Despite the increasing number of studies investigating eye gaze patterns in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during passive viewing of stimuli, few studies have focused on gaze behaviour of people with ASD during active task engagement. Active engagement may cue these individuals to allocate gaze to task-related information and…

We can incidentally learn regularities in a visual scene, and this kind of learning facilitates subsequent processing of similar scenes. One example of incidental learning is referred to as "contextual cueing," a phenomenon in which repetitive exposure to a particular spatial configuration facilitates visual search performance in the…

According to dual-process theory, recognition memory performance draws upon two processes, familiarity and recollection. The relative contribution to recognition memory are commonly distinguished in humans by analyzing receiver-operating-characteristics (ROC) curves; analogous methods are more complex and very rare in animals but fast familiarity…

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a "global shift" over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether…

Background: A comprehensive aphasia assessment is necessary to diagnose the type and severity of aphasia differentially and guide appropriate interventions. One component of an aphasia assessment is the picture description task (PDT), designed to probe spontaneous speech fluency and information content. Most aphasia assessments use black-and-white…

Visual disengagement has been hypothesized as an endophenotype for autism. In this study we used twin modelling to assess the role of genetics in basic measures of visual disengagement, and tested their putative association to autistic traits in the general population. We used the Gap Overlap task in a sample of 492 twins. Results showed that most…

Children's spontaneous focus on numerosity (SFON) is described as an unprompted tendency that is stable across contexts. The attention to number task (AtN), an experimental forced-choice picture-matching task designed to evaluate select aspects of children's focus on numerosity, may reveal whether task materials can implicitly prompt children to…

When hearing an object label, a specific object may come to mind. With the phrase, "There was a balloon in the pack/air" the representation of balloon varies based on the implied shape (deflated vs. inflated). The current study investigated whether the implied shape affects sentence-picture verification for adults and preschool children.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether children's identification of misarticulated words as real objects was influenced by an inherent bias toward selecting real objects or whether a change in experimental conditions could impact children's selections. Method: Forty preschool children aged 4 years 0 months to 6 years 11 months…

During face-to-face communication, people use visual cues about what their partners are attending to as they process language. An eyetracking experiment explored how addressees use speakers' eye gaze and head orientation while interpreting references to objects in a spatial task. Thirty-six naive director/matcher pairs seated face-to-face were…

Accurate perception of emotional (facial) expressions is an essential social skill. It is currently debated whether emotion categorization in infancy emerges in a "broad-to-narrow" pattern and the degree to which language influences this process. We used an habituation paradigm to explore (a) whether 14- and 18-month-old infants perceive…

Previous studies have reported contradictory findings regarding the effects of item repetition on the subsequent encoding of contextual details associated with items (i.e., source memory). Whereas some studies reported repetition-induced enhancement in source memory, other studies observed repetition-induced impairment. To resolve these…

Having historically received less attention than other linguistic structures (Derwing & Munro, 2005), second language (L2) pronunciation instruction represents an emergent area of research in the field (Thomson & Derwing, 2015). While several methods have been shown to be effective for improving L2 segmental production, including explicit…

How are scene representations stored in memory? Researchers have often posited that scene representations have a hierarchical structure with background elements providing a scaffold for more detailed foreground elements. To further investigate scene representation and the role of background and foreground information, we introduced a new stimulus…

It is difficult to recognize the identity of a face presented in negative contrast. This difficulty, however, is substantially reduced when only the eye region is contrast positive in an otherwise negative face image, and recognition of these so-called contrast chimeras approaches performance with full positive faces. This apparently similar…