Younger brains are noisier information processing systems; this means that information for younger individuals has to allow clearer differentiation between those aspects that are required for the processing task in hand (the "signal") and those that are not (the "noise"). We compared toddler-directed and adult-directed TV…

Environmental perception is prerequisite to most vertebrate behavior and its modern investigation initiated the founding of experimental psychology. Navigation costs may affect environmental perception, such as overestimating distances while encumbered (Solomon, 1949). However, little is known about how this occurs in real-world navigation or how…

Adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have shown deficits in switching between rules governing their behaviour, as have high-functioning children with ASD. However, there are few studies of flexibility in lower-functioning children with ASD. The current study investigated this phenomenon with a group of low-functioning children with ASD…

The present study was carried out to examine how the event-related potentials to fragmentation predict recognition success. Stimuli were abstract meaningless figures that were either complete or fragmented to various extents but still recoverable. Stimuli were first encoded as part of a symmetry discrimination task. In a subsequent recognition…

The magnocellular (M) pathway hypothesis proposes that impaired visual motion perception observed in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) might be mediated by atypical functioning of the subcortical M pathway, as this pathway provides the bulk of visual input to cortical motion detectors. To test this hypothesis, we measured luminance…

Two experiments examined the effects of multimodal presentation and stimulus familiarity on auditory and visual processing. In Experiment 1, 10-month-olds were habituated to either an auditory stimulus, a visual stimulus, or an auditory-visual multimodal stimulus. Processing time was assessed during the habituation phase, and discrimination of…

In two experiments children with autism and two groups of controls matched for either chronological or non-verbal mental age were tested on tasks of colour discrimination and memory. The results from experiment 1 showed significantly poorer colour discrimination in children with autism in comparison to typically developing chronological age…

Features from stimuli presented at a high rate in a single spatial position (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, RSVP) can migrate forming a wrong combination or illusory conjunction. Several serial and parallel models have been proposed to explain the generation of this type of errors. The behavioral results fit better the two-stage parallel model…

This study examined the use of an antecedent-based intervention to reduce the vocal stereotypy of a student diagnosed with Autism within the general education classroom. The student displayed frequent nonfunctional speech and disruptive vocal sounds. An antecedent-based intervention, involving the use of qualitatively different cards--to cue the…

Identifying 2 target stimuli in a rapid stream of visual symbols is much easier if the 2nd target appears immediately after the 1st target (i.e., at Lag 1) than if distractor stimuli intervene. As this phenomenon comes with a strong tendency to confuse the order of the targets, it seems to be due to the integration of both targets into the same…

World knowledge influences how we perceive the world. This study shows that this influence is at least partly mediated by declarative memory. Dutch and German participants categorized hues from a yellow-to-orange continuum on stimuli that were prototypically orange or yellow and that were also associated with these color labels. Both groups gave…

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…

This study evaluated whether atypical face processing in autism extends from human to cartoon faces for which they show a greater interest. Twenty children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) were compared to two groups of typically developing children, matched on chronological and mental age. They processed the emotional expressions of real…

In this study, the authors used a dual-task flanker paradigm to investigate the degree to which flankers are coprocessed with the target as a function of whether flankers have to be used as stimuli for a second task. A series of experiments, in which performance in dual tasks was compared with that in single tasks, revealed that participants had a…

Previous studies indicate that the benefits of dividing an information processing load across both cerebral hemispheres outweigh the costs of interhemispheric transfer as tasks become more difficult or cognitively complex. This is demonstrated as better performance when two stimuli to be compared are presented one to each visual field and…