Facing threat: infants' and adults' visual scanning of faces with neutral, happy, sad, angry, and fearful emotional expressions.

Human faces are among the most important visual stimuli that we encounter at all ages. This importance partly stems from the face as a conveyer of information on the emotional state of other individuals. Previous research has demonstrated specific scanning patterns in response to threat-related compared to non-threat-related emotional expressions.

Bricks, butter, and slices of cucumber: investigating semantic influences in amodal completion.

Objects in our world are partly occluded by other objects or sometimes even partly by themselves. Amodal completion is a visual process that enables us to perceive these objects as complete and is influenced by both local object information, present at contour intersections, and overall (global) object shape. In contrast, object semantics have been demonstrated to play no role in amodal completion but do so only by means of subjective methods.

The significance of event information for 6- to 16-month-old infants' perception of containment.

Four experiments familiarized 6-, 9-, 12-, and 16-month-old infants to a solid block that was repeatedly lowered into a semitransparent container. In test trials the end state, containment, was either compatible or incompatible with the objects' size and position. In Experiment 1, infants saw the block and box successively before they observed the end state.

Sensitivity to second-order motion in 10-month-olds.

Ten-month-old infants' sensitivity to first-order motion (FOM) defined by luminance and second-order motion (SOM) defined by flickering was measured in an eye-tracking paradigm. We used a small single disc or gratings moving horizontally. Although infants could track the SOM of a small disc, they failed to exhibit smooth pursuit eye movements.

Visual completion and complexity of visual shape in children with pervasive developmental disorder.

Much evidence has been gathered for differences in visual perceptual processing in individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. The presence of the fundamental process of visual completion was tested in a group of children with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), as this requires perceptually integrating visual structure into wholes. In Experiment 1, it was investigated whether visual completion is present for simple partly occluded shapes in a group of children with PDD and a typically developing group.

Con-fusing contours & pieces of glass.

We present a new illusory display in which illusory contours are misaligned with physical contours. In these displays, illusory Kanizsa squares, induced by the so-called pacmen, are positioned on top of a background grid of bars. The misalignment of the illusory contours with respect to physical contours of the grid of bars induces an overall 'restless' appearance and evokes the impression that parts of the grid within the illusory square are shifted.

Cortical responses to contextual influences in amodal completion.

Amodal completion refers to the process in the visual system that enables us to perceive partly occluded objects as whole objects. Both the overall shape of a visual object (global aspect) and the region immediately surrounding the occluder (local aspect) are known to determine the process of completion. We investigated the influence of overall shape context in completion on human brain activity using MEG recordings.

Luminance edges are not necessary for visual completion.

Luminance edges seem to have an important role in visual feature binding and, more specifically, in visual completion because luminance differences are important for the perception of depth. We investigated this claim in two experiments in which the primed-matching paradigm was used. In Experiment 1, we investigated conditions under which either a partly occluded shape or an occluder was isoluminant with respect to the background.

Global visual completion of quasi-regular shapes.

The topic of amodal completion has often been investigated by using partly occluded shapes that are regular. In research that has typically been done with displays such as these regular shapes, it has been shown that global aspects of a shape can determine completion. To see how robust these global influences in the completion process are, we investigated quasi-regular shapes, ie shapes with a certain overall regularity but not based on metrical identities.