Our visual system samples external information, adjusts its sensitivity and constructs a stable representation of the world that allows us to perceive and interact with objects in our environments. Visual information with different levels of complexity is processed through the hierarchically organized visual cortical areas. This dissertation…

Previous studies have indicated that visual-auditory temporal acuity is reduced in children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) in comparison to neurotypicals. In the present study we investigated temporal acuity for all possible bimodal pairings of visual, tactile and auditory information in adults with ASC (n = 18) and a matched control group…

Does visuospatial orientation influence repetition and transposed character (TC) priming effects in logographic scripts? According to perceptual learning accounts, the nature of orthographic (form) priming effects should be influenced by text orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast,…

In human adults, visual dominance emerges in several multisensory tasks. In children, auditory dominance has been reported up to 4 years of age. To establish when sensory dominance changes during development, 41 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were tested on the Colavita task (Experiment 1) and 32 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were…

Four experiments examined how faces compete with physically salient stimuli for the control of attention in 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants (N = 117 total). Three computational models were used to quantify physical salience. We presented infants with visual search arrays containing a face and familiar object(s), such as shoes and flowers. Six- and…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by differences in unimodal and multimodal sensory and proprioceptive processing, with complex biases towards local over global processing. Many of these elements are implicated in versions of the rubber hand illusion (RHI), which were therefore studied in high-functioning individuals with ASD and a…

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…

Perceptual processing in autism is associated with both "strengths" and "weaknesses" but within a literature that varies widely in terms of the assessments used. We report data from 12 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 12 age and IQ matched neurotypical controls tested on a set of tasks using the same stimuli…

Autistic people are better at perceiving details. Major theories explain this in terms of bottom-up sensory mechanisms or in terms of top-down cognitive biases. Recently, it has become possible to link these theories within a common framework. This framework assumes that perception is implicit neural inference, combining sensory evidence with…

Congruency effects were examined using a manual response version of the Stroop task in which the relationship between the colour word and its hue on incongruent trials was either kept constant or varied randomly across different pairings within the stimulus set. Congruency effects were increased in the condition where the incongruent hue-word…

The primary focus of this research study was to examine the benefit of a using a multimodal approach to speech sound correction with preschool children. The approach uses the auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic modalities and includes a unique, interactive visual focus that attempts to provide a visual representation of a phonemic category. The…

While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages…

Previous studies have shown that infants, including newborns, can match previously unseen and unheard human faces and vocalizations. More recently, it has been reported that infants as young as 4 months of age also can match the faces and vocalizations of other species raising the possibility that such broad multisensory perceptual tuning is…

Practicing a visual task commonly results in improved performance. Often the improvement does not transfer well to a new retinal location, suggesting that it is mediated by changes occurring in early visual cortex, and indeed neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies both demonstrate that perceptual learning is associated with altered activity…

Recently, Redford (2010) found that monkeys seemed to exert metacognitive control in a category-learning paradigm. Specifically, they selected more trials to view as the difficulty of the category-learning task increased. However, category-learning difficulty was determined by manipulating the family resemblance across the to-be-learned exemplars.…