Long-term deprivation of normal visual inputs can cause perceptual impairments at various levels of visual function, from basic visual acuity deficits, through mid-level deficits such as contour integration and motion coherence, to high-level face and object agnosia. Yet it is unclear whether training during adulthood, at a post-developmental…

How objects are held determines how they are seen, and may thereby play an important developmental role in building visual object representations. Previous research suggests that toddlers, like adults, show themselves a disproportionate number of planar object views--that is, views in which the objects' axes of elongation are perpendicular or…

People with developmental dyslexia (DD) have been shown to be impaired in tasks that require the processing of multiple visual elements in parallel. It has been suggested that this deficit originates from disturbed visual attentional functions. The parameter-based assessment of visual attention based on Bundesen's (1990) theory of visual…

Five- and 3-month-old infants' perception of infant-directed (ID) faces and the role of speech in perceiving faces were examined. Infants' eye movements were recorded as they viewed a series of two side-by-side talking faces, one infant-directed and one adult-directed (AD), while listening to ID speech, AD speech, or in silence. Infants…

Being able to see a talking face confers a considerable advantage for speech perception in adulthood. However, behavioural data currently suggest that children fail to make full use of these available visual speech cues until age 8 or 9. This is particularly surprising given the potential utility of multiple informational cues during language…

The expertise of adults in face perception is facilitated by their ability to rapidly detect that a stimulus is a face. In two experiments, we examined the role of early visual input in the development of face detection by testing patients who had been treated as infants for bilateral congenital cataract. Experiment 1 indicated that, at age 9 to…

We measured Chinese dyslexic and control children's eye movements during rapid automatized naming (RAN) with alphanumeric (digits) and symbolic (dice surfaces) stimuli. Both types of stimuli required identical oral responses, controlling for effects associated with speech production. Results showed that naming dice was much slower than naming…

In the primate brain, sensory information is processed along two partially segregated cortical streams: the ventral stream, mainly coding for objects' shape and identity, and the dorsal stream, mainly coding for objects' quantitative information (including size, number, and spatial position). Neurophysiological measures indicate that…

Recent studies indicate that young children preferentially attend to snakes, spiders, and lions compared with nondangerous species, but these results have yet to be replicated in populations that actually experience dangerous animals in nature. This multi-site study investigated the visual-detection biases of southern Indian children towards two…

Previous studies suggest that individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetically based neurodevelopmental disorder, show specific weaknesses in visual attention and response inhibition within the visuospatial domain. Here we examine the extent to which impairments in attentional control extend to the visuomotor domain using a…

Almost all locomotor animals are sensitive to optical expansion (visual looming) and for most animals this sensitivity is evident very early in their development. In humans there is evidence that responses to looming stimuli begin in the first 6 weeks of life, but here we demonstrate that as children become independent their perceptual acuity…

Early in the first year of life infants exhibit equivalent performance distinguishing among people within their own race and within other races. However, with development and experience, their face recognition skills become tuned to groups of people they interact with the most. This developmental tuning is hypothesized to be the origin of adult…

Pointing, like eye gaze, is a deictic gesture that can be used to orient the attention of another person towards an object or an event. Previous research suggests that infants first begin to follow a pointing gesture between 10 and 13 months of age. We investigated whether sensitivity to pointing could be seen at younger ages employing a technique…

We used opposing figural aftereffects to investigate whether there are at least partially separable representations of upright and inverted faces in patients who missed early visual experience because of bilateral congenital cataracts (mean age at test 19.5 years). Visually normal adults and 10-year-olds were tested for comparison. Adults showed…

The acquisition of reading has an extensive impact on the developing brain and leads to enhanced abilities in phonological processing and visual letter perception. Could this expertise also extend to early visual abilities outside the reading domain? Here we studied the performance of illiterate, ex-illiterate and literate adults closely matched…