The term learning styles (LS) describes the notion that individuals have a preferred modality of learning (i.e., vision, audition, or kinesthesis) and that matching instruction to this modality results in optimal learning. During the last decades, LS has received extensive criticism, yet they remain a virtual truism within education. One of the…

Sensory issues are highly prevalent in autism and previous findings support a relationship between questionnaires of sensitivity and autistic symptoms and traits, whereas studies that examine this relationship through behavioural assessments of sensitivity are less consistent. The current study explores these differences and suggests that…

Attention is biased toward features aligning with task goals and stimuli previously allocated attentional priority (selection history). The relationship between selection history and the strategic control of attention has scarcely been explored. In the present study, we utilized a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS) task…

If cues from different sensory modalities share the same cause, their information can be integrated to improve perceptual precision. While it is well established that adults exploit sensory redundancy by integrating cues in a Bayes optimal fashion, whether children under 8 years of age combine sensory information in a similar fashion is still…

Perceptual restoration occurs when the brain restores missing segments from speech under certain conditions. It is investigated in the auditory modality, but minimal evidence has been collected during speechreading tasks. The authors measured perceptual restoration in speechreading by individuals with hearing loss and compared it to perceptual…

Although statistical learning (SL) has been studied extensively in developmental dyslexia (DD), less attention has been paid to other fundamental challenges in language acquisition, such as cross-situational word learning. Such investigation is important for determining whether and how SL processes are affected in DD at the word level. In this…

Can metaphorical reasoning involving embodied experience--such as color perception--be learned from the statistics of language alone? Recent work finds that colorblind individuals robustly understand and reason abstractly about color, implying that color associations in everyday language might contribute to the metaphorical understanding of color.…

To facilitate multisensory processing, the brain binds multisensory information when presented within a certain maximum time lag (temporal binding window). In addition, and in audiovisual perception specifically, the brain adapts rapidly to asynchronies within a single trial and shifts the point of subjective simultaneity. Both processes, temporal…

As many autistic individuals report mentalizing difficulties into adulthood, the current pre-registered study investigated potential differences in belief reasoning and/or visual perspective taking between autistic and non-autistic adults. The Seeing-Believing task was administered to 121 gender-balanced participants online (57 with a self-…

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

One model of numeric perception is a density-area mechanism: a process that estimates both density and area of an array, then multiplies them to create an estimate of number. One line of evidence that supports this is the surprising numeric Ebbinghaus illusion: smaller context circles lead to greater perceived number than larger context circles,…

The aim of this study was to analyze the development of Perceptual Inhibition (PI) and Selective Visual Attention (SVA) across lifespan, identifying key moments of change in the direction of development. A total of 810 Argentinian participants, ranging from 6-80 years, were included. The results revealed that PI and SVA followed similar patterns,…

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show abnormal face perception and emotion recognition. However, it remains largely unknown whether these differences are associated with abnormal physiological responses when viewing faces. In this study, we employed a sensitive emotion judgment task and conducted a detailed investigation of pupil…

Modulation in sensory-perceptual processing is a known characteristic of autism, although the underlying mechanism is debated. A prevailing account is formulated in Bayesian terms, where either a reduced prior or reduced noise in the measurement (sensory input) may account for the modulated perception as expressed by the posterior distribution.…

Perception is not an independent, in-the-moment event. Instead, perceiving involves integrating prior expectations with current observations. How does this ability develop from infancy through adulthood? We examined how prior visual experience shapes visual perception in infants, children, and adults. Using an identical task across age groups, we…