The effects of fluency-based instruction and accuracy-based instruction on contingency adduction were assessed using an alternating treatments design. Stimulus equivalence tasks were used to measure contingency adduction. Stimulus classes were composed of arbitrary visual forms. One treatment condition consisted of teaching fast, fluent responding…

Objective: Little is known about cognition's effect on jump-landing movement patterns. Design: Participants completed three baseline cognitive tasks. Then, participants performed three jump-landing trials per condition (dual-task trials (DT)): Stroop Color Word test (SCWT), Symbol Digits Modalities test (SDMT), Brooks Visuospatial task (BVT), and…

Actions aim to produce effects in the environment. To accomplish this properly, we not only have to recruit the appropriate motor patterns, but also we must be able to monitor whether an intended effect has ultimately been realized. Here, we investigated the impact of such effect monitoring on performance in multitasking situations: Multitasking…

Although action experience has been shown to enhance the development of spatial cognition, the mechanism underlying the effects of action is still unclear. The present research examined the role of visual cues generated during action in promoting infants' mental rotation. We sought to clarify the underlying mechanism by decoupling different…

Animation can be used for various purposes such as for procedural and motor skill learning (i.e., dance, sports, and motor rehabilitation). In the context of visual design, this study explores the possible influence of realism (levels of visual detail) in animation at the cognitive stage of motor skill acquisition. Students (N = 64) with low-prior…

Despite the importance of handwriting for school readiness and early academic progress, prior research on the development of handwriting has focused primarily on the product rather than the process by which young children write letters. In contrast, in the present work, early handwriting is viewed as involving a suite of perceptual, motor, and…

Perceptual processing in autism is associated with both "strengths" and "weaknesses" but within a literature that varies widely in terms of the assessments used. We report data from 12 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 12 age and IQ matched neurotypical controls tested on a set of tasks using the same stimuli…

Previous research has illustrated the unique benefits of three-dimensional (3-D) Virtual Reality (VR) technology in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) children. This study examined the use of 3-D VR technology as an assessment tool in ASD children, and further compared its use to two-dimensional (2-D) tasks. Additionally, we aimed to examine…

An issue of continued debate in the visuomotor control literature surrounds whether a 2D object serves as a representative proxy for a 3D object in understanding the nature of the visual information supporting grasping control. In an effort to reconcile this issue, we examined the extent to which aperture profiles for grasping 2D and 3D objects…

Eye gaze is a powerful directional cue that automatically evokes joint attention states. Even when faces are ignored, there is incidental learning of the reliability of the gaze cueing of another person, such that people who look away from targets are judged less trustworthy. In a series of experiments, we demonstrated further properties of the…

Unconscious visual stimuli can be processed by human observers and modulate their behavior. This has been shown for masked prime stimuli that influence motor responses to subsequent target stimuli. Beyond this, masked stimuli can also affect participants' behavior when they are free to choose one of two response alternatives. This finding…

Thirteen autistic and 14 typically developing children (controls) imitated hand/arm gestures and performed mirror drawing; both tasks assessed ability to reorganize the relationship between spatial goals and the motor commands needed to acquire them. During imitation, children with autism were less accurate than controls in replicating hand shape,…

A dysfunction in predictive motor timing is put forward to underlie DCD-related motor problems. Predictive timing allows for the pre-selection of motor programmes (except "program" in computers) in order to decrease processing load and facilitate reactions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study investigated the neural…

In this training study, we aimed to selectively train participants' filtering mechanisms to enhance visual working memory (WM) efficiency. The highly restricted nature of visual WM capacity renders efficient filtering mechanisms crucial for its successful functioning. Filtering efficiency in visual WM can be measured via the lateralized change…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by differences in unimodal and multimodal sensory and proprioceptive processing, with complex biases towards local over global processing. Many of these elements are implicated in versions of the rubber hand illusion (RHI), which were therefore studied in high-functioning individuals with ASD and a…