Far from being peripheral to human functioning, aesthetic activity is fundamental to the process of coping. It is distinguished from other cultural activity, like religion and science, because its raw materials are formal properties--line, form, color, texture--derived from the external world. (Author/CS)

Sex specific biases in visual images was explored. When photographs of male and female faces were presented in a deliberately ambiguous manner, university students overreported the number of male faces and underreported female faces. The results are predictable with the variation of generic sentences shown with the photographs. (VM)

A brief target that is visible when displayed alone can be rendered invisible by a trailing stimulus (metacontrast masking). It has been difficult to determine the temporal dynamics of masking to date because increments in stimulus duration have been invariably confounded with apparent brightness (Bloch's law). In the research reported here,…