This study examined iconic gesture comprehension in autism, with the goal of assessing whether cross-modal processing difficulties impede speech-and-gesture integration. Participants were 19 adolescents with high functioning autism (HFA) and 20 typical controls matched on age, gender, verbal IQ, and socio-economic status (SES). Gesture…

Baby media have exploded in the past decade, and children younger than 2 are showing increased use of these baby media. This paper examines the historical evidence of babies' use of television since the 1950s as well as the various factors that have given rise to the current increase in screen media for babies. We also consider the ubiquitous role…

Two lexical decision experiments examined the joint effects of stimulus quality, semantic context, and cue-target associative strength when all factors were intermixed in a block of trials. Both experiments found a three-way interaction. Semantic context and stimulus quality interacted when associative strength between cue-target pairs was strong,…

Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anaphora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year-olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing…

To examine the ontogeny of emotion-attention interactions, we investigated whether infants exhibit adult-like biases in automatic and voluntary attentional processes towards fearful facial expressions. Heart rate and saccadic eye movements were measured from 7-month-old infants (n = 42) while viewing non-face control stimuli, and neutral, happy,…

Moves are afoot at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) to acknowledge disability within the overall experience of student life. Scheduled to launch in time for UTS Orientation 2010, "UTS AccessAbility" is a student-generated web presence addressing the significant additional layer that experiences of disability add to study…

There is now a large body of evidence suggesting that color and photographic detail exert an effect on recognition of visually presented familiar objects. However, an unresolved issue is whether these factors act at the visual, the semantic or lexical level of the recognition process. In the present study, we investigated this issue by having…

By way of reclamation of the metaphor "green," this paper contends that research regarding the relationships between children's literatures and cultures and environmental experience requires a reinvigorated consideration of the role of the visual. The heightened importance of visual texts is made evident via three primary, contemporary conditions…

Effective use of computers in education for children requires consideration of individual and developmental characteristics of users. There is limited empirical evidence, however, to guide educational programming when it comes to children and their acquisition of computing skills. This paper reports on the influence of previous experience and…

This study investigated the visual information that children and adults consider while switching or maintaining object-matching rules. Eye movements of 5- and 6-year-old children and adults were collected with two versions of the Advanced Dimensional Change Card Sort, which requires switching between shape- and color-matching rules. In addition to…

We aimed to clarify the importance of early visual processing deficits for the formation of cognitive deficits in the schizophrenia spectrum. We carried out an event-related potential (ERP) study using a computerised delayed matching to sample working memory (WM) task on a sample of volunteers with high and low scores on the Schizotypal…

Work systems provide visual information and organization for students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and assist in increasing on-task behavior and productivity while simultaneously decreasing adult prompting. Work systems are a core component of the Treatment and Education of Autistic and Related Communication-Handicapped Children…

Empirical evidence demonstrating that sentence meaning is rapidly reconciled with the visual environment has been broadly construed as supporting the seamless interaction of visual and linguistic representations during situated comprehension. Based on recent behavioral and neuroscientific findings, however, we argue for the more deeply rooted…

Two experiments investigated preschoolers' interference control in variants of the day-night task. The day-night task involves instructing children across 16 trials to say the word "day" when viewing a card depicting a nighttime sky and to say "night" when shown a picture of the daytime sky. The purpose of the experiments was to investigate…

Past research has shown that top-heaviness is a perceptual property that plays a crucial role in triggering newborns' preference toward faces. The present study examined the contribution of a second configural property, "congruency," to newborns' face preference. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that when embedded in nonfacelike stimuli,…