The size congruity effect (SiCE) shows that number and physical size interact as magnitudes. That is, response times are faster when number and size are congruent (e.g., 2 4) than when they are incongruent (e.g., 2 4). A shared representational system has been the most influential account for the SiCE. Recently, this account has been challenged by…

Studies examining video modeling and visual activity schedules independent of one another have been shown to be effective in teaching skills for students with autism, but there is little research about the effectiveness of combining the two methods. Use of visual activity schedules with embedded video models via an iPad application was…

How is semantic memory influenced by individual differences under conditions of distraction? This question was addressed by observing how participants recalled visual target words-drawn from a single category-while ignoring spoken distractor words that were members of either the same or a different (single) category. Working memory capacity (WMC)…

Do words cue children's visual attention, and if so, what are the relevant mechanisms? Across four experiments, 3-year-old children (N = 163) were tested in visual search tasks in which targets were cued with only a visual preview versus a visual preview and a spoken name. The experiments were designed to determine whether labels facilitated…

Our visual brain is remarkable in extracting invariant properties from the noisy environment, guiding selection of where to look and what to identify. However, how the brain achieves this is still poorly understood. Here we explore interactions of local context and global structure in the long-term learning and retrieval of invariant display…

"Heuristic" theories of autism postulate that a single mechanism or process underpins the diverse psychological features of autism spectrum disorder. Although no such theory can offer a comprehensive account, the parsimonious descriptions they provide are powerful catalysts to autism research. One recent proposal holds that…

Purpose: Although traditional study of auditory training has been in controlled laboratory settings, interest has been increasing in more interactive options. The authors examine whether such interactive training can result in short-term perceptual learning, and the range of perceptual skills it impacts. Method: Experiments 1 (N = 37) and 2 (N =…

Purpose: This study compared the use of 2 different types of contextual cues (sentence based and situation based) in 2 different modalities (visual only and auditory only). Method: Twenty young adults were tested with the Illustrated Sentence Test (Tye-Murray, Hale, Spehar, Myerson, & Sommers, 2014) and the Speech Perception in Noise Test…

This study explores whether children can use gesture to inform their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. Specifically, we ask whether four- to eight-year-old English-speaking children are sensitive to information contained in co-referential localizing gestures in video narrations. The data show that the older (7-8 years of age) but not younger…

The gender and number of a direct object clitic pronoun are based on the gender and number of the noun to which it refers. Grammatical gender is an intrinsic property of the lexical item that is independent from the natural sex of referents, whereas number is a non-intrinsic feature of nouns based on the conceptual level of quantity. The aim of…

Inversion effect in biological motion perception has been recently attributed to an innate sensitivity of the visual system to the gravity-dependent dynamic of the motion. However, the specific cues that determine the inversion effect in naïve subjects were never investigated. In the present study, we have assessed the contribution of the local…

Purpose: The present study examined cochlear implant (CI) users' perception of vowels presented concurrently (i.e., "double vowels") to further our understanding of auditory grouping in electric hearing. Method: Identification of double vowels and single vowels was measured with 10 CI subjects. Fundamental frequencies (F0s) of…

In this study, we examined the effects of emotional experience, a relatively new dimension of emotional knowledge that gauges the ease with which words evoke emotional experience, on abstract word processing in the Stroop task. In order to test the context-dependency of these effects, we accentuated the saliency of this dimension in Experiment 1A…

We examined whether adults with dementia could learn to emit a picture-based communication response and if this skill would maintain over time. Three women with moderate to severe dementia were taught to exchange a picture card for a highly preferred activity. All participants quickly learned to exchange the picture card and maintained this…

There's extensive research on infant's discrimination of speaking voices but few studies have focused on infant's discrimination of singing voices. Most investigations on infants' perception of timbre in music have been based on instrumental sounds. We completed an experiment with 7-and 13-month-olds (n = 16 and n = 17…