Two experiments investigated 5-month-old infants' amodal sensitivity to numerical correspondences between sets of objects presented in the tactile and visual modes. A classical cross-modal transfer task from touch to vision was adopted. Infants were first tactually familiarized with two or three different objects presented one by one in their…

In three experiments, participants listened for a target's pitch change within recurrent nine-tone patterns having largely isochronous rhythms. Patterns differed in pitch structure of initial (context) and final (target distance) pattern segments. Also varied were: probe timing (Experiments 2 and 3) and instructions about probe timing (Experiments…

Bottleneck models of psychological refractory period (PRP) tasks suggest that a Task 1 response should be unaffected by the Task 2 response in the same trial, because selection of the former finishes before selection of the latter begins. Contrary to this conception, the authors found backward response-level crosstalk effects in which Task 2…

This study examined the hypothesis of superior quantification abilities of persons with high functioning autism (HFA). Fourteen HFA individuals (mean age: 15 years) individually matched with 14 typically developing (TD) participants (gender, chronological age, full-scale IQ) were asked to quantify as accurately and quickly as possible…

This study examined the development of neural processing of auditorally presented words in high functioning children with autism. The purpose was to test the hypothesis that electrophysiological abnormalities associated with impairments in early cortical processing and in semantic processing persist into early adolescence in autistic individuals.…

Many studies of eye tracking or event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in subjects with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) have yielded inconsistent results on attentional processing. However, recent studies have indicated that there are specific abnormalities in early processing that are probably related to perception. ERP amplitudes in…

Clear and unequivocal evidence shows that observation of object affordances or transitive actions facilitates the activation of a compatible response. By contrast, the evidence showing response facilitation following observation of intransitive actions is less conclusive because automatic imitation and spatial compatibility have been confounded.…

Objective: To determine whether there is an age-specific incidence of hospitalized cases of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) that has similar properties to the previously reported ''normal crying curve,'' as a form of indirect evidence that crying is an important stimulus for SBS. Design and setting: The study analyzed cases of Shaken Baby Syndrome by…

Hemispheric asymmetries in global-local visual processing are well-established, as are gender differences in cognition. Although hemispheric asymmetry presumably underlies gender differences in cognition, the literature on gender differences in global-local processing is sparse. We employed event related brain potential (ERP) recordings during…

The present meta-analysis of the predictive validity of visual habituation and visual dishabituation shows that the weighted and normalized average correlation between infant habituation/dishabituation and childhood cognitive performance is 0.37. In contrast to the findings of earlier reviews, for risk samples, dishabituation is apparently…

Conditional directives are used by speakers to instruct hearers which actions are to be taken should certain events occur. The authors demonstrate that conditional directives are distinct from indicative conditionals in which speakers predict what is likely to be observed should certain events occur. The 1st set of experiments shows that goal…

Screeners at airport security checkpoints perform an important categorization task in which they search for threat items in complex x-ray images. But little is known about how the processes of categorization stand up to visual complexity. The authors filled this research gap with screening tasks in which participants searched for members of target…

In 3 experiments, the authors manipulated response instructions for 2 concurrently performed tasks. Specifically, the authors' instructions described left and right keypresses on a manual task either as left versus right or as blue versus green keypresses and required either "left" versus "right" or "blue" versus "green" concurrent verbalizations.…

This study was designed to differentiate between structural description and bias accounts of performance in the possible/impossible object-decision test. Two event-related potential (ERP) studies examined how the visual system processes structurally possible and impossible objects. Specifically, the authors investigated the effects of object…

During locomotion, retinal flow, gaze angle, and vestibular information can contribute to one's perception of self-motion. Their respective roles were investigated during active steering: Retinal flow and gaze angle were biased by altering the visual information during computer-simulated locomotion, and vestibular information was controlled…