Background: Individuals with autism exhibit impairments in face recognition, and neuroimaging studies have shown that individuals with autism exhibit abnormal patterns of brain activity during face processing. The current study examined the temporal characteristics of face processing in autism and their relation to behavior. Method: High-density…

This study investigated gender differences in communication effectiveness between popular and unpopular 5- to 7-year-old children. Because previous research suggests that there may be gender differences in how popular and unpopular children communicate with each other, 24 same-gender pairs (each containing a popular and an unpopular child) were…

The present study focused on age and SES differences in stress reactivity in response to cognitively challenging tasks. Specifically, we assessed within-person trajectories of cortisol, a steroid hormone released by the adrenal gland in response to stressors, before, during, and after exposure to cognitively challenging tasks. We extend the…

Thirty-one 8- and 9-year-old children selected for dyscalculia, reading difficulties or both, were compared to controls on a range of basic number processing tasks. Children with dyscalculia only had impaired performance on the tasks despite high-average performance on tests of IQ, vocabulary and working memory tasks. Children with reading…

When two masked targets are presented in a rapid sequence, correct identification of the first hinders identification of the second. This attentional blink (AB) is thought to be the result of capacity limitations in visual information processing. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence implicated the right hemisphere as the source of this…

In the first part of this study, we investigated effects of item and task type on span performance in a group of aphasic individuals with word processing and STM deficits. Group analyses revealed significant effects of item on span performance with span being greater for digits than for words. We also investigated associations between subjects'…

The extent to which learners conform to the structure, aims and linguistic demands of a task is often seen as the responsibility of the materials writer and/or teacher. Given a logical rubric, well-designed task and clear classroom instructions, it is often assumed that the task will be approached as intended. When a task is enacted differently,…

This study examined the effect of structural and content characteristics of language tasks on foreign language learners' conversational negotiations. In a 2x2 Greco-Latin square design, degree of structural support of language tasks, students' degree of familiarity with German video segments, and task order were varied. Twenty-eight pairs of…

Pitch constancy, perceiving the same pitch from tones with differing spectral shapes, requires one to extract the fundamental frequency from two sets of harmonics and compare them. We previously showed this difficult task to be easier when tonal context is present, presumably because the context creates a tonal reference point from which to judge…

In the present experiment, the authors tested Mandarin and English listeners on a range of auditory tasks to investigate whether long-term linguistic experience influences the cognitive processing of nonspeech sounds. As expected, Mandarin listeners identified Mandarin tones significantly more accurately than English listeners; however,…

We evaluated the use of a video prompting procedure for teaching three adults with developmental disabilities to make popcorn using a microwave oven. Training, using a 10-step task analysis, was conducted in the kitchen of the participant's vocational training program. During baseline, participants were instructed to make popcorn, but were given…

The potential of virtual environments for teaching people with autism has been positively promoted in recent years. The present study aimed to systematically investigate this potential with 12 participants with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs), each individually matched with comparison participants according to either verbal IQ or performance…

Global-local processing was examined in high-functioning children with autism and in groups of typically developing children. In experiment 1, the effects of structural bias were tested by comparing visual search that favored access to either local or global targets. The children with autism were not unusually sensitive to either level of visual…

Central coherence theory hypothesizes individuals with autism process information in a detail-focused fashion. The present study examined whether adolescents with an intellectual disability and comorbid autism spectrum disorder showed a weaker central coherence than age- and IQ-matched controls. The central coherence skills of 43 adolescents from…

Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner "the" preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was…