Autistic people are often described as being impaired with regard to theory of mind, though more recent literature finds flaws in the theory of mind deficit paradigm. In addition, the predominant methods for examining theory of mind often rely on "observational" modes of assessment and do not adequately reflect the dynamic process of…

Four experiments used a sensory preconditioning protocol to examine how a dangerous context influences learning about innocuous events. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, rats were exposed to presentations of a tone followed immediately or 20-sec later by presentations of a light. These tone-light pairings occurred in a context that was either familiar…

The severe amblyopia induced by chronic monocular deprivation is highly resistant to reversal in adulthood. Here we use a rodent model to show that recovery from deprivation amblyopia can be achieved in adults by a two-step sequence, involving enhancement of synaptic plasticity in the visual cortex by dark exposure followed immediately by visual…

There is now abundant evidence that human learning and memory are governed by multiple systems. As a result, research is now turning to the next question of how these putative systems interact. For instance, how is overall control of behavior coordinated, and does learning occur independently within systems regardless of what system is in control?…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been associated with sensory hypersensitivity. A recent study reported visual acuity (VA) in ASD in the region reported for birds of prey. The validity of the results was subsequently doubted. This study examined VA in 34 individuals with ASD, 16 with schizophrenia (SCH), and 26 typically developing (TYP).…

While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages…

McCarty and colleagues (1999) developed the elevated spoon task to measure motor planning in human infants. In this task, a spoon containing food was placed on an elevated apparatus that supported both ends of the spoon. The handle was oriented to the left or right on different trials. We presented naive adult rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) with…

Autism is currently one of the most prominent and widely discussed human conditions. Its increased prevalence has intensified the demand for effective educational and therapeutic services, and intervention science is providing mounting evidence about practices that positively impact outcomes. The purpose of this report is to describe a set of…

Previous studies have shown that infants, including newborns, can match previously unseen and unheard human faces and vocalizations. More recently, it has been reported that infants as young as 4 months of age also can match the faces and vocalizations of other species raising the possibility that such broad multisensory perceptual tuning is…

Spatial cognition is a branch of cognitive psychology that studies how people acquire and use knowledge about their environment to determine where they are, how to obtain resources, and how to find their way home. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including neuroscience, cognition, and sociology, have discovered a great deal about how…

Infants are sensitive to biological motion, but do they recognize it as animate? As a first step towards answering this question, two experiments investigated whether 6-month-olds selectively attribute goals to shapes moving like animals. We habituated infants to a square moving towards one of two targets. When target locations were switched,…

Recently, Redford (2010) found that monkeys seemed to exert metacognitive control in a category-learning paradigm. Specifically, they selected more trials to view as the difficulty of the category-learning task increased. However, category-learning difficulty was determined by manipulating the family resemblance across the to-be-learned exemplars.…

We explored the amount and timing of temporal synchrony necessary to facilitate prenatal perceptual learning using an animal model, the bobwhite quail. Quail embryos were exposed to various audiovisual combinations of a bobwhite maternal call paired with patterned light during the late stages of prenatal development and were tested postnatally for…

Gottlieb promoted the value of a developmental psychobiological systems approach to the study of human development. This approach recognizes the importance of comparative, animal-based research to advancing our understanding of the complexities and dynamics of the process of development. The major contribution of animal developmental studies is…

Disentangling bottom-up and top-down processing in adult category learning is notoriously difficult. Studying category learning in infancy provides a simple way of exploring category learning while minimizing the contribution of top-down information. Three- to 4-month-old infants presented with cat or dog images will form a perceptual category…