Two experiments found that (1) by age 8 months infants perceived that leaning extends their effective reaching space to grasp objects; (2) by 10 months they perceived the effective limits of leaning and reaching; and (3) by 12 months they began to perceive how this space may be extended by a mechanical aid. (MDM)

This study evaluated whether listeners can distinguish human brainstem auditory evoked responses elicited by acoustic clicks from control waveforms obtained with no acoustic stimulus when the waveforms are presented auditorily. Detection performance for stimuli presented visually was slightly, but consistently, superior to that which occurred for…

Two experiments examined visual attention in 5- to 13-year olds who were hearing or deaf with or without cochlear implants. Findings indicated that visual selective attention changes occurred around 8 years for all groups, with deaf children without cochlear implants performing less well than others. Differences between deaf children with and…

A rather consistent finding in studies of perceived (imagined) compared to actual movement in a reaching paradigm is the tendency to overestimate at midline. Explanations of such behavior have focused primarily on perceptions of postural constraints and the notion that individuals calibrate reachability in reference to multiple degrees of freedom,…

People presume that the light source in pictures comes from above, and there is some evidence that this phenomenon also demonstrates lateral biases. When investigators present multiple ambiguous stimuli or visually complex objects, people assume that the source of light is from above, and to the left. However, when single relatively simple stimuli…

When presented simultaneously with equally discriminable, but unfamiliar, visual and auditory stimuli, 4-year-olds exhibited auditory dominance, processing only auditory information ( Sloutsky & Napolitano, 2003). The current study examined factors underlying auditory dominance. In 6 experiments, 4-year-olds (N181) were presented with auditory and…

The detection or discrimination of the second of 2 targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task is often temporarily impaired-a phenomenon termed the attentional blink. This study demonstrated that the attentional blink also affects localization performance. Spatial cues pointed out the possible target positions in a subsequent visual…

Semantic influences on attention during the 1st fixation on a scene were explored in 3 experiments. Subjects viewed briefly presented scenes; following scene presentation, a spatial probe was presented at the location of an object whose identity was consistent or inconsistent with the scene category. Responses to the probe served as an index of…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) was probed while observers performed smooth pursuit eye movements. Smooth pursuit keeps a moving object stabilized in the fovea. VSTM capacity for position was reduced during smooth pursuit compared with a condition with eye fixation. There was no difference between a condition in which the items were approximately…

Bornstein, Kessen, and Weiskopf (1976) reported that pre-linguistic infants perceive colour categorically for primary boundaries: Following habituation, dishabituation only occurred if the test stimulus was from a different adult category to the original. Here, we replicated this important study and extended it to include secondary boundaries,…

In feature search tasks, uncertainty about the dimension on which targets differ from the nontargets hampers search performance relative to a situation in which this dimension is known in advance. Typically, these cross-dimensional costs are associated with less efficient guidance of attention to the target. In the present study, participants…

It is known that naive observers have striking misconceptions about mirror reflections. In 5 experiments, this article systematically extends the findings to graphic stimuli, to interactive visual tasks, and finally to tasks involving real mirrors. The results show that the perceptual knowledge of nonexpert adults is far superior to their…

Although many theories of attention assume that attending to an object results in the processing of all its feature dimensions, there has been no direct evidence that the irrelevant dimensions of an attended nontarget object are encoded. This article explores factors that modulate such processing. In 6 experiments, participants made a speeded…

When navigating by path integration, knowledge of one's position becomes increasingly uncertain as one walks from a known location. This uncertainty decreases if one perceives a known landmark location nearby. We hypothesized that remembering landmarks might serve a similar purpose for path integration as directly perceiving them. If this is true,…

Human infants actively forage for visual information from the moment of birth onward. Although we know a great deal about how stimulus characteristics influence looking behavior in the first few postnatal weeks, we know much less about the intrinsic dynamics of the behavior. Here we show that a simple stochastic dynamical system acts…