Placing psychology in a biological and physical context, James J. Gibson performed prophetic work on visual motion, inspiring more recent studies on higher order aspects of motion encoding. Although not always fully acknowledged, Gibson's work is very important to the development of perceptual psychology. (SLD)

Describes the ways in which our own view of the world effects the way that we interpret information. Contends that we need to know the difference between perceptions and illusions. Discusses the world of illusions; haptic senses; adaptive adjustments; and visual illusions. (ZWH)

Describes 4 experiments examining 10-month-old infants' causal event perception. Results from all experiments indicated that infants perceived causality of simple events by associating a specific agent with a causal action. These results provide more support for an information-processing view of causal perception than for a view that explains…

Steps aside from conventional ideas about diagrams to examine how they work. Brings to bear ideas from a perceptual psychologist, a communication theorist, and a philosopher. Introduces the papers in this special issue as diagrams for worldmaking. (SR)

Analyzed postural oscillations in six-, eight-, and 10-year-olds in four visual and two somatosensory conditions. Found that children were more stable with than without vision and more stable with a normal than with an altered support surface. Overall, there was no effect of age. The relative influence of peripheral and central vision on postural…

Explored the role of motion versus shape in children's categorization of animal and non-animal kinds. Found that 4-year olds significantly used motion cues over shape cues to categorize objects. Seven-year olds and adults tended to use motion more than shape to categorize animals but not geometric figures. Findings support view that children are…

This study compared role of motion in adults' and infants' perception of object unity. Findings favored ecologically-oriented accounts of object perception. Motion was a determinant of object unity for infants. Alignment and common motion contributed to adults' object-unity perception; synchronous color changes did not. Infants detected…

Eye movement of six subjects (three with deafness) was recorded as they watched video segments with and without captions. The addition of captions to a video resulted in major changes in eye movement patterns, with the viewing process becoming primarily a reading process. (Contains six references.) (Author/CR)

Examined development of infants' relational coding in spatial orientation problems. Found that 6-month-olds performed poorly in a peekaboo task in which they had to turn to a target after displacement to a novel position and direction. Twelve- month-olds solved the tasks whether or not target was located between two landmarks; 8.5-month-olds…

Four experiments examined the perceptual features used by 4.5- to 11.5-month olds to individuate objects involved in occlusion events. Results indicated that 4.5-month olds used shape and size features to individuate objects in occlusion events. By 7.5 months, infants used pattern, and by 11.5 months, they used color to reason about object…

Compared the recognition, perceptual saliency, and naming of color to that of other perceptual object attributes in 2- to 5-year-olds as a function of language age. Found that although color was perceptually salient relative to other visual attributes, no selective impairment to color cognition was found relative to motion, form, and size.…

A large orthographic neighborhood (N) facilitates lexical decision for central and left visual field/right hemisphere (LVF/RH) presentation, but not for right visual field/left hemisphere (RVF/LH) presentation. Based on the SERIOL model of letter-position encoding, this asymmetric N effect is explained by differential activation patterns at the…

We are able to recognise familiar faces easily across large variations in image quality, though our ability to match unfamiliar faces is strikingly poor. Here we ask how the representation of a face changes as we become familiar with it. We use a simple image-averaging technique to derive abstract representations of known faces. Using Principal…

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) display poor visuo-spatial cognition relative to verbal abilities. Furthermore, whilst perceptual abilities are delayed, visuo-spatial construction abilities are comparatively even weaker, and are characterised by a local bias. We investigated whether this differentiation in visuo-spatial abilities can be…

There are certain simple rotations of objects that most people cannot reason about accurately. Reliable gaps in the understanding of a fundamental physical domain raise the question of how learning to reason in that domain might proceed. Using virtual reality techniques, this project investigated the nature of learning to reason across the domain…