Visual comparison is a key process in everyday learning and reasoning. Recent research has discovered the spatial alignment principle, based on the broader framework of structure-mapping theory in comparison. According to the spatial alignment principle, visual comparison is more efficient when the figures being compared are arranged in…

Reduced social attention is characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It has been suggested to result from an early onset and excessive influence of circumscribed interests (CIs) on gaze behaviour, compared to typically developing (TYP) individuals. To date, these findings have been mixed. The current eye-tracking study utilised a visual…

Target onsets in dynamically changing displays can be predicted when contingencies exist between different stimulus states over time. In the present study, we examined predictive monitoring when participants searched dynamically changing displays of numbers and colored squares for a color target, a number target, or both. Stimuli were presented in…

Functional neuroimaging is a useful approach to study the neural correlates of visual perceptual expertise. The purpose of this paper is to review the functional-neuroimaging methods that have been implemented in previous research in this context. First, we will discuss research questions typically addressed in visual expertise research. Second,…

How does the visual system recognize images of a novel object after a single observation despite possible variations in the viewpoint of that object relative to the observer? One possibility is comparing the image with a prototype for invariance over a relevant transformation set (e.g., translations and dilations). However, invariance over…

Age-related change in processing speed has been linked directly to increases in reasoning as well as indirectly via increases in the capacity of working memory (WM). Most of the evidence linking change in speed to reasoning has come from cross-sectional research; in this article we present the findings from a 2½-year longitudinal study of 277 6-…

Do we access information from any object we can see, or do we access information only from objects that we intend to name? In 3 experiments using a modified multiple object naming paradigm, subjects were required to name several objects in succession when previews appeared briefly and simultaneously in the same location as the target as well as at…

When presented with a sequence of visual stimuli in rapid succession, participants often fail to detect a second salient target, a phenomenon referred as the attentional blink (AB; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992; Shapiro, Raymond, & Arnell, 1997). On the basis of a vast corpus of experiments, several cognitive theories suggest that the blink…

Readers continuously receive parafoveal information about the upcoming word in addition to the foveal information about the currently fixated word. Previous research (Inhoff, Radach, Starr, & Greenberg, 2000) showed that the presence of a parafoveal word that was similar to the foveal word facilitated processing of the foveal word. We used the…

People's behavior in relation to objects depends on whether they are owned. But how do people judge whether objects are owned? We propose that people expect human-made objects (artifacts) to be more likely to be owned than naturally occurring objects (natural kinds), and we examine the development of these expectations in young children.…

It is now well-known that the absence of attention can leave us "blind" to visual stimuli that are very obvious under normal viewing conditions (e.g. a person dressed as a gorilla; Simons & Chabris, 1999). However, the question of whether hearing can ever be susceptible to such effects remains open. Here, we present evidence that the absence of…

The presence of a salient distractor interferes with visual search. According to the salience-driven selection hypothesis, this interference is because of an initial deployment of attention to the distractor. Three event-related potential (ERP) findings have been regarded as evidence for this hypothesis: (a) salient distractors were found to…

When confronted with bad things happening to good people, observers often engage reactive strategies, such as victim derogation, to maintain a belief in a just world. Although such reasoning is usually made retrospectively, we investigated the extent to which knowledge of another person's good or bad behavior can also bias people's online…

To evaluate evidence for motor impairment specificity in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Children completed performance-based assessment of motor functioning (Movement Assessment Battery for Children: MABC-2). Logistic regression models were used to predict group membership. In the models…

We address the issue of how information flows within the written word production system by examining written object-naming latencies. We report 4 experiments in which we manipulate variables assumed to have their primary impact at the level of object recognition (e.g., quality of visual presentation of pictured objects), at the level of semantic…