Psychologists have long been captivated by the perception of animacy--the fact that even simple moving shapes may appear to engage in animate, intentional, and goal-directed movements. Here we report several new types of studies of a particularly salient form of perceived animacy: "chasing", in which one shape (the "wolf") pursues another shape…

We show that perceptual sensitivity to visual stimuli can be modulated by matches between the contents of working memory (WM) and stimuli in the visual field. Observers were presented with an object cue (to hold in WM or to merely attend) and subsequently had to identify a brief target presented within a colored shape. The cue could be…

Aim: The cognitive deficits present in the Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) are not yet well characterized. Attention, considered to be the brain mechanism responsible for the selection of sensory stimuli, could be disturbed in DMD, contributing, at least partially, to the observed global cognitive deficit. The aim of this study was to…

A priority for the visual system is to construct 3-dimensional surfaces from visual primitives. Information is combined across individual cues to form a robust representation of the external world. Here, it is shown that surface completion relying on multiple visual cues influences relative dominance during binocular rivalry. The shape of a…

Goal-directed behavior requires cognitive control to effect online adjustments in response to ongoing processing demands. How signaling for these adjustments occurs has been a question of much interest. A basic question regarding the architecture of the cognitive control system is whether such signaling for control is specific to task context or…

The present research explores young children's extension of novel labels to novel animate items. Three experiments were performed by means of the intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm. In Experiment 1, after repeated exposure to novel word-object associations, 24- and 36-month-olds extend novel labels on the basis of shape similarity, in…

Previous research suggests individuals with autism may be less influenced by a three-dimensional interpretation when copying line drawings (Sheppard et al. "J Autism Dev Disord" 37:1913-1924, 2007). The current research aimed to determine whether this reduced dimensionality effect extends to drawings of an actual object. Twenty-four children and…

In a study of optical cues to the visual perception of stress, three American English talkers spoke words that differed in lexical stress and sentences that differed in phrasal stress, while video and movements of the face were recorded. The production of stressed and unstressed syllables from these utterances was analyzed along many measures of…

Although several accounts of autism have predicted that the disorder should be associated with a decreased susceptibility to visual illusions, previous experimental results have been mixed. This study examined whether a link between autism and illusion susceptibility can be more convincingly demonstrated by assessing the relationships between…

This study investigated the visual information that children and adults consider while switching or maintaining object-matching rules. Eye movements of 5- and 6-year-old children and adults were collected with two versions of the Advanced Dimensional Change Card Sort, which requires switching between shape- and color-matching rules. In addition to…

Two habituation experiments were conducted to investigate how 4-month-old infants perceive partly occluded shapes. In the first experiment, we presented a simple, partly occluded shape to the infants until habituation was reached. Then we showed either a probable completion (one that would be predicted on the basis of both local and global cues)…

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a delay in response time (RT) to targets appearing at a previously cued location. The prevailing view is that IOR reflects visual-motor inhibition. The "attentional momentum" account rejects this idea, and instead proposes that IOR reflects an automatic shift of attention away from the cued location…

The current study examined the abilities of children (6 and 8 years of age) and adults to freely categorize and label dynamic bodily/facial expressions designed to portray happiness, pleasure, anger, irritation, and neutrality and controlled for their level of valence, arousal, intensity, and authenticity. Multidimensional scaling and cluster…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether an index of self-reported attention deficits predicts the pattern of visual field asymmetries observed in behavioral measures of attention. Studies of "normal" subjects do not present a consistent pattern of asymmetry in attention functions, with some studies showing better left visual field (LVF)…

Purpose: Communication about feelings is a core element of human interaction. Aided augmentative and alternative communication systems must therefore include symbols representing these concepts. The symbols must be readily distinguishable in order for users to communicate effectively. However, emotions are represented within most systems by…