The present study investigates visual orienting to directional cues (arrow or eyes) in adults with high functioning autism (n = 19) and age matched controls (n = 19). A choice reaction time paradigm is used in which eye-or arrow direction correctly (congruent) or incorrectly (incongruent) cues target location. In typically developing participants,…

The authors conducted 3 experiments to explore the roles of curvature, density, and relative proximity in the perceptual organization of ambiguous dot patterns. To this end, they developed a new family of regular dot patterns that tend to be perceptually grouped into parallel contours, dot-sampled structured grids (DSGs). DSGs are similar to the…

D. N. Lee (1976) described a braking strategy based on optical expansion in which the driver brakes so that the target's time-to-contact declines around a constant slope in the range -0.5 less than or equal to tau less than 0. The present results from a series of braking simulations confirm and extend earlier reports (E. H. Yilmaz & W. H. Warren,…

Evidence suggests that adults in school settings are doing less than they should to stop student peer sexual harassment. When such behavior persists, it creates an intrusive environment that may interfere with learning. The study was designed to determine teachers' attitudes toward sexual harassment; their perceptions of sexually harassing student…

Do locomotor after effects depend specifically on visual feedback? In 7 experiments, 116 college students were tested, with closed eyes, at stationary running or at walking to a previewed target after adaptation, with closed eyes, to treadmill locomotion. Subjects showed faster inadvertent drift during stationary running and increased distance…

Using a lexical-decision task performed by Dutch-English bilinguals, the author showed that the recognition of visually presented first language (L1; e.g., touw) and second language (L2; e.g., back) targets is facilitated by L2 and L1 masked primes, respectively, which are pseudohomophones (roap and ruch) of the target's translation equivalent…

Contextual cuing refers to the facilitation of performance in visual search due to the repetition of the same displays. Whereas previous studies have focused on contextual cuing within single-search trials, this study tested whether 1 trial facilitates visual search of the next trial. Participants searched for a T among Ls. In the training phase,…

The authors investigated how 2-digit Arabic numerals are named by looking at the effects of masked primes on the naming latencies. Target numerals were named faster when prime and target shared a digit at the same position (e.g., the target 28 primed by 18 and 21). In contrast, naming latencies were slower when prime and target shared 1 or 2…

Point-light displays of human gait provide information sufficient to recognize the gender of a walker and are taken as evidence of the exquisite tuning of the visual system to biological motion. The authors revisit this topic with the goals of quantifying human efficiency at gender recognition. To achieve this, the authors first derive an ideal…

The enumeration of small numbers of objects (approximately 4) proceeds rapidly, accurately, and with little effort via a process termed subitization. Four experiments examined whether it was possible to subitize the number of features rather than objects present in a display. Overall, the findings showed that when features are presented randomly…

Six results are reported. (a) Reaching accuracy increases when visual capture of the target is allowed (e.g., target on vs. target off at saccade onset). (b) Whatever the visual condition, trajectories diverge only after peak acceleration, suggesting that accuracy is improved through feedback mechanisms. (c) Feedback corrections are smoothly…

Accumulating evidence suggests the existence of a processing bias in favor of threat-related stimulation in anxious individuals. Using behavioral and ERP measures, the present study investigated the deployment of attention to face stimuli with different emotion expressions in high-anxious and low-anxious participants. An attention-shifting…

Behavioral preferences for consonance over dissonance were tested in hearing infants of deaf parents and in hearing infants of hearing parents when they were 2 days old. Using a modified visual-fixation-based, auditory-preference procedure, I found that both 2-day-old infants of deaf parents and those of hearing parents looked longer at a visual…

Sequences of notes contain several different types of pitch cues, including both absolute and relative pitch information. What factors determine which of these cues are used when learning about tone sequences? Previous research suggests that infants tend to preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, while other…

The perirhinal cortex is known to be important for memory, but there has recently been interest in the possibility that it might also be involved in visual perceptual functions. In four experiments, we assessed visual discrimination ability and visual discrimination learning in severely amnesic patients with large medial temporal lobe lesions that…