Using normal adult readers, this study examined the relative involvement of magnocellular and parvocellular processes in reading English phonologically regular pseudowords and irregular words presented in isolation and in contiguity from left to right. The data showed that a low temporal frequency visual measure that implied more parvocellular…

Visual perception may be a developmental prerequisite to some types of social understanding. The ability to perceive social information given visual motion appears to develop early. However, children with autism have profound deficits in social cognitive function and may fail to see social motion in the same way that typically developing children…

This study examined 2- to 3-year-olds' ability to make a pretend-real distinction in the absence of content cues. Children watched two actors side by side. One was really eating, and the other was pretending to eat, but in neither case was information about content available. Following the displays, children were asked to retrieve the real food…

Background: Investigations of the cognitive processes underlying specific language impairment (SLI) have implicated deficits in the storage and processing of phonological information, but to date these abilities have not been studied in the same group of children with SLI. Aims: To examine the extent to which deficits in immediate verbal…

The current study examined the reinforcing effects of choosing among alternatives in a four-part evaluation. In the first study, initial-link responses in a concurrent-chains arrangement resulted in access to terminal links in which the completion of an academic task resulted in (a) the choice of a reinforcer (choice), (b) the delivery of an…

How long does it take to form a durable representation in visual working memory? Several theorists have proposed that this consolidation process is very slow. Here, we measured the time course of consolidation. Observers performed a change-detection task for colored squares, and shortly after the presentation of the first array, pattern masks were…

Case reports and sensory inventories suggest that autism involves sensory processing anomalies. Behavioral tests indicate impaired motion and normal form perception in autism. The present study used first-person accounts to investigate perceptual anomalies and related subjective to psychophysical measures. Nine high-functioning children with…

The influences of domain-specific meteorological knowledge and general visual-spatial abilities on the comprehension of simple weather maps were examined in a regression-based study involving a sample of participants with relatively low meteorological knowledge and in an experiment involving a contrast between samples of higher- and…

Textons are elongated blobs of specific color, angular orientation, ends of lines, and crossings of line segments that are proposed to be the perceptual building blocks of the visual system. A study was conducted to explore the relative memorability of different types and arrangements of textons, exploring the time course for the discrimination…

Demonstrates that discrimination training with verbal materials (words and letters) is generally more helpful than training with non-verbal forms. (RB)

Reviews examples from the recent psychological literature relating to object orientation and constancy. The conclusion is reached that the attempt to separate the constancy and discrimination questions in an experimental design employing only a single dependent variable fails practically and theoretically. A theoretically more acceptable…

One method of computing the optimum size of lettering for slides and TV title cards. (Author)

Described is a system for evaluating a child's learning pattern. It is explained that the evaluation is based on a social history, visual screening (including acuity, functional skills, pursuit skills and binocularity skills), auditory evaluation, motor assessment, and academic testing. (CL)

Confirmed the hypothesis that those in the three-dimensional instructional group would make fewer confusion errors that those in the two-dimensional instructional group on a transfer task in reading. (RB)

To investigate the possible cue (stimulus) as opposed to motivational functions of drive and reward, this study assessed the effects of problem difficulty, reward magnitude, and drive level on the performance of rats in visual discrimination tasks entailing both choice and speed measures. (Editor/RK)