Two experiments examined the perceptual processing of letters embedded within one- and two-syllable words and visually similar nonwords. Results suggest that (1) the size of compelling perceptual units seems limited, and (2) unit size is not necessarily related to the correspondence between letter order and pronounceability. (Author/BW)

Discusses the effects on oculomotor behavior of variations of the physical attributes of text and similar effects from physical word cues processed in the reader's parafoveal vision. (HOD)

The ability of forty 8-week-old infants to discriminate between projected-stereograms with and without retinal disparity was tested with an habituation-dishabituation paradigm. Results were interpreted as indicating that the infants could discriminate between stimuli when the only difference between them was binocular disparity. (MS)

Visual discrimination and motor reproduction tasks involving computer-simulated arm movements were administered to 12 adults with mental retardation and a gender-matched control group. The purpose was to examine whether inadequacies in visual perception account for the poorer motor performance of this population. Results indicate both perceptual…

Two experiments examined the effects of common motion, background texture, and orientation on four-month olds' perception of unity of a partially occluded rod. Results indicated that infants' perception of object unity is not dependent on a single visual cue but on a variety of cues including motion, interposition, depth cues, background texture,…

Infants were familiarized with plastic animals from one of two categories (land or sea) that were judged similar or variable by adults. Infants were then tested with novel animals from the same or a different category. Thirteen-month-olds in the similar familiarization condition dishabituated to novel animals of a different category and, to a…

Twenty-five older adults with age-related macular degeneration were separated into one of three groups: in-clinic training, take-home-training, or no-training. After testing, results showed that the ability to distinguish figure from ground is an improvable skill with the take-home group improving the most. (Author/DB)

Visual persistence was investigated in adults with and without dyslexia in order to determine whether dyslexic adults demonstrate problems similar to those found in childhood dyslexia. Results showed that sensitivity of dyslexic adults was impaired when parts of a test stimulus were presented to adjacent retinal areas, suggesting that under…

Studied 4- to 10-year-olds' familiarity judgments of peers. Found that, contrary to adults, external facial features were key. Also found that the switch to adult recognition pattern takes place after the ninth year. (ETB)

Two studies investigated the effect of age on memory for visual and spatial information. Five to 10 year olds were asked to reconstruct a previously seen spatial arrangement of objects. The association between an object's identity and its location was weaker for younger than for older children. (LB)

Tested infants' remembrance of the orientations and angular relations of line segments. In one experiment, infants "dishabituated" to a change in orientation but not a change in angle. In two further experiments, infants familiar with either an acute or obtuse angle gave strong novelty preferences to a different angle. (BC)

Do readers encode the sequencing of consonant (C) and vowel (V) phonemes (skeletal structure) in printed words? The authors used the Stroop task to examine readers' sensitivity to skeletal structure. In Experiment 1, CVC nonwords (e.g., pof) facilitated the naming of colors with congruent frames (e.g., red, a CVC word) but not with incongruent…

Using surface colours as stimuli, the present research was aimed at the two following goals: (1) To determine the chromatic angles related to categorical effects type B-B (Bezold-Brucke). (2) To determine the colourimetric characteristics compatible with each Spanish colour basic category. To get these goals the full set of tiles included in the…

The authors conducted 3 experiments to explore the roles of curvature, density, and relative proximity in the perceptual organization of ambiguous dot patterns. To this end, they developed a new family of regular dot patterns that tend to be perceptually grouped into parallel contours, dot-sampled structured grids (DSGs). DSGs are similar to the…

Meaningful visual experience requires computations that identify objects as the same persisting individuals over time, motion, occlusion, and featural change. This article explores these computations in the tunnel effect: When an object moves behind an occluder, and then an object later emerges following a consistent trajectory, observers…