The hippocampus has long been recognized as important for the formation of long-term memory. Recent work has suggested that the hippocampus might also be important for certain kinds of spatial operations, as in constructing scenes, shifting perspective, or perceiving the geometry of scenes and their boundaries. We explored this proposal using a…

Young and nondemented older adults completed a visual object continuous recognition memory task in which some stimuli (lures) were similar but not identical to previously presented objects. The lures were hypothesized to result in increased interference and increased pattern separation demand. To examine variability in object pattern separation…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have been assumed to show evidence of abnormal visuospatial processing, which has been attributed to a failure to integrate local features into coherent global Gestalts and/or to a bias towards local processing. As the available data are based on baseline performance only, which does not provide…

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…

Background: Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is an early diagnosed monogenic disorder, associated with a striking pattern of cognitive/attentional difficulties and a high risk of poor behavioural outcomes. FXS therefore represents an ideal model disorder to study prospectively the impact of early attention deficits on behaviour. Methods: Thirty-seven boys…

Objective: To examine whether participants with ADHD showed a deficit in Stroop/reverse-Stroop interference by comparing them to non-ADHD participants. Method: A group with ADHD, primarily inattentive type (n = 15), and a paired non-ADHD group (n = 15) completed the group version of the Stroop/reverse-Stroop test. Results: Asymmetric interference…

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show inferior global motion performance with superior performance in detail form perception, suggesting dysfunction of the dorsal visual stream. To elucidate the neural basis of impaired global motion perception in ASD, we measured psychophysical threshold and visual event-related potentials (ERPs)…

Previous research has revealed that a stimulus presented in the blind visual field of participants with visual hemifield defects can evoke oculomotor competition, in the absence of awareness. Here we studied three cases to determine whether a distractor in a blind hemifield would be capable of inducing a "global effect", a shift of saccade…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by a deficit of dorsal visual stream processing as well as the impairment of inhibitory control capability. However, the cognitive processing mechanisms of executive dysfunction have not been addressed. In the present study, the endogenous Posner paradigm task was administered to 15 children with…

The study sought to provide norms for a simple test of visual perception of verticality (subjective visual vertical). The study was designed as a cohort study with a balanced design. The setting was the Rehabilitation Department of a University Hospital. Twenty-two healthy adults, of 23-58 years, 11 men (three left handed) and 11 women (three left…

Autism is characterized by deficits in attention. However, no study has investigated the dynamics of attentional processes in autistic patients yet. The attentional blink (AB) paradigm provides information about the temporal dynamics of attention in particular about the allocation and the duration of an attentional episode. We compared 11 high…

The study examined the effects of mirror feedback information on neuromuscular activation during bimanual coordination in eight children with spastic hemiparetic cerebral palsy (SHCP) and a matched control group. The "mirror box" creates a visual illusion, which gives rise to a visual perception of a zero lag, symmetric movement between the two…

Aim: The cognitive deficits present in the Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) are not yet well characterized. Attention, considered to be the brain mechanism responsible for the selection of sensory stimuli, could be disturbed in DMD, contributing, at least partially, to the observed global cognitive deficit. The aim of this study was to…

We present data indicating that visual awareness for a basic perceptual feature (colour) can be influenced by the relation between the feature and the semantic properties of the stimulus. We examined semantic interference from the meaning of a colour word ("RED") on simple colour (ink related) detection responses in a patient with simultagnosia…

The neuropsychological literature on the processing of emotions in Parkinson's disease (PD) reveals conflicting evidence about the role of the basal ganglia in the recognition of facial emotions. Hence, the present study had two objectives. One was to determine the extent to which the visual processing of emotions and objects differs in PD. The…