Perceptual processing in autism is associated with both "strengths" and "weaknesses" but within a literature that varies widely in terms of the assessments used. We report data from 12 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 12 age and IQ matched neurotypical controls tested on a set of tasks using the same stimuli…

Autistic people are better at perceiving details. Major theories explain this in terms of bottom-up sensory mechanisms or in terms of top-down cognitive biases. Recently, it has become possible to link these theories within a common framework. This framework assumes that perception is implicit neural inference, combining sensory evidence with…

Can infants use interposition and line junction cues to infer three-dimensional (3D) structure? Previous work has shown that in a task that required 4-month-olds to discriminate between static two-dimensional (2D) pictures of possible and impossible cubes, infants exhibited a spontaneous preference for displays of the impossible cube but left open…

Holistic processing of faces is characterized by encoding of the face as a single stimulus. This study employed a composite face task to examine whether holistic processing varies when attention is restricted to the top as compared to the bottom half of the face, and whether evidence of holistic processing would be observed in event-related…

To examine the ontogeny of emotional face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults and 7-month-old infants while viewing pictures of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Face-sensitive ERPs at occipital-temporal scalp regions differentiated between fearful and neutral/happy faces in both adults (N170 was larger for fear)…

Although it is acknowledged that adults integrate features into a representation of the whole face, there is still some disagreement about the onset and developmental course of holistic face processing. We tested adults and children from 4 to 6 years of age with the same paradigm measuring holistic face processing through an adaptation of the…

Investigated infants' integration of visual information across space and time. In four experiments, infants aged 12 months and 6 months viewed objects after watching light trace similar and dissimilar shapes. Infants looked longer at novel shapes, although six-month-olds did not recognize figures taking more than 10 seconds to trace. One-year-old…

Human neonates selectively fixated patterns with curved rather than straight contours when the outermost contours differed in this form variable and when quantitative variables were controlled. Data indicated the presence from birth of a discrimination ability basic to later form perception. (Author/ED)

This study investigated whether object-picture discrepancy occurs because preschool children regard pictures as significates rather than as signifiers. Results indicated the children did not consistently respond to objects and their pictorial representations equivalently. (Author/DB)

The ability of young infants between the ages of 8 and 17 weeks to perceive outline shapes was investigated in nine experiments using an habituation paradigm. (JMB)

Assessed 13- and 20-week-olds infants' discrimination between shearing stimuli, in which columns of dots move vertically on a screen at different velocities, and foil stimuli, in which all dots move at the same velocity. Results revealed the threshold levels of dot velocity in shearing stimuli at which discrimination occurred. (BC)

Infants were tested at 5, 8, and 13 months of age for numerosity perception. Subjects observed displayed figures on a screen moving at constant speed with irregular trajectories and occasional occlusions. Results demonstrated that discrimination of units, and not of characteristic patterns, underlies numerosity perception. (BC)

Evaluates models of infant visual preferences with predictions based on the physical attributes of visual patterns using pairs of schematic faces and abstract patterns identical except for contrast reversals. Results suggest that a fundamental change in the determinants of visual preference occurs postnatally between 6 and 12 weeks. (Author/RWB)

Two variants of the habituation paradigm were used to investigate fine orientation discrimination and shape constancy in 34 young infants. Results demonstrate that conditions determine whether young infants show sensitivity to relatively fine variations in pattern orientation or give evidence of shape constancy with the same patterns. (HOD)