Introduction: This study has aimed to investigate the relationship between the development of working memory and performance on arithmetic activities. Method: We conducted a 3-year longitudinal study of a sample of 90 children, that was followed during the first, second and third year of primary school. All children were tested on measures of WM…

The goal of the study was to examine the association between visual-attentional span and lexical decision in skilled adult readers. In the span tasks, an array of letters was presented briefly and recognition or production of a single cued letter (partial span) or production of all letters (whole span) was required. Independently of letter…

In this paper, we present an approach to spatial geometry that involved a group of university students, who engaged in visual experiences while discussing about geometrical properties using a dynamic geometry environment. Drawing on aspects related to the difficulty of seeing in 3D, we introduce suitable connections between quadrilaterals and…

Over their 1st year of life, infants' "universal" perception of the sounds of language narrows to encompass only those contrasts made in their native language (J. F. Werker & R. C. Tees, 1984). This research tested 40 infants in an eyetracking paradigm and showed that this pattern also holds for infants exposed to seen language--American Sign…

Our first review article (Wagemans et al., 2012) on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Gestalt psychology focused on perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. It concluded that further progress requires a reconsideration of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the Gestalt approach, which is provided here. In…

Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University where she conducts research and teaches courses on livestock handling and facility design. She is also a past member of the board of directors of the Autism Society of America. She lectures to parents and teachers throughout the United States on her experiences with…

We examined whether illusory self-motion perception ("vection") induced by viewing upward and downward grating motion stimuli can alter the emotional valence of recollected autobiographical episodic memories. We found that participants recollected positive episodes more often while perceiving upward vection. However, when we tested a small moving…

Relative to low scorers, high scorers on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) show enhanced performance on the Embedded Figures Test and the Radial Frequency search task (RFST), which has been attributed to both enhanced local processing and differences in combining global percepts. We investigate the role of local and global processing further using…

When remembering a real-world scene, people encode both detailed information about specific objects and higher order information like the overall gist of the scene. However, formal models of change detection, like those used to estimate visual working memory capacity, assume observers encode only a simple memory representation that includes no…

A prominent theory in the face perception literature--the parallel-route hypothesis (Bruce & Young, 1986)--assumes a dedicated channel for the processing of identity that is separate and independent from the channel(s) in which nonidentity information is processed (e.g., expression, eye gaze). The current work subjected this assumption to…

Our visual system is highly sensitive to regularities in the environment. Locations that were important in one's previous experience are often prioritized during search, even though observers may not be aware of the learning. In this study we characterized the guidance of spatial attention by incidental learning of a target's spatial probability,…

We investigated the influence of control over a social stimulus on the ability to detect direct gaze in high-functioning autism (HFA). In a pilot study, 19 participants with and 19 without HFA were compared on a gaze detection and a gaze setting task. Participants with HFA were less accurate in detecting direct gaze in the detection task, but did…

We utilized a hierarchical figures task to determine the default level of perceptual processing and the flexibility of visual processing in a group of high-functioning young adults with autism (n = 12) and a typically developing young adults, matched by chronological age and IQ (n = 12). In one task, participants attended to one level of the…

The aim of the experiments was to investigate how manipulating the contrast of the signal and noise dots in a random dot kinematogram (RDK), influenced on motion coherence thresholds in adults with dyslexia. In the first of two experiments, coherent motion thresholds were measured when the contrasts of the signal and noise dots in an RDK were…

Recent work implicates a link between action control systems and action understanding. In this study, we investigated the role of the motor system in the development of visual anticipation of others' actions. Twelve-month-olds engaged in behavioral and observation tasks. "Containment activity", infants' spontaneous engagement in producing…