A landmark study by O'Neill (1996), in which 2-year-old children were found to be more likely to point toward a hidden object to help an adult who was unsighted during the hiding event than to point helpfully for an adult who had been sighted, seems to undermine the conventional assumption that children this young do not understand the…

Despite the discovery of body-selective neural areas in occipitotemporal cortex, little is known about how bodies are visually coded. We used perceptual adaptation to determine how body identity is coded. Brief exposure to a body (e.g., anti-Rose) biased perception toward an identity with opposite properties (Rose). Moreover, the size of this…

A salient stimulus may interrupt visual search because of attentional capture. It has been shown that attentional capture occurs with a wide, but not with a small attentional window. We tested the hypothesis that capture depends more strongly on the shape of the attentional window than on its size. Search elements were arranged in two nested…

It has been shown that the left and right cerebral hemispheres (LH and RH) respectively process qualitative or "categorical" spatial relations and metric or "coordinate" spatial relations. However, categorical spatial information could be thought as divided into two types: semantically-coded and visuospatially-coded categorical information. We…

Maljkovic and Nakayama have demonstrated memory influences in singleton search from one trial to the next, an effect they termed "priming of pop-out" (PoP). This effect was described as resulting from the persistence of an implicit memory trace, the influence of which could be observed for around 5-8 subsequent trials. Thomson and…

We selected 24 Hollywood movies released from 1940 through 2010 to serve as a film corpus. Eight viewers, three per film, parsed them into events, which are best termed subscenes. While watching a film a second time, viewers scrolled through frames and recorded the frame number where each event began. Viewers agreed about 90% of the time. We then…

Diminished episodic memory and diminished use of semantic information to aid recall by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are both thought to result from diminished relational binding of elements of complex stimuli. To test this hypothesis, we asked high-functioning adults with ASD and typical comparison participants to study grids in…

We investigated whether preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit the shape bias in word learning: the bias to generalize based on shape rather than size, color, or texture in an object naming context ("This is a wek; find another wek") but not in a non-naming similarity classification context ("See this?…

In four experiments we assessed whether visual working memory (VWM) maintains a record of previously processed visual information, allowing old information to be inhibited, and new information to be prioritized. Specifically, we evaluated whether VWM contributes to the inhibition (i.e., visual marking) of previewed distractors in a preview search.…

Adolescent cannabis use is associated with working memory impairment. The present randomized controlled trial assigned adolescents ages 14 to 21 enrolled in cannabis use treatment to receive either working memory training (experimental group) or a control training (control group) as an adjunctive treatment. Cognitive function, drug use, and other…

Poor parallel letter-string processing in developmental dyslexia was taken as evidence of poor visual attention (VA) span, that is, a limitation of visual attentional resources that affects multi-character processing. However, the use of letter stimuli in oral report tasks was challenged on its capacity to highlight a VA span disorder. In…

Colored filters are used to treat Irlen syndrome (IS), a controversial disorder posited to be the cause of a substantial proportion of reading difficulties. Previously, we found that Irlen colored filters do not produce any short-term alleviation of reading difficulties in schoolchildren aged 7-12. Here, we tested whether colored filters show…

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems often supplement oral communication for individuals with intellectual and communication disabilities. Research with preschoolers without disabilities has demonstrated that two visual--perceptual factors influence speed and/or accuracy of finding a target: the internal color and spatial…

Visual stress (the experience of visual distortions and discomfort during prolonged reading) is frequently identified and alleviated with coloured overlays or lenses. Previous studies have associated visual stress with dyslexia and as a consequence, coloured overlays are widely distributed to children and adults with reading difficulty. However,…

Searching simultaneously for metal threats (guns and knives) and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in X-ray images is less effective than 2 independent single-target searches, 1 for metal threats and 1 for IEDs. The goals of this study were to (a) replicate this dual-target cost for categorical targets and to determine whether the cost remains…