To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

Purpose: This study explored visual speech influence in preschoolers using 3 developmentally appropriate tasks that vary in perceptual difficulty and task demands. They also examined developmental differences in the ability to use visually salient speech cues and visual phonological knowledge. Method: Twelve adults and 27 typically developing 3-…

Stimulus overselectivity is widely accepted as a stimulus control abnormality in autism spectrum disorders and subsets of other populations. Previous research has demonstrated a link between both chronological and mental age and overselectivity in typical development. However, the age at which children are developmentally ready to respond to…

By definition children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) experience difficulty understanding and using language. Accordingly, visual and picture-based strategies such as the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) show promise in ameliorating speech and language deficits. This study reports the results of a multiple baseline across…

Three experiments explored effects of stimulus and task factors on tendency to categorize according to taxonomic relations when those relations conflict with appearances. When provided with information that constrained categorization, preschoolers and adults reliably based their decisions on taxonomic relations between physically dissimilar items.…

The current study examined the reinforcing effects of choosing among alternatives in a four-part evaluation. In the first study, initial-link responses in a concurrent-chains arrangement resulted in access to terminal links in which the completion of an academic task resulted in (a) the choice of a reinforcer (choice), (b) the delivery of an…

The ability of 40 children four and five years of age to discriminate reflections and rotations of visual stimuli was examined in a kinetic imagery task. Results revealed that prediction accuracy was associated with the existence of orientation markers on the stimuli, as well as age, sex, type of discrimination, and several interactions among the…

In Experiment I, 24 preschoolers were tested on left-right, vertical-horizontal, and mirror-image oblique discriminations under essentially context-free conditions. Experiment II contrasted children's performance under context-free conditions with their ability to discriminate orientation in the presence of external visual cues. (RH)

This study investigated whether object-picture discrepancy occurs because preschool children regard pictures as significates rather than as signifiers. Results indicated the children did not consistently respond to objects and their pictorial representations equivalently. (Author/DB)

Examined reversal of emergent simple discriminations through stimulus contiguity. In experiment one, Baseline and Reversal phases were positive for most children. Experiments two through four examined protocol aspects that possibly contributed to successful reversal of the form discrimination; found that reversed discrimination usually was a…

The purpose of this paper is to set out a descriptive model in which the relative dominance of a stimulus dimension is related to the form of attention it receives. (Author/DB)

Two experiments were conducted to determine the relative importance of style of movement versus physical appearance in person recognition. The first study investigated the capabilities of young children and adults to recognize target individuals' styles or manners of movement and to distinguish between people when their faces were not visible. A…

Preschoolers learned colors more rapidly than sizes and forms when cup stimuli were used. They learned sizes and forms more rapidly than colors when face stimuli were used. (RL)

In three experiments, three normal preschoolers were presented with sorting tasks ordinarily insoluble for four-year-olds. Found that, although the subjects had difficulty correctly sorting the pictures when told what criterion to sort by, they could provide correct answers when asked what they were looking for. This self-instructional effect was…