Contrasting reports of "reduced" and "intact" sensitivity to coherent motion in autistic individuals may be attributable to stimulus parameters. Here, we investigated whether dot lifetime contributes to elevated thresholds in children with autism. We presented a standard motion coherence task to 31 children with autism and 31…

Does visuospatial orientation influence repetition and transposed character (TC) priming effects in logographic scripts? According to perceptual learning accounts, the nature of orthographic (form) priming effects should be influenced by text orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast,…

The advances of scientific techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging have led to an enormous increase in understanding of the physical, neurological and cognitive developments in infancy. Alongside this, radical new forms of theatre, dance and music have emerged, aimed at this same age group. Many…

While some people feel that an infant who will never see or hear can bring only heartache, Orion's family knew differently. Deafblindness is not just about the absence of sight and sound. It is so much more than the sum of these two parts. What one learns from experiencing the collaboration between a teacher of the deaf and a teacher of the…

This article argues that psychological discourse fails miserably to provide an account of learning that can explain how humans come to understand, particularly understanding that has been grasped meaningfully. Part of the problem with psychological approaches to learning is that they are disconnected from the integral role embodiment plays in how…

Neurologically healthy adults display a reliable but slight leftward spatial bias, and this bias appears to change with age (Jewell & McCourt, 2000). Studies using line bisection and the landmark task to investigate pseudoneglect in participants over 60 years of age have shown suppression and near reversal of the leftward response bias. The…

The severe amblyopia induced by chronic monocular deprivation is highly resistant to reversal in adulthood. Here we use a rodent model to show that recovery from deprivation amblyopia can be achieved in adults by a two-step sequence, involving enhancement of synaptic plasticity in the visual cortex by dark exposure followed immediately by visual…

Groups of objects are nearly everywhere we look. Adults can perceive and understand the "gist" of multiple objects at once, engaging ensemble-coding mechanisms that summarize a group's overall appearance. Are these group-perception mechanisms in place early in childhood? Here, we provide the first evidence that 4-5-year-old children use…

Grazia Honegger Fresco gives us direct observations of her daughter from birth to eight months, grouping her observations by age even further into birth to fourth month, fifth and sixth months, and seventh and eighth months. Within each age range, she focuses on Sara's sensory life and her relationships. Her observations are detailed and gentle as…

Many young people with autism spectrum disorder display 'challenging behaviours', characterised by externalising behaviour and self-injurious behaviours. These behaviours can have a negative impact on a young person's well-being, family environment and educational achievement. However, the development of effective interventions requires greater…

Challenges in peer interaction are commonly associated with autism, both within research literature and through first-person accounts. Related intervention studies have tended toward a skills-based approach that emphasizes remediating perceived social deficits in the autistic individual, with most of the literature focusing on children who are…

This Special Issue of "Language Learning" presents an interdisciplinary state-of-the-art overview of current approaches to linguistic relativity. It contains empirical and theoretical studies and reflections on linguistic relativity from a variety of perspectives, such as associative learning, conceptual transfer, multilingual awareness,…

Four experiments examined how faces compete with physically salient stimuli for the control of attention in 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants (N = 117 total). Three computational models were used to quantify physical salience. We presented infants with visual search arrays containing a face and familiar object(s), such as shoes and flowers. Six- and…

In this research, the emotion recognition abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder and typically developing children were compared. When facial expressions and situational cues of emotion were congruent, accuracy in recognizing emotions was good for both children with autism spectrum disorder and typically developing children. When…

Previous studies have indicated that visual-auditory temporal acuity is reduced in children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) in comparison to neurotypicals. In the present study we investigated temporal acuity for all possible bimodal pairings of visual, tactile and auditory information in adults with ASC (n = 18) and a matched control group…