Do we view the world differently if it is described to us in figurative rather than literal terms? An answer to this question would reveal something about both the conceptual representation of figurative language and the scope of top-down influences on scene perception. Previous work has shown that participants will look longer at a path region of…

The authors investigated whether anomalous information in the periphery of a scene attracts saccades when the anomaly is not distinctive in its low-level visual properties. Subjects viewed color photographs for 8 s while their eye movements were monitored. Each subject saw 2 photographs of different scenes. One photograph was a control scene in…

Nine experiments examined the means by which visual memory for individual objects is structured into a larger representation of a scene. Participants viewed images of natural scenes or object arrays in a change detection task requiring memory for the visual form of a single target object. In the test image, 2 properties of the stimulus were…

Understanding the relative role of top-down and bottom-up guidance is crucial for models of visual search. Previous studies have addressed the role of top-down and bottom-up processes in search for a conjunction of features but with inconsistent results. Here, the author used an attentional capture method to address the role of top-down and…

Visual constructive and visual-motor skills in the deaf population were investigated by comparing performance of deaf native signers (n = 20) to that of hearing nonsigners (n = 20) on the Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration, Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test, Wechsler Memory Scale Visual Reproduction subtest, and…

People perceive and conceive of activity in terms of discrete events. Here the authors propose a theory according to which the perception of boundaries between events arises from ongoing perceptual processing and regulates attention and memory. Perceptual systems continuously make predictions about what will happen next. When transient errors in…

This article presents a speech delivered by the author for the Kent M. Christiansen Memorial Lecture series in April 2008 at Arizona State University. The author discusses why he thinks that approaches to academic advising theory and research that arises out of the humanities can be of great value to practitioners in the field of academic…

This study examined children's and young adults' use of three mental capacity criteria for treating an entity as one to which moral subjects have moral obligations, that is, as having moral status. In line with philosophical theorizing, these criteria were the capacity to (1) perceive; (2) suffer; and (3) think. In this study, 116 respondents aged…

Mounting clinical evidence suggests that abnormalities of social engagement in children with autism are present even during infancy. However, direct experimental documentation of these abnormalities is still limited. In this case report of a 15-month-old infant with autism, we measured visual fixation patterns to both naturalistic and ambiguous…

A pivotal period in the development of language occurs in the second year of life, when language comprehension undergoes rapid acceleration. However, the brain bases of these advances remain speculative as there is currently no functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from healthy, typically developing toddlers at this age. We…

Listeners can explicitly categorize unfamiliar talkers by regional dialect with above-chance performance under ideal listening conditions. However, the extent to which this important source of variation affects speech processing is largely unknown. In a series of four experiments, we examined the effects of dialect variation on speech…

We studied the age-related differences in inspection time and multiple cognitive domains in a group of monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins aged 7 to 17 years. Data from 111 twin pairs and 19 singleton siblings were included. We found clear age-related trends towards more efficient visual information processing in older participants. There…

Methods used to assess children's speech perception and recognition in the clinical setting are out of step with current methods used to investigate these experimentally. Traditional methods of assessing speech discrimination, such as picture pointing, yield accuracy scores which may fail to detect subtle perceptual difficulties. This paper will…

There is a growing body of literature about assessment in higher education. Much of it is devoted to advocating the benefits of assessment, describing how assessment initiatives and programs might be organized within an institution, identifying key attributes of successful assessment projects (leadership, resources, faculty engagement), and…

The temporal order of two events, each presented in a different visual hemifield, is judged correctly by typical observers even when their onsets differ only slightly. The present study examined the influence of an endogenous process on TOJ, and shows that the perception of temporal order is also affected when available attentional resources are…