Four experiments examined the ability of infants to form categorical representations for the spatial relations "above" and "below." Found that three- and four-month-olds could form categorical representations for above and below when a diamond-shape was presented above or below a horizontal bar but could not do so when a number…

Studied whether a primary imagery (IM) factor can be identified as a separate dimension of individual differences in the spatial ability domain. Findings for 213 adults suggest the existence of three first-order IM factors, and a second-order confirmatory factor analysis suggests that the visual imagery dimensions can be located within the spatial…

Two experiments examined whether Deaf signers or hearing nonsigners exhibit categorical perception (CP) for hand configuration or for place of articulation in American Sign Language. Findings that signers and nonsigners performed similarly suggests that these categories in American Sign Language have a perceptual as well as a linguistic basis.…

Infants were familiarized with geometric forms and were then tested with a novel form paired with the familiar one. Compared to infants who had longer looks at the display, those who had shorter looks demonstrated more broadly distributed looks, showed more looks and shifts, and inspected more stimulus areas; and their shifts included more…

Investigated the ability of the Motor Free Test of Visual Perception Revised (MVPT-R) to differentiate between children with learning disabilities (n=38)and matched control children (n=38). Results showed that children with learning disabilities scored lower, with a significantly greater percentage scoring below the criterion cutoff than the…

A total of 45 3-month-olds were observed for stability in forming visual expectations. Findings indicate that infant performance in the Visual Expectation Paradigm is reliable as early as 3 months. Individual differences exist in infants' tendency to form visual expectations. (RH)

It is argued that the visual knowledge of smoothly curved surfaces can be defined in terms of local, non-metric order relations as well as point-by-point mappings of metric depth and/or orientation relative to the observer. A series of experiments with eight graduate students supports this theory. (SLD)

This study examined the effects of speechreading sentence perception across three speaker viewing angles: front view, quarter view, and side view. The performance of a female adult with postlingual hearing loss was measured at each angle. Results indicated that the side view angle was the most effective, though performance at the other angles was…

This preliminary study examined effects of word visibility and prime association factors on visual spoken word recognition in lipreading, using a related/unrelated prime-target paradigm with 20 hearing adults. In related prime-target pairings, more targets with a high than low prime association were identified. In unrelated prime-target pairings,…

In three experiments, three- and four-year olds were asked to map relative size from one array of objects to another, map relative size to relative proportion, and map relative size to a variety of perceptual dimensions. Children were able to make relational mappings based on size when spatial positions and concrete representations of size of…

Seven experiments with a total of 480 subjects indicated that subjects visually imaging classical ambiguous figures have difficulty reconstructing the images, and that their construal of the image strongly influences what is depicted within the image. Image content, rather than image inspection, appears to be selective. (SLD)

Groups of 10 and 15 year olds were shown a capital letter visual stimulus followed by a masking grid pattern. Sensory transmission time was the same in both groups. Older children showed a greater rate of information accrual and a greater amount of information extraction than did members of the younger group. (BC)

James J. Gibson (1954) viewed perception as a system that picks up information which supports coordination of the agent's actions with the systems the environment provides. This led him to develop the idea of affordances, characteristics of objects and the environment that support their contributions to interactive activity. (SLD)

Three experiments with 29 college students and 8 members of a university community demonstrate that shape recognition processes influence perceived figure-ground relationships in 3-dimensional displays when the edge between 2 potential figural regions is both a luminance contrast edge and a disparity edge. Implications for shape recognition and…

A connectionist model, SEarch via Recursive Rejection (SERR), is presented that performs across a window defining the model's functional field. Implications are discussed, and results of 5 experiments involving 19 male and 19 female adults and adolescents that test novel predictions derived from the model are presented. (SLD)