Background: Williams syndrome (WMS) is a rare genetic disorder with an estimated prevalence of 1 in 20,000 live births. Among other characteristics, WMS has a distinctive cognitive profile with spared face processing and language skills that contrasts with impairment in the cognitive domains of spatial cognition, problem solving and planning. It…

Learning movement sequences is thought to develop from an initial controlled attentive phase to a more automatic inattentive phase. Furthermore, execution of sequences becomes faster with practice, which may result from changes at a general motor processing level rather than at an effector specific motor processing level. In the current study, we…

Representing the spatial appearance of objects and scenes in drawings is a difficult task for young children in particular. In the present study, the relationship between spatial drawing and cognitive flexibility was investigated. Seven- to 11-year-olds (N = 60) were asked to copy a three-dimensional model in a drawing. The use of depth cues as an…

Psychological studies of face recognition have typically ignored within-person variation in appearance, instead emphasising differences "between" individuals. Studies typically assume that a photograph adequately captures a person's appearance, and for that reason most studies use just one, or a small number of photos per person. Here we show that…

Is it easier to detect angry or happy facial expressions in crowds of faces? The present studies used several variations of the visual search task to assess whether people selectively attend to expressive faces. Contrary to widely cited studies (e.g., Ohman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001) that suggest angry faces "pop out" of crowds, our review of…

What accounts for the Right Hemisphere (RH) functional superiority in visual change detection? An original task which combines one-shot and divided visual field paradigms allowed us to direct change information initially to the RH or the Left Hemisphere (LH) by deleting, respectively, an object included in the left or right half of a scene…

Atypical development of face processing is a major characteristic in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which could be due to atypical interactions between subcortical and cortical face processing. The current study investigated the saccade planning towards faces in ASD. Seventeen children with ASD and 17 typically developing (TD) children observed a…

This study aimed to explore the recognition of emotional and non-emotional biological movements in children with severe and profound deafness. Twenty-four deaf children, together with 24 control children matched on mental age and 24 control children matched on chronological age, were asked to identify a person's actions, subjective states,…

Research has shown that for acquiring problem-solving skills, instruction consisting of studying worked examples is more effective and efficient for novice learners than instruction consisting of problem-solving. This study investigated whether worked examples would also be a useful instructional format for the acquisition of visual perceptual…

This first Japanese twin study of early literacy development investigated the extent to which genetic and environmental factors influence individual differences in prereading skills in 238 pairs of twins at 42 months of age. Twin pairs were individually tested on measures of phonological awareness, "kana" letter name/sound knowledge,…

Mathematical Word Problem Solving of Students with Autistic Spectrum Disorders and Students with Typical Development Young Seh Bae This study investigated mathematical word problem solving and the factors associated with the solution paths adopted by two groups of participants (N=40), students with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and typically…

Visual and auditory verbal learning using a selective reminding format was studied in a mixed clinical sample of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (n = 42), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (n = 83), velocardiofacial syndrome (n = 17) and neurotypicals (n = 38) using the Test of Memory and Learning to (1) more thoroughly…

During prolonged observation of an ambiguous figure sudden perceptual reversals occur, while the stimulus itself stays unchanged. There is a vivid debate about whether bottom-up or top-down mechanisms underlie this phenomenon. In the present study, we investigated the interrelation of two experimental factors: volitional control and discontinuous…

A class of fourth-graders (nine-to-ten-year-olds) was taught art appreciation one day a week during an entire school year. Three years later their performance in visual awareness was tested and compared to the performance of pupils of the same age from another class who had not received any particular education in art appreciation. The results…

After multiple reviews of the literature, which documented that multiple cognitive processes may be involved in mathematics ability and disability, Geary (1993) proposed a model that included three subtypes of math disability: Semantic, Procedural, and Visuospatial. A review of the extant literature produced three studies that examined Geary's…