We investigated whether individuals with a mild form of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are influenced by an actor's gaze direction when anticipating how an observed action will continue in the immediate future. Participants observed a head rotate towards them, while the gaze direction was either leading, or lagging behind, rotation. They also…

The exact roles of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in conditional choice behavior are unknown and a visual contextual response selection task was used for examining the issue. Inactivation of the mPFC severely disrupted performance in the task. mPFC inactivations, however, did not disrupt the capability of perceptual discrimination for visual…

Most adults experience childhood amnesia: They have very few memories of events prior to 3 to 4 years of age. Nevertheless, some early memories are retained. Multiple factors likely are responsible for the survival of early childhood memories, including external representations such as videos, photographs, and conversations about past experiences,…

The benefits of permanent pictorial prompts in enhancing maintenance and generalization are likely dependent on their degree of stimulus control and the extent to which their use is generalized. Although several studies on the use of pictorial prompts have demonstrated their efficacy (e.g., Pierce & Schreibman, 1994; Wacker & Berg, 1983; Wacker,…

Five individuals with autism or other developmental disabilities participated in paired-stimulus preference assessments during repeated baseline probes. All subjects initially showed a pronounced bias by typically selecting the stimulus placed in either the left or right position. Biased responding for 3 subjects was eliminated when training…

Drawing on data from a three-year Participatory Action Research project, undertaken with 41 teenage girls within and beyond the boundaries of a designated disadvantaged urban school, this article is an effort to critique the use of participatory methods as a means of producing different knowledge, and producing knowledge differently with students.…

This study was a systematic replication and extension of Fisher, Kodak, and Moore (2007), in which a picture prompt embedded into a least-to-most prompting sequence facilitated acquisition of auditory-visual conditional discriminations. Participants were 4 children who had been diagnosed with autism; 2 had limited prior receptive skills, and 2 had…

The role of gender categories in prototype formation during face recognition was investigated in 2 experiments. The participants were asked to learn individual faces and then to recognize them. During recognition, individual faces were mixed with faces, which were blended faces of same or different genders. The results of the 2 experiments showed…

When two targets (T1 and T2) are embedded in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), T2 is often missed (attentional blink, AB) if T2 follows T1 by less than 500 ms. Some have proposed that inhibition of a distractor following T1 contributes to the AB, but no direct evidence supports this proposal. This study examined distractor inhibition by…

Combining information from the visual and auditory senses can greatly enhance intelligibility of natural speech. Integration of audiovisual speech signals is robust even when temporal offsets are present between the component signals. In the present study, we characterized the temporal integration window for speech and nonspeech stimuli with…

Reasoning and Proof is one of the Process Standards set forth in National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM) "Principles and Standards for School Mathematics." Thus, it is important to give students opportunities to build their reasoning skills and aid their understanding of the proof process. Teaching students how to do proofs is a…

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…

Participants made categorical or coordinate spatial judgments on the global or local elements of shapes. Stimuli were composed of a horizontal line and two dots. In the Categorical task, participants judged whether the line was above or below the dots. In the Coordinate task, they judged whether the line would fit between the dots. Stimuli were…

Listeners rapidly adjust to talkers' pronunciations, accommodating those pronunciations into the relevant phonemic category to improve subsequent perception. Previous work has suggested that such learning is restricted to pronunciations that are representative of how the speaker talks (Kraljic, Samuel, & Brennan, 2008). If an ambiguous…

The iambic-trochaic law has been proposed to account for the grouping of auditory stimuli: Sequences of sounds that differ only in duration are grouped as iambs (i.e., the most prominent element marks the end of a sequence of sounds), and sequences that differ only in pitch or intensity are grouped as trochees (i.e., the most prominent element…