Studies examining visuospatial working memory (WM) in individuals with congenital deafness have yielded inconsistent results, and tactile WM has rarely been examined. The current study examined WM span tasks in the two modalities among 20 individuals with congenital deafness and 20 participants with typical hearing. The congenital deafness group…

In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word…

Efficient visual exploration in infancy is essential for cognitive and language development. It allows infants to participate in social interactions by attending to faces and learning about objects of interest. Visual scanning of scenes depends on a number of factors, and early differences in efficiency are likely contributing to differences in…

A high Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) score (Baron-Cohen et al. in "J Autism Dev Disord" 31(1):5-17, 2001) is increasingly used as a proxy in empirical studies of perceptual mechanisms in autism. Several investigations have assessed perception in non-autistic people measured for AQ, claiming the same relationship exists between…

Individuals with developmental disabilities may fail to attend to multiple features in compound stimuli (e.g., arrays of pictures, letters within words) with detrimental effects on learning. Participants were 5 children with autism spectrum disorder who had low to intermediate accuracy scores (35% to 84%) on a computer-presented compound matching…

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorders, and daily transient feelings of anxiety (or "stress") are ubiquitous. However, the precise impact of both transient and pathological anxiety on higher-order cognitive functions, including short- and long-term memory, is poorly understood. A clearer understanding of the…

An issue of continued debate in the visuomotor control literature surrounds whether a 2D object serves as a representative proxy for a 3D object in understanding the nature of the visual information supporting grasping control. In an effort to reconcile this issue, we examined the extent to which aperture profiles for grasping 2D and 3D objects…

Although holistic processing is thought to underlie normal face recognition ability, widely discrepant reports have recently emerged about this link in an individual differences context. Progress in this domain may have been impeded by the widespread use of subtraction scores, which lack validity due to their contamination with control condition…

This study was designed to investigate if the working memory profiles of children living in rural poverty are distinct from the working memory profiles of children living in urban poverty. Verbal and visuospatial working memory tasks were administered to sixth-grade students living in low-income rural, low-income urban, high-income rural, and…

Previous research has demonstrated a female advantage, albeit imperfectly, on tests of object location memory where object identity information is readily available. However, spatial and visual elements are often confounded in the experimental tasks used. Here spatial and visual memory performance was compared in 30 men and 30 women by presenting…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of an intensive psychosocial intervention on the executive functioning (EF) in children with ADHD. The treatment was carried out in a coordinated manner over a period of 10 weeks with 27 children with ADHD aged 7 to 10, their parents, and their teachers. A battery of neuropsychological tasks was…

The Embedded Figure Test (EFT) requires locating a simple shape embedded within a background of overlapping target-irrelevant scene elements. Observers with autism, or those with high levels of autistic-like traits, typically outperform matched comparison groups on the EFT. This research investigated the critical visual properties which give rise…

Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM) is a standardised test that is commonly used to obtain a non-verbal reasoning score for children. As the RCPM involves the matching of a target to a pattern it is also considered to be a visuo-spatial perception task. RCPM is therefore frequently used in studies in Williams Syndrome (WS), in order to…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether an index of self-reported attention deficits predicts the pattern of visual field asymmetries observed in behavioral measures of attention. Studies of "normal" subjects do not present a consistent pattern of asymmetry in attention functions, with some studies showing better left visual field (LVF)…

Young children born very prematurely show elevated thresholds for global motion and global form [Atkinson, J. & Braddick, O. (2007). "Visual and visuocognitive development in children born very prematurely." "Progress in Brain Research, 164." 123-149; MacKay, T. L., Jakobson, L. S., Ellemberg, D., Lewis, T. L., Maurer, D., & Casiro, O. (2005).…