Background: When looking at faces, we tend to attend more to the left visual field (corresponding to the right side of the person's face). This phenomenon is called the left visual field bias (LVF) and is presumed to reflect the brain's right-sided dominance for face processing. Whether alterations in hemispheric dominance are present in dyslexia,…

Recent studies reported a differential multisensory integration (MSI) in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Much of the research on MSI differences has focused on how visual stimuli influence speech processing. The present study takes a reverse perspective. We investigated if speech processing can affect the construction of low-level visual…

Spatial memory is important for supporting the successful completion of everyday activities and is a particularly vulnerable domain in late life. Grouping items together in memory, or chunking, can improve spatial memory performance. In memory for desktop scale spaces and well-learned large-scale environments, error patterns suggest that…

"Taza" in Spanish refers to cups and mugs in English, whereas glass refers to different glass types in Spanish: "copa" and "vaso." It is still unclear whether such categorical distinctions induce early perceptual differences in speakers of different languages. In this study, for the first time, we report symmetrical…

Implementing the delayed measure feature in music education has transformed the learning experience for students that are learning to read music. By combining cognitive engagement, visual perception, and real-time performance, this approach enhances students' ability to recognize, process, and perform intricate rhythm and note patterns…

Traditionally, the exogenous control of gaze by external saliencies and the endogenous control of gaze by knowledge and context have been viewed as competing systems, with late infancy seen as a period of strengthening top-down control over the vagaries of the input. Here we found that one-year-old infants control sustained attention through head…

Population coding models provide a quantitative account of visual working memory (VWM) retrieval errors with a plausible link to the response characteristics of sensory neurons. Recent work has provided an important new perspective linking population coding to variables of signal detection, including d-prime, and put forward a new hypothesis: that…

Atypical habituation to repetitive information has been commonly reported in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) but it is not yet clear whether similar abnormalities are present in Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1). We employed a cross-syndrome design using a novel eye tracking paradigm to measure habituation in preschoolers with NF1, children with…

We investigated the factors associated with subjective temporal distance of pandemic-related events in a sample of healthcare workers. A total of 257 healthcare workers were asked to recall two COVID-19 pandemic-related events that impacted them the most at the beginning of the pandemic (April--May 2020), and rated event centrality,…

We examined whether visual disfluency, as elicited by presenting text on flickering slides, affects learning positively and the global judgment of learning (JOL) negatively. Participants (N = 202 in Experiment 1, between-subjects design; N = 53 in Experiment 2, within-subjects design) saw in an online session multiple slides including textual…

As many autistic individuals report mentalizing difficulties into adulthood, the current pre-registered study investigated potential differences in belief reasoning and/or visual perspective taking between autistic and non-autistic adults. The Seeing-Believing task was administered to 121 gender-balanced participants online (57 with a self-…

Camouflage-breaking is a special case of visual search where an object of interest, or target, can be hard to distinguish from the background even when in plain view. We have previously shown that naive, non-professional subjects can be trained using a deep learning paradigm to accurately perform a camouflage-breaking task in which they report…

Children (N = 103, 4-9 years, 59 females, 84% White, c. 2019) completed visual processing, visual feature integration (color, luminance, motion), and visual search tasks. Contrast sensitivity and feature search improved with age similarly for luminance and color-defined targets. Incidental feature integration improved more with age for…

Interactions between stimuli from different sensory modalities and their integration are central to daily life, contributing to improved perception. Being born prematurely and the subsequent hospitalization can have an impact not only on sensory processes, but also on the manner in which information from different senses is combined--i.e.,…

Witnesses to crime often experience stress during the witnessed event. However, most laboratory studies examining eyewitness memory do not include a stressful encoding event. Participants (N = 129) completed an experimental stress induction procedure--a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test. We designed three conditions to manipulate…