This research uses enclosed whole shapes, rather than visual form fragments, to demonstrate that children's use of local geometric information is influenced by global shapes in small-scale spaces. Three- to six-year-old children and adults participated in two experiments with a table-top task. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a…

While hemispheric differences in global/local processing have been reported by various studies, it is still under dispute at which processing stage they occur. Primarily, it was assumed that these asymmetries originate from an early perceptual stage. Instead, the content-level binding theory (Hubner & Volberg, 2005) suggests that the hemispheres…

Learning about the structure of the world requires learning probabilistic relationships: rules in which cues do not predict outcomes with certainty. However, in some cases, the ability to track probabilistic relationships is a handicap, leading adults to perform non-normatively in prediction tasks. For example, in the "dilution effect,"…

Previous studies have revealed that young infants can distinguish between displays of possible or impossible figures, which may require detection of inconsistent depth relations among local line junctions that disrupt global object configurations. Here, we used an eye-tracking paradigm to record eye movements in young infants during an object…

Research suggests that the relational completion procedure (RCP) is effective for studying derived relations of same and opposite. Previously, procedural parameters, such as the presence or absence of a confirmatory response requirement, were found to have a facilitative effect on the number of training trials to criterion and overall arbitrary…

Previous studies have reported that infants selectively reproduce observed actions and have argued that this selectivity reflects understanding of intentions and goals, or goal-directed imitation. We reasoned that if selective imitation of goal-directed actions reflects understanding of intentions, infants should demonstrate stability across…

The traditional view of satiation is that repeated consumption produces an unavoidable decline in liking according to the quantity and recency of consumption. We challenge this deterministic view by showing that satiation is instead partially constructed in the moment based on contextual cues. More specifically, while satiation is a function of…

Our visual system is highly sensitive to regularities in the environment. Locations that were important in one's previous experience are often prioritized during search, even though observers may not be aware of the learning. In this study we characterized the guidance of spatial attention by incidental learning of a target's spatial probability,…

Previous evidence on neurotypical adults shows that the presentation of a stimulus allocates the attention to its modality, resulting in faster responses to a subsequent target presented in the same (vs. different) modality. People with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) often fail to detect a (visual or auditory) target in a stream of stimuli after…

In the face of underspecified utterances, listeners routinely and without much apparent effort make the right kinds of pragmatic inferences about a speaker's intended meaning. This dissertation investigates the processing of scalar implicatures as a way of addressing how listeners perform this remarkable feat. In particular, the role of context in…

We investigated the influence of control over a social stimulus on the ability to detect direct gaze in high-functioning autism (HFA). In a pilot study, 19 participants with and 19 without HFA were compared on a gaze detection and a gaze setting task. Participants with HFA were less accurate in detecting direct gaze in the detection task, but did…

According to some theories imitation, defined as an action resonance mechanism, is deficient in autism. In contrast, other theories (e.g., the "top down control of imitation" hypothesis) state that the problem is not in imitation per se but in the way social cues modulate imitative responses. In this study, 15 high-functioning children with autism…

Effective processing of sensory input in daily life requires attentional selection and amplification of relevant input and, just as importantly, attenuation of irrelevant information. It has been proposed that top-down modulation of oscillatory alpha band activity (8-14 Hz) serves to allocate resources to various regions, depending on task…

Propositional models of evaluative conditioning postulate that the impact of stimulus pairings on liking should depend not on the pairings themselves but on what the pairings imply about the relation between stimuli. Hence, context manipulations that change the implications of stimulus pairings should moderate evaluative conditioning. We…

The purpose of this investigation is to explore the use by Spanish excellent oesophageal speakers of acoustic cues to mark syllabic stress. The speech material has consisted of five pairs of disyllabic words which only differed in stress position. Total 44 oesophageal and 9 laryngeal speakers were recorded and a computerised designed "ad…