Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non-human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non-human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that…

Previous studies indicate that at least some aspects of audiovisual speech perception are impaired in children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, whether audiovisual processing difficulties are also present in older children with a history of this disorder is unknown. By combining electrophysiological and behavioral measures, we…

In quantity discrimination tasks, adults, infants and animals have been sometimes observed to process number only after all continuous variables, such as area or density, have been controlled for. This has been taken as evidence that processing number may be more cognitively demanding than processing continuous variables. We tested this hypothesis…

Human adults are more accurate at discriminating faces from their own race than faces from another race. This "other-race effect" (ORE) has been characterized as a reflection of face processing specialization arising from differential experience with own-race faces. We examined whether 3.5-month-old infants exhibit ORE using morphed faces on which…

Reports effects of context that are entirely perceptual. Visual discrimination was enhanced when line segments were flashed in a region that was perceived as a figure. Discrimination was substantially degraded when the same region was seen as ground although the physical stimulus remained identical throughout figure-ground reversals. (Author/JN)

This study of the effects of practice on children's perceptual judgments investigates the validity of the distinctive features hypothesis and the schemata hypothesis by comparing performance on discrimination tasks using familiar stimuli (letters of the alphabet) with a variety of transformations held constant over four massed practice conditions.…

The theory is developed and contrasted with other theories of pattern recognition in which concepts such as stimulus generalization, tuned detectors, and preprocessing play major roles. A relation of this theory to problems encountered among disabled readers ("dyslexics") is also brought out. (Author/BJG)

Investigates the dominance of global versus local visual properties in four-month-old infants as a function of individual differences in fixation duration. Suggests that long-looking infants process visual information more slowly than short-looking infants, and there may be qualitative differences in the manner in which the two groups of infants…