Children with autism have been shown to be less susceptible to Kanisza type contour illusions than children without autism (Happe, 1996). Other authors have suggested that this finding could be explained by the fact that participants with autism were required to make a potentially ambiguous verbal response which may have masked whether or not they…

We describe the performance of an aphasic individual who showed a selective impairment affecting his comprehension of auditorily presented number words and not other word categories. His difficulty in number word comprehension was restricted to the auditory modality, given that with visual stimuli (written words, Arabic numerals and pictures) his…

This study investigated whether masked priming is mediated by existing memory representations by determining whether nonwords targets would show repetition priming. To avoid the potential confound that nonword repetition priming would be obscured by a familiarity response bias, the standard lexical decision and naming tasks were modified to make…

To examine visual and verbal coding strategies, I asked children with intellectual disabilities and peers matched for MA and CA to perform picture memory span tasks with phonologically similar, visually similar, long, or nonsimilar named items. The CA group showed effects consistent with advanced verbal memory coding (phonological similarity and…

Over the history of the study of visual perception there has been great success at discovering countless visual illusions. There has been less success in organizing the overwhelming variety of illusions into empirical generalizations (much less explaining them all via a unifying theory). Here, this article shows that it is possible to…

In cross-dimensional visual search tasks, target discrimination is faster when the previous trial contained a target defined in the same visual dimension as the current trial. The dimension-weighting account (DWA; A. Found & H. J. Muller, 1996) explains this intertrial facilitation by assuming that visual dimensions are weighted at an early…

This study examined three visual strategies for timing the initiation of the landing flare based on perceptions of either: (a) a critical height above ground level; (b) a critical runway width angle ([psi]); or (c) a critical time-to-contact (TTC) with the runway. Visual displays simulated landing approaches with trial-to-trial variations in…

The current study assessed the lateralization of function hypothesis (Rilea, S. L., Roskos-Ewoldsen, B., & Boles, D. (2004). "Sex differences in spatial ability: A lateralization of function approach." "Brain and Cognition," 56, 332-343) which suggested that it was the interaction of brain organization and the type of spatial task that led to sex…

An example of the auditory-visual illusion in speech perception, first described by McGurk and MacDonald, is the perception of [ta] when listeners hear [pa] in synchrony with the lip movements for [ka]. One account of the illusion is that lip-read and heard speech are combined in an articulatory code since people who mispronounce words respond…

Reading aloud is faster when targets (e.g., "PAIR") are preceded by visually masked primes sharing just the onset (e.g., "pole") compared to all different primes (e.g., "take"). This effect is known as the "masked onset priming effect" (MOPE). One crucial feature of this effect is its presumed non-lexical…

We used fMRI to directly compare activation in two cortical regions previously identified as relevant to real-world scene processing: retrosplenial cortex and a region of posterior parahippocampal cortex functionally defined as the parahippocampal place area (PPA). We compared activation in these regions to full views of scenes from a global…

This study was aimed at investigating face categorization strategies in children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). Performance of 17 children with ASD was compared to that of 17 control children in a face-matching task, including hybrid faces (composed of two overlapping faces of different spatial bandwidths) and either low- or high-pass…

Testing sensory characteristics on herpetological species has been difficult due to a range of properties related to physiology, responsiveness, performance ability, and the type of reinforcer used. Using the Jacky lizard as a model, we outline a successfully established procedure in which to test the visual sensitivity to motion characteristics.…

Previous work applying cognitive load theory has demonstrated the effect of various text/graphic/narration relations on learning using multimedia material. Other work has looked at how the degree of integration between the text and graphics influences their use. This study set out to look at how the degree of integration between text and graphics…

In this study, the authors wish to explore the use of visual representations in facilitating the understanding of multiplication. In doing so, they examine the different aspects of multiplication that they can access through different representations. In addition, they draw on a study that they have been carrying out looking at pupils' actual use…