Despite the discovery of body-selective neural areas in occipitotemporal cortex, little is known about how bodies are visually coded. We used perceptual adaptation to determine how body identity is coded. Brief exposure to a body (e.g., anti-Rose) biased perception toward an identity with opposite properties (Rose). Moreover, the size of this…

The Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is a computationally difficult combinatorial optimization problem. In spite of its relative difficulty, human solvers are able to generate close-to-optimal solutions in a close-to-linear time frame, and it has been suggested that this is due to the visual system's inherent sensitivity to certain geometric…

Tracy Logan and Tom Lowrie argue that while little attention is given to visual imagery and spatial reasoning within the Australian Curriculum, a significant proportion of National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tasks require high levels of visuospatial reasoning. This article includes teaching ideas to promote visuospatial…

This paper presents new data extracted from the National Survey of Jazz Instrumentalists and Vocalists. The survey was administered to 209 professional jazz musicians who resided and performed in Australia during 2009-2010. Presented here are five statistically significant characteristics which differentiate vocalists' experiences from other jazz…

Despite the large number of people with visual impairments in Australia, all Western Australian secondary students are required to complete their secondary exams using handwriting, unless they qualify for special provisions. Students with visual impairments do not necessarily qualify for special provisions on the basis of their visual impairment…

Grapheme-color synesthesia is an atypical condition in which individuals experience sensations of color when reading printed graphemes such as letters and digits. For some grapheme-color synesthetes, seeing a printed grapheme triggers a sensation of color, but "hearing" the name of a grapheme does not. This dissociation allowed us to…

In the typical human visual system, the macula allows for high visual resolution. Damage to this area from diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), causes the loss of central vision in the form of a central scotoma. Since no treatment is available to reverse AMD, providing low vision rehabilitation to compensate for the loss of…

Several different explanations have been proposed to account for the search asymmetry (SA) for angry schematic faces (i.e., the fact that an angry face target among friendly faces can be found faster than vice versa). The present study critically tested the perceptual grouping account, (a) that the SA is not due to emotional factors, but to…

The capacity to solve tasks that contain high concentrations of visual-spatial information, including graphs, maps and diagrams, is becoming increasingly important in educational contexts as well as everyday life. This research examined gender differences in the performance of students solving graphics tasks from the Graphical Languages in…

This article, based on my PhD empirical study, was conducted in a qualitative and holistic approach. It had examined how students had used formal and informal strategies, styles and situations while improvising and composing for the research task. Eighteen research groups made up of a total of 40 males and nine females had participated in…

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…

Geometry is an area in which Australian students performed particularly poorly on the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). One innovative area of recreational geometry that has rich potential to engage and challenge a wide variety of students is "impossible geometry." An impossible geometric object is a…

This study examined the science and mathematics achievements of 16 Year 9 students with hearing loss in an inclusive high-school setting in Western Australia. Results from the Monitoring Standards in Education (MSE) compulsory state tests were compared with state and class averages for students with normal hearing. Data were collected from three…

Many myths occur regarding the inherent abilities young Indigenous students possess when they enter a Western school environment. One such myth in early numeracy is Indigenous students' innate ability to instantly recognise the number of objects in a small group without counting them; that is, their ability to subitise. Willis (2000) reports that…

Curriculum guidelines, including the emergent Australian curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2009-10), indicate expectations that teachers will support their students' interpretation and creation of multimodal texts. However, English curriculum guidelines are yet to advise on a detailed metalanguage to…