The process of word segmentation is flexible, with many strategies potentially available to learners. This experiment explores how segmentation cues interact, and whether successful resolution of cue competition is related to general executive functioning. Participants listened to artificial speech streams that contained both statistical and…

Literature on sound sensitivity in individuals with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is reviewed in this article. Empirical evidence is examined, and physiologic and psychoemotional-behavioral perspectives are described. There is virtually no evidence of true physiological differences in auditory systems of individuals with ASD. It is…

The focus of this study was the developmental pattern of the ability to shift attention between global and local levels of hierarchical stimuli. Children aged 7 years and 11 years and 21-year-old adults were administered a task (two experiments) that allowed for the examination of 1) the direction of attention to global or local stimulus levels;…

Two preferential-reaching experiments explored 5- and 7-month-olds' sensitivity to pictorial depth cues. In the first experiment, infants viewed a display in which texture gradients, linear perspective of the surface contours, and relative height in the visual field provided information that two objects were at different distances. Five- and…

In the present study, we examined if young infants can extract information regarding the directionality of biological motion. We report that 6-month-old infants can differentiate leftward and rightward motions from a movie depicting the sagittal view of an upright human point-light walker, walking as if on a treadmill. Inversion of the stimuli…

Two studies illustrate the functional significance of a new category of prelinguistic vocalizing--object-directed vocalizations (ODVs)--and show that these sounds are connected to learning about words and objects. Experiment 1 tested 12-month-old infants' perceptual learning of objects that elicited ODVs. Fourteen infants' vocalizations were…

In this study, we asked whether 14- and 18-month-old infants use the experiences they have previously shared with others when deciding what to point to for them declaratively. After sharing a particular type of referent with an adult in an excited manner, 18-month-olds subsequently found a picture of that type of referent more worthy of…

It is well attested that 14-month-olds have difficulty learning similar sounding words (e.g., bih/dih), despite their excellent phonetic discrimination abilities. By contrast, Rost and McMurray (2009) recently demonstrated that 14-month-olds' minimal-pair learning can be improved by the presentation of words by multiple talkers. This study…

This study compared inhibitory functioning among ADHD subtype groups on manual and visual versions of the stop task. Seventy-six children, identified as ADHD/I (n = 17), ADHD/C (n = 43), and comparison (n = 20) completed both tasks. Results indicated that both ADHD groups were slower to inhibit responses than the comparison group on both tasks.…

The "credit card effect" describes a finding where greater value is given to consumer items if credit card logos are present. One explanation for the effect is that credit cards elicit spending behavior through associative learning. If this is true, social, economic and historical contexts should alter this effect. In Experiment 1, Year…

Previous research has revealed that a stimulus presented in the blind visual field of participants with visual hemifield defects can evoke oculomotor competition, in the absence of awareness. Here we studied three cases to determine whether a distractor in a blind hemifield would be capable of inducing a "global effect", a shift of saccade…

This study examined predictions based upon the right hemisphere (RH) model, the valence-arousal model, and a recently proposed integrated model (Killgore & Yurgelun-Todd, 2007) of emotion processing by testing immediate recall and recognition memory for positive, negative, and neutral verbal stimuli among 35 right-handed women. Building upon…

Mathematicians have proven that four colors are sufficient to color 2-D maps so that no neighboring regions share the same color. Here we consider the psychological 4-color problem: Identifying which 4 colors should be used to make a map easy to use. We build a model of visual search for this design task and demonstrate how to apply it to the task…

Purpose: Delayed auditory feedback is a technique that can improve fluency in stutterers, while disrupting fluency in many nonstuttering individuals. The aim of this study was to determine the neural basis for the detection of and compensation for such a delay, and the effects of increases in the delay duration. Method: Positron emission…

This study assessed a simple behavioral strategy for reducing stereotypic tongue protrusion and forward head tilting displayed by a woman and a man with severe to profound intellectual disabilities. The strategy involved (a) auditory prompting (i.e., verbal encouragements to keep the tongue in the mouth or the head upright) delivered automatically…