The current study examined eye movement control in autistic (ASD) children. Simple targets were presented in isolation, or with central, parafoveal, or peripheral distractors synchronously. Sixteen children with ASD (47-81 months) and nineteen age and IQ matched typically developing children were instructed to look to the target as accurately and…

Studies have identified deficits in attention in individuals with aphasia in language and nonlanguage tasks. Attention may play a role in the construction and use of language, as well as in learning and the process of rehabilitation, yet the role of attention on rehabilitation is not fully understood. To improve the understanding of attention and…

Social motivation theory states that individuals with ASD find social stimuli less rewarding (Chevallier et al. in Trends Cognit Sci 16(4):231-239, 2012). An alternative theory suggests that competition from circumscribed interests (CIs) may better account for diminished social attention (Sasson et al. in Autism Res 1(1):31-42, 2008). This study…

The potential role of iconic memory in dyslexia-specific partial report deficits has never been investigated although it may help distinguish between different visuo-attentional theories of dyslexia. The present study is a first step towards such an investigation within an iconic memory framework. 20 French-speaking university students with…

Reading is one of the most important daily visual tasks. Majority of people become expert readers at a very young age and perform this complex task effortlessly and automatically throughout most of their lives. However, in this "effortless" task, multiple complex processes must be efficiently carried out in a very short amount of time.…

This article explores video-stimulated recall as a novel approach to understanding children's decisions to engage in relational and physical aggression. Past studies have relied on caregiver and observer reports to investigate children's social behaviors, omitting children's experience and interpretation of their own behavior. Within this…

Music performance is an intensive sensorimotor task that involves the generation of mental representations of musical information that are actively accessed, maintained, and manipulated according to the demands of the performance. Internal representations and external information interact through feedback and feedforward processes that adjust the…

It has been suggested that attenuated adaptation to visual stimuli in autism is the result of atypical perceptual priors (e.g., Pellicano and Burr in "Trends Cogn Sci" 16(10):504-510, 2012. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2012.08.009). This study investigated adaptation to color in autistic adults, measuring both strength of afterimage and the…

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

Mirror visual feedback increases neural activity, enhances performance, and induces neuroplasticity; however, mixed results have been observed during the learning of motor skills. While mirrors are commonplace in Western dance education, further research is needed to determine how mirrors are used when learning dance phrases. This study measured…

To date, there has been no investigation into how metalinguistic terms, pertaining to English language teaching, are expressed in British Sign Language (BSL). This preliminary study explored how these terms are realised in BSL with the relevant professional community. The investigation was underpinned by translanguaging as a theoretical framework…

Research indicates that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are superior at local processing while the integration of local features to global percepts is reduced. Here, we compared infants at familiar risk for ASD to typically developing infants in terms of global coherence processing at 5 months of age, using steady state visually…

Using Chinese characters, we investigated how stroke count and frequency of use influence attention and short-term memory (STM) encoding in Mainland Chinese speakers. To isolate specific components of attention we employed the Theory of Visual Attention (TVA), which allowed estimates of STM capacity, processing speed, and the threshold of visual…

In radiological screening, clinicians scan myriads of radiographs with the intent of recognizing and differentiating lesions. Even though they are trained experts, radiologists' human search engines are not perfect: average daily error rates are estimated around 3-5%. A main underlying assumption in radiological screening is that visual search on…

Eye-tracking represents a sensitive, direct measure of gaze allocation and goal-directed looking behaviors that correspond to visual information processing. Clear definitions and standardization of research protocols to document the utility and feasibility of these methods are warranted. This systematic review provides an account of stimuli…