits in visual information processing in autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) can be offset by the recruitment of brain structures involved in selective attention. During functional MRI, 12 children with ASD and 19 control participants completed a selective attention one-back task in which images of faces and houses were…

Reading fluency is often predicted by rapid automatized naming (RAN) speed, which as the name implies, measures the automaticity with which familiar stimuli (e.g., letters) can be retrieved and named. Readers with dyslexia are considered to have less "automatized" access to lexical information, reflected in longer RAN times compared with…

In classical conditioning, the temporal sequence of stimulus presentations is critical for the association between the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US). In forward conditioning, the CS precedes the US and is learned as a predictor for the US. Thus it acquires properties to elicit a behavioral response, defined as…

The olfactory span task (OST) uses an incrementing non-matching to sample procedure such that the number of stimuli to remember increases during the session. The number of consecutive correct responses (span length) and percent correct as a function of the memory load have been viewed as defining rodent working memory capacity limitations in…