Cultural display rules govern the manifestation of emotional expressions. In compliance with display rules, the facial expressions displayed (i.e. apparent emotion) may be incongruent with the emotion experienced (i.e. real emotion). This study investigates Australian Caucasian children's understanding of display rules. A sample of 80 four year…

Recent spatial cuing studies have shown that detection sensitivity can be increased by the allocation of attention. This increase has been attributed to one of two mechanisms: signal enhancement or uncertainty reduction. Signal enhancement is an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio at the cued location; uncertainty reduction is a reduction in the…

How does past experience influence visual search strategy (i.e., attentional set)? Recent reports have shown that, when given the option to use 1 of 2 attentional sets, observers persist with the set previously required in a training phase. Here, 2 related questions are addressed. First, does the training effect result only from perseveration with…

When a moving object abruptly disappears, this profoundly influences its localization by the visual system. In Experiment 1, 2 aligned objects moved across the screen, and 1 of them abruptly disappeared. Observers reported seeing the objects misaligned at the time of the offset, with the continuing object leading. Experiment 2 showed that the…

Impressions of force are commonplace in the visual perception of objects interacting. It is proposed that these impressions have their source in haptically mediated experiences of exertion of force in actions on objects. Visual impressions of force in interactions between objects occur by a kind of generalization of the proprioceptive impression…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with impaired visuospatial representations subserved by the dorsal stream and relatively strong object recognition abilities subserved by the ventral stream. There is conflicting evidence on whether this uneven pattern in WS extends to working memory (WM). The present studies…

We previously reported a meta-analysis of explicit memory studies in populations with intellectual disability (ID). The current study discusses the educational implications of this meta-analysis. The main factors at the core of these implications can be divided into two categories: those related to task characteristics (e.g., depth of processing,…

Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three- to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1 and 3). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not…

Configural/holistic processing, a key property of face recognition, has previously been examined only for front views of faces. Here, 6 experiments tested front (0 degree), three-quarter (45 degree), and profile views (90 degree), using composite and peripheral inversion tasks. Results showed an overall disadvantage in identifying profiles. This…

To examine the development of feedforward control during manual tracking, 117 participants in 5 age groups (6 to 7, 8 to 9, 10 to 11, 12 to 14, and 15 to 17 years) tracked an accelerating dot presented on a monitor by moving an electronic pen on a digitizer. To remain successful at higher target velocities, they had to create a predictive model of…

Identifying 2 target stimuli in a rapid stream of visual symbols is much easier if the 2nd target appears immediately after the 1st target (i.e., at Lag 1) than if distractor stimuli intervene. As this phenomenon comes with a strong tendency to confuse the order of the targets, it seems to be due to the integration of both targets into the same…

Converging evidence has shown that action observation and execution are tightly linked. The observation of an action directly activates an equivalent internal motor representation in the observer (direct matching). However, whether direct matching is primarily driven by basic perceptual features of the observed movement or is influenced by more…

Searching for an object within a cluttered, continuously changing environment can be a very time-consuming process. The authors show that a simple auditory pip drastically decreases search times for a synchronized visual object that is normally very difficult to find. This effect occurs even though the pip contains no information on the location…

The authors examined observers steering through a series of obstacles to determine the role of active gaze in shaping locomotor trajectories. Participants sat on a bicycle trainer integrated with a large field-of-view simulator and steered through a series of slalom gates. Steering behavior was determined by examining the passing distance through…

Intuition denotes the ability to judge stimulus properties on the basis of information that is activated in memory, but not consciously retrieved. In three experiments we show that participants discriminated better than chance fragmented line drawings depicting meaningful objects (coherent fragments) from fragments consisting of randomly displaced…