Alastair D. Smith

Social camouflaging behaviours are often used by people with high autistic traits to negotiate a predominantly neurotypical social world. Previous discussion has associated camouflaging with a tendency to conform, although it has also been suggested that masking autistic tendencies may be a more specific motivating factor. The relationship between autistic traits and conformity is itself equivocal, suggesting that it may not necessarily be a driving force for social camouflaging in this group. To better characterise the relationship between these factors, we conducted an exploratory questionnaire study comprising measures of social conformity (Tendency to Conform Questionnaire), autistic traits (AQ), social camouflaging (CAT-Q), and personality (BFI-10). Data from N = 511 adults, including University students and members of online communities, revealed negative relationships between conformity and both camouflaging and autistic traits, suggesting that camouflaging is less likely to be driven by a tendency to ‘fit in’. Regression analysis of camouflaging traits further revealed a negative role for conformity, although this was lost when AQ scores were incorporated, indicating a more fundamental explanatory role for autistic traits. This first large-scale assay of conformity in relation to these measures clarifies its contribution to camouflaging behaviours, providing a springboard for more nuanced examination.

Early learning takes place within complex, multimodal environments where curiosity plays a critical role in guiding exploratory behaviors and supporting cognitive development. While trait curiosity shapes children's early learning experiences, state curiosity is context‐dependent fostering early learning, in‐part, through information seeking behaviors. Here, we explore whether state‐induced curiosity can influence exploratory behaviors and facilitate word‐learning within a multimodal search task that mirrors real‐world learning environments. Children (2.5‐ to 4‐year‐olds) will be introduced to novel objects and labels via a storybook. After exposure to each novel object, participants will locate the target object (i.e., a sticker depicting the novel object), hidden within one of ten boxes uniformly distributed across a real‐world space. Unbeknownst to participants, the target will only be hidden within a single hemispace. In the “High‐Curiosity” condition, the storybook should elicit greater curiosity, whereas the “Low‐Curiosity” condition will present novel words in a context that should invoke lower levels of curiosity. Following the search task, participants will complete a forced‐choice word learning task. Findings will provide insights into whether and how curiosity facilitates word learning in rich, multimodal contexts and how this relationship can be impacted by children's explorative strategies, including their sensitivity to environmental statistics. Summary: Curiosity drives early development, but the extent to which it facilitates learning within a multimodal environment remains underexplored. The study examines how high versus low induced curiosity states influence toddlers' exploratory behavior, including search efficiency and adaptation to spatial probability cues. The study assesses whether higher state‐induced curiosity leads to stronger retention and recognition of novel word‐object mappings compared to the lower curiosity condition. The study examines how curiosity‐driven search strategies relate to novel word learning and whether learning is moderated by how children choose to search for information.

Drawing tasks continue to represent one of the most valuable elements of the neuropsychologist’s toolkit. Since the process of graphic production is reliant on the synthesis of a range of cognitive...

Navigation relies on the integration of both allocentric (world-centered) and egocentric (navigator-centered) spatial cues. An influential real-world navigational task dissociated allocentric place learning from egocentric path integration, highlighting the decline in allocentric cue use associated with cognitive aging. This report describes a novel computer-based replication of this task, designed as a remote test of navigational ability, that also addresses potential confounds in the original task, including tighter control of spatial cue competition. In Experiment 1a, participants learned a location signaled either by landmark cues in the absence of a stable starting position (allocentric), distance and direction from the starting position in the absence of landmarks (egocentric), or a combination of the two (control). In the allocentric condition, participants exhibited lower accuracy, greater reorientation, and more complex paths compared to the control and egocentric conditions. Experiment 1b employed the same design but featured an egocentric condition with unstable landmarks that did not predict the target location. In Experiment 1b, egocentric condition accuracy was equivalent to the allocentric condition and lower compared to Experiment 1a's egocentric condition. Additionally, in Experiment 1b's egocentric condition, participants took more complex paths and reoriented more to the unstable landmarks. Experiments 2a and 2b replicated findings from Experiments 1a and 1b, indicating their reliability. These data suggest that path complexity is associated with navigational error and underscore the benefits of integrating different sources of information during navigation. Cross-experiment comparisons also show how the presence of unstable visual cues can lead to the adoption of unsuitable strategic approaches. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Efficient environmental search is an important and adaptive everyday skill. A particular feature of theoretical interest is whether large-scale search is informed by the spatial statistics of the environment-probability cueing is a robust effect in two-dimensional visual search tasks, but studies of large-scale search have generated equivocal findings. Here, we examined whether sensitivity to a statistical cue specified within an allocentric reference frame is modulated by the presence and location of environmental landmarks. Participants explored fully immersive virtual environments, wherein they were presented with an array of locations (columns) and required to search them for a hidden target (i.e., the column that changed color upon activation). A target was present on each trial, appearing within the cued hemispace on 80% of trials. In Experiment 1, the array was surrounded by a featureless circular wall, and participants exhibited no reliable cueing effects. Experiments 2 and 3 introduced a stable landmark into the environment and manipulated its location to be either orthogonal or adjacent to the cued hemispace. Participants reliably biased their search in response to the probability cue, although learning was only observed when the landmark was positioned along the axis orthogonal to the midline separating hemispaces. These findings suggest that adapting search behavior in response to a statistical cue is facilitated by the presence of a stable landmark when it is specified independently of the searcher's viewpoint, although this is dependent upon the spatial relationship between the landmark and the distribution itself. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The way in which organisms represent the shape of their environments during navigation has been debated in cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychology. While there is evidence that adult humans encode the entire boundary shape of an environment (a global-shape representation), there are also data demonstrating that organisms reorient using only segments of the boundary that signal a goal location (a local-shape representation). Developmental studies offer unique insights into this debate; however, most studies have used designs that cannot dissociate the type of boundary-shape representation that children use to guide reorientation. Thus, we examined the developmental trajectories of children's reorientation according to local and global boundary shape. Participants aged 6-12 years were trained to find a goal hidden in one corner of a virtual arena, after which they were required to reorient in a novel test arena. From 10.5 years, children performed above chance when the test arena permitted reorientation based only on local-shape (Experiment 2), or only global-shape (Experiment 3) information. Moreover, when these responses were placed into conflict, older children reoriented with respect to global-shape information (Experiment 4). These age-related findings were not due to older children being better able to reorient in virtual environments per se: when trained and tested within the same environment (Experiment 1), children performed above chance from 6 years. Together, our results suggest (a) the ability to reorient on the basis of global- and local-shape representations develops in parallel, and (b) shape-based information is weighted to determine which representation informs reorientation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Neuropsychological evidence suggests that visuospatial memory is subserved by two separable processing systems, with dorsal underpinnings for global form a