This study examined if listener behavior and responding by exclusion would emerge after training 3 participants with autism to tact stimuli. Tacts for 2 of 3 stimuli were directly trained using discrete trial training methodology and were followed by an auditory-visual discrimination probe in which auditory-visual discrimination by naming (i.e.,…

Mastery criteria can be applied to individual targets or stimuli organized into sets. Wong et al. (2021) and Wong and Fienup (2022) found that participants who received special education services learned sight words more rapidly when an individual target mastery criterion was applied. The current study replicated and extended these findings across…

We extended past observational learning research by incorporating stimuli already known to participants into training. We used a multiple-baseline design across three participants to determine the effects of discrimination training on the discrimination of consequences applied to modeled responses using both known and unknown pictures. During…

Stimulus overselectivity is widely accepted as a stimulus control abnormality in autism spectrum disorders and subsets of other populations. Previous research has demonstrated a link between both chronological and mental age and overselectivity in typical development. However, the age at which children are developmentally ready to respond to…

Five individuals with autism or other developmental disabilities participated in paired-stimulus preference assessments during repeated baseline probes. All subjects initially showed a pronounced bias by typically selecting the stimulus placed in either the left or right position. Biased responding for 3 subjects was eliminated when training…

Inhibition of return (IOR) is modulated by task set and appears later in discrimination tasks than in detection tasks. Several hypotheses have been suggested to account for this difference. We tested three of these hypotheses in two experiments by examining the influence of cue and target level of processing on the onset of IOR. In the first…

Previous work has shown that 4-month-olds can discriminate between two-dimensional (2D) depictions of structurally possible and impossible objects [S. M. Shuwairi (2009), "Journal of Experimental Child Psychology", 104, 115; S. M. Shuwairi, M. K. Albert, & S. P. Johnson (2007), "Psychological Science", 18, 303]. Here, we asked whether evidence of…

The effects of moving task-irrelevant objects on time-to-contact (TTC) judgments were examined in 5 experiments. Observers viewed a directly approaching target in the presence of a distractor object moving in parallel with the target. In Experiments 1 to 4, observers decided whether the target would have collided with them earlier or later than a…

In cross-dimensional visual search tasks, target discrimination is faster when the previous trial contained a target defined in the same visual dimension as the current trial. The dimension-weighting account (DWA; A. Found & H. J. Muller, 1996) explains this intertrial facilitation by assuming that visual dimensions are weighted at an early…

This study investigates the hypotheses set forth by Russian researchers that there may be identified a pervasive characteristic of the central nervous system labeled as "strength". Ten of the 12 measures used were direct replications of representative strength measures derived from the Russian work. Two additional measures were included to test…

Three studies were designed to examine infants' bisensory responsiveness to temporally modulated stimulation by varying frequency while keeping intensity constant, by varying both frequency and intensity together, and by varying intensity while keeping temporal frequency constant. Findings indicate that sound influences visual preferences via…

Several studies have indicated that children have difficulty differentiating mirror-image stimuli. In the present study adults were required to classify pairs of horseshoe stimuli as same or different. Response times were compared for stimulus pairs that varied in orientation (left-right vs up-down) and spatial plane of the pair (horizontal vs.…

The aim of this study was to determine what visual information expert soccer players encode when they are asked to make a decision. We used a repetition-priming paradigm to test the hypothesis that experts encode a soccer pattern's structure independently of the players' physical characteristics (i.e., posture and morphology). The participants…

Nine studies showed a bidirectional link (a) between a global processing style and generation of similarities and (b) between a local processing style and generation of dissimilarities. In Experiments 1-4, participants were primed with global versus local perception styles and then asked to work on an allegedly unrelated generation task. Across…

An audiovisual sensory test on 66 educational psychology students supported the contention expressed in Holmes'"Substrata Factor of Reading" that the individual differences in the sensory modes are not necessarily highly correlated. It further suggested that there exists an "intersensory facilitation," but that facilitation is probably not at the…