Two experiments demonstrate that 5-month-olds are sensitive to local redundancy in visual-temporal sequences. In Experiment 1, 20 infants saw 2 separate sequences of looming colored shapes that possessed the same elements but contrasting transitional probabilities. One sequence was random whereas the other was based on bigrams. Without any prior…

Five experiments examined what is learned based on the perceptual and semantic information of objects in visual statistical learning (VSL). In the familiarization phase, participants viewed a sequence of line drawings and detected repetitions of various objects. In a subsequent test phase, they watched 2 test sequences (statistically related…

Two significant questions in cognitive and developmental science are first, whether objects and events are selected for attention based on their features (featural processing) or the configuration of their features (configural processing), and second, how these modes of processing develop. These questions have been addressed in part with…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between school counselor participants' perceived levels of job burnout, as measured by Lee's 2007 Counselor Burnout Inventory (CBI) with the assignment of non-counseling duties, as measured by Scarborough's 2005 School Counselors Activity Rating Scale (SCARS) and the alignment of their…

This study investigated children's tonal awareness by measuring their abilities to detect dissonance in major tonality using the author-created "Tonal Dissonance Detection Test." A two-way analysis of variance of 312 elementary school subjects' Tonal Dissonance Detection Test scores revealed that first- and second-graders' dissonance detection…

In "The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective," one of Samuel Edgerton's claims is that Filippo Brunelleschi and his contemporaries did not develop a three-dimensional style of representing the world in painting as much as they reappropriated a way to depict the natural world in painting that most mirrored the human perception of it.…

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether Blissymbolics have the potential for being developed into a tactile symbol communication system. Tactile techniques are used by many individuals with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) needs. Tactile processing is optimized by the use of minimalistic stimuli, i.e., stimuli…

Recognition of a single word is an elemental task in innumerable cognitive psychology experiments, but involves unexpected complexity. We test a controversial claim that the human fovea is vertically divided, with each half projecting to either the contralateral or ipsilateral hemisphere, thereby influencing foveal word recognition. We report a…

What does it mean to "know" what an object is? Viewing objects from different categories (e.g., tools vs. animals) engages distinct brain regions, but it is unclear whether these differences reflect object categories themselves or the tendency to interact differently with objects from different categories (grasping tools, not animals). Here we…

In conditioned taste aversion (CTA), a taste, the conditioned stimulus (CS), is paired with an illness-inducing stimulus, the unconditioned stimulus (US), to produce CS-US associations at very long (hours) intervals, a result that appears to violate the law of contiguity. The specific length of the maximum effective trace interval that has been…

A retinally stabilized object readily undergoes perceptual fading and disappears from consciousness. This startling phenomenon is commonly believed to arise from local bottom-up sensory adaptation to edge information that occurs early in the visual pathway, such as in the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus or retinal ganglion cells. Here…

Although considerable research has examined the storage limits of visual short-term memory (VSTM), little is known about the initial formation (i.e., the consolidation) of VSTM representations. A few previous studies have estimated the capacity of consolidation to be one item at a time. Here we used a sequential-simultaneous manipulation to…

Typical studies of object substitution masking (OSM) employ a briefly presented search array. The target item is indicated by a cue/mask that surrounds but does not overlap the target and, compared to a common offset control condition, report of the target is reduced when the mask remains present after target offset. Given how little observers are…

Classical views of speech perception argue that the static and dynamic characteristics of spectral energy peaks (formants) are the acoustic features that underpin phoneme recognition. Here we use representations where the amplitude modulations of sub-band filtered speech are described, precisely, in terms of co-sinusoidal pulses. These pulses are…

Patients deprived of visual experience during infancy by dense bilateral congenital cataracts later show marked deficits in the perception of global motion (dorsal visual stream) and global form (ventral visual stream). We expected that they would also show marked deficits in sensitivity to biological motion, which is normally processed in the…