While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages…

Increased processing time for threatening stimuli is a reliable finding in emotional Stroop tasks. This is particularly pronounced among individuals with anxiety disorders and reflects heightened attentional bias for perceived threat. In this repeated measures study, 35 healthy participants completed a randomized series of Stroop tasks involving…

Early in development, there is a transition in spatial working memory (SWM). When remembering a location in a homogeneous space (e.g., in a sandbox), young children are biased toward the midline symmetry axis of the space. Over development, a transition occurs that leads to older children being biased away from midline. The dynamic field theory…

In searching for a toy hidden at a new location, infants will err by searching at the previously correct location. This study investigated the possibility that 8.5-month-old infants would perseverate on the basis of other visual features by which covers could be individuated. Infants saw a toy hidden under 1 of 2 distinctly shaped covers.…

It was hypothesized that in multimedia information applications a visual component can add value to otherwise audio-only clips. Subjects rated clips used in published CD-ROMs and how much they remembered was also tested. In one set of clips, the visual component was removed, in a second the audio was removed and a third set was unedited. The…

This study was designed to differentiate between structural description and bias accounts of performance in the possible/impossible object-decision test. Two event-related potential (ERP) studies examined how the visual system processes structurally possible and impossible objects. Specifically, the authors investigated the effects of object…

Several studies have reported that individuals with autism and Asperger's syndrome show a local processing bias on tasks involving features and configurations. This study assessed whether this bias results from differences in the perception of features or a cognitive bias to attend to features in autism as a consequence of a deficit in attending…