Understanding the intentional actions of others is a fundamental part of human social cognition and behavior. An important question is therefore whether other animal species, especially our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, also understand the intentional actions of others. Here we show that chimpanzees spontaneously (without training) behave…

It only makes sense to talk about the position of a moving object if one specifies the time at which its position is of interest. The authors here show that when a flash or tone specifies the moment of interest, subjects estimate the moving object to be closer to where it passes the fixation point and further in its direction of motion than it…

In a previous study, it was shown that the attentional blink (AB)--the failure to recall the 2nd of 2 visual targets (T1 and T2) presented within 500 ms in rapid serial visual presentation--is reduced when T2 is preceded by a distractor that shares a feature with T2 (e.g., color; Nieuwenstein, Chun, van der Lubbe & Hooge, 2005). Here, this cuing…

Visual attention is preattentively drawn to abrupt onsets of stimuli appearing in a visual array. In this experiment, I examined the speed of attentional capture for persons with and without mental retardation. Participants identified target stimuli that were signaled by a valid location cue (20% of the time), an invalid location cue (60% of the…

Fifteen young adults with intellectual disability and 17 college students learned the locations of 5 landmarks on an island map and then scanned from one landmark to another. In the perception condition, the landmarks were visible; in the imagery condition, they were not. The rate of scanning over distance was similar for perception and imagery…

The authors investigated the effect of action gaming on the spatial distribution of attention. The authors used the flanker compatibility effect to separately assess center and peripheral attentional resources in gamers versus nongamers. Gamers exhibited an enhancement in attentional resources compared with nongamers, not only in the periphery but…

Purpose: To study the role of visual perception of phonemes in visual perception of sentences and words among normal-hearing individuals. Method: Twenty-four normal-hearing adults identified consonants, words, and sentences, spoken by either a human or a synthetic talker. The synthetic talker was programmed with identical parameters within phoneme…

It is not known why people move their eyes when engaged in non-visual cognition. The current study tested the hypothesis that differences in saccadic eye movement rate (EMR) during non-visual cognitive tasks reflect different requirements for searching long-term memory. Participants performed non-visual tasks requiring relatively low or high…

Recent eye tracking studies of face processing have produced differing accounts of how and whether children with autism differ from their typically developing peers. The two groups' gaze patterns appear to differ for dynamic videos of social scenes, but not for static photos of isolated individuals. The present study replicated and extended…

Although it is acknowledged that adults integrate features into a representation of the whole face, there is still some disagreement about the onset and developmental course of holistic face processing. We tested adults and children from 4 to 6 years of age with the same paradigm measuring holistic face processing through an adaptation of the…

Patients diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, show impaired integration of information across different senses. The processing-level from which this impairment originates, however, remains unclear. We investigated low-level integration of auditory and visual stimuli in subjects with Autism Spectrum Disorder. High-functioning adult subjects…

We used a reference memory paradigm to examine whether 4- and 5-year-old children could be trained to use landmark features to relocate targets after disorientation. In Experiment 1, half of the children were pretrained in a small equilateral triangle-shaped room. Each of the three walls was a different color, and the target was always in the…

Researchers know little about whether very young children can recognize objects originally introduced to them in a picture book when they encounter similar looking objects in various real-world contexts. The present studies used an imitation procedure to explore young children's ability to generalize a novel action sequence from a picture book to…

Prime pictures of emotional scenes appeared in parafoveal vision, followed by probe pictures either congruent or incongruent in affective valence. Participants responded whether the probe was pleasant or unpleasant (or whether it portrayed people or animals). Shorter latencies for congruent than for incongruent prime-probe pairs revealed affective…

One of the defining cognitive characteristics of the chromosome 22q deletion syndrome (DS22q11.2) is visuospatial processing impairments. The purpose of this study was to investigate and extend the specific attentional profile of children with this disorder using both an object-based attention task and an inhibition of return task. A group of…