Integrating evidence from multiple sources to guide decisions is something humans do on a daily basis. Existing research suggests that not all sources of information are weighted equally in decision-making tasks, and that observers are subject to biases in the face of internal and external noise. Here we describe two experiments that measured…

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological…

Emotion recognition research in autism has provided conflicting results and has ignored the role of context. We examined if autistic adolescents use context to identify displayed and felt emotion. Twenty adolescents with autism and 20 age-matched neurotypical adolescents identified emotions from a standardised set of images. The groups also viewed…

Given the profound influence that technology has on society, shaping our behaviours, conversations, and decisions, it is essential to understand its development and nature. Obtaining a complete understanding of technology requires us to explore both the nature of technology and its historical aspects. This study examines how using supportive…

The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of…

Individual differences in face identification ability range from prosopagnosia to super-recognition. The current study examined whether face identification ability predicts voice identification ability (participants: N = 529). Superior-face-identifiers (exceptional at face memory and matching), superior-face-recognisers (exceptional at face memory…

Purpose: Prelingual deaf children with cochlear implants show lower digit span test scores compared to normal-hearing peers, suggesting a working memory impairment. To pinpoint more precisely the subprocesses responsible for this impairment, we designed a sequence reproduction task with varying length (two to six stimuli), modality (auditory or…

The "Star Trek" franchise presents a hopeful vision of the future that is free from many of the social issues that plague our current society. This research explores "Star Trek's" utopian vision through a disabled lens, presenting a critical content analysis examining the representation of mobility disability in the "Star…

Studies have supported two different hypotheses of reduced eye gaze in people with ASD; gaze "avoidance" and gaze "indifference," while less is known about the role of anxiety. We tested these hypotheses using an eye-tracking paradigm that cued the eyes or mouth of emotional faces. Autistic children (n = 12, mean age 7 years)…

People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often report difficulty remembering information in their everyday lives. Recent findings suggest that such difficulties may be due to PTSD-related deficits in parsing ongoing activity into discrete events, a process called "event segmentation." Here, we investigated the causal…

Research consistently shows that autistic adults do not attend to faces as much as non-autistic adults. However, this conclusion is largely based on studies using pre-recorded videos or photographs as stimuli. In studies using real social scenarios, the evidence is not as clear. To explore the extent to which differences in findings relate to…

Previous studies on value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) have demonstrated that the uncertainty of reward value modulates attentional allocation via associative learning. However, it is unclear whether such attentional exploration is executed based on the amount of potential reward information available for refining value prediction or the…

This study explores how three widely used US kindergarten mathematics textbooks, each written to align with the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM), vary in terms of content coverage, instructional grouping, and use of representational strategies. Results show that all textbooks (i) primarily emphasize math practices related to…

This study examined how toddler looking to a discourse referent is mediated by the information status of the referent and the pitch contour of the referring expression. Eighteen-month-olds saw a short discourse of three sets of images with the proportion of looking time to a target analyzed during the final image. At test, the information status…

Although the positive effects of congruency between stimuli are well replicated in face memory paradigms, mixed findings have been found in face matching. Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, face masks are now very common during daily life outdoor activities. Thus, the present study aims to further explore congruency effects in matching faces…