A patient with pica and Lennox Gastaut syndrome suddenly refused oral intake. Neck radiographs revealed no foreign body. Barium swallow identified an irregular filling defect in the cervical esophagus. Esophagoscopy showed a gold ball-like object (half a lemon) 3 cm distal to the cricopharyngeus. This object had to be removed by esophagotomy after…

The effects of familiarity on selective attention for the identity and expression of faces were tested using Garner's speeded-classification task. In 2 experiments, participants classified expression (or identity) of familiar and unfamiliar faces while the irrelevant dimension of identity (or expression) was either held constant (baseline…

Despite emphasis in policy on participation of disabled children, we still know relatively little about how to obtain the views of disabled children with significant communication impairment and their views are often overlooked in planning and service provision. This article describes how the views of children who do not use speech were accessed…

The present study was designed to investigate the relationship between performance of limb gestures and the severity of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Apraxia tends to occur at later stages of AD, and the severity of apraxia has been shown to vary with the severity of AD dementia. Participants were 19 mild (including 9 with no cognitive impairment and…

Limb apraxia is a common symptom of corticobasal degeneration (CBD). While previous research has shown that individuals with CBD have difficulty imitating transitive (tool-use actions) and intransitive non-representational gestures (nonsense actions), intransitive representational gestures (actions without a tool) have not been examined. In the…

Three experiments investigated whether the similarity of relational structures influences the interpretation of spatial representations. Adults were shown diagrams of hand gestures paired with simple statements and asked to judge the meaning of new gestures. In Experiment 1 the gestures were paired with active declarative statements. In Experiment…

When people perform a recognition memory task, they may avail themselves of different forms of information. For example, they may recall specific learning episodes, or rely on general feelings of familiarity. Although subjective familiarity is often valid, it can make people vulnerable to memory illusions. Research using verbal materials has shown…

We examined the ontogeny of gaze following by testing infants at 9, 10 and 11 months of age. Infants (N = 96) watched as an adult turned her head toward a target with either open or closed eyes. The 10- and 11-month-olds followed adult turns significantly more often in the open-eyes than the closed-eyes condition, but the 9-month-olds did not…

Very young infants orient overtly with eye and head movements to salient events in their visual environments, but those events rarely occur in the absence of competing visual stimuli. Two different models of how this kind of orienting is related to number and distribution of elements in the stimulus field were tested with infants across the age…

This article examines the potential effectiveness of training in nonverbal communication for sales representatives. The literature on this subject was reviewed, and a study using students as sales representatives was conducted to evaluate the potential of training in body language. The research results provide support for the proposition that such…

The study of gaze following in infants younger than 12 months of age has emphasized the effects of gesture, type of target, and its position or placement. This experiment extends this literature by examining the effects of adults' affective expression on 7-month-olds' gaze following. The effects of 3 affective expressions--happy, sad, and…

This paper examines the ways in which the choreography of "Moulin Rouge!" offers a range of gazes to the audience through the perspectives of both the characters and the camera itself. Various gendered and imperial/colonial power relationships that occur within the narrative are heightened in the choreography by referring to discourses inscribed…

When asked questions, children often avert their gaze. Furthermore, the frequency of such gaze aversion (GA) is related to the difficulty of cognitive processing, suggesting that GA is a good indicator of children's thinking and comprehension. However, little is known about how teachers detect and interpret such gaze signals. In Study 1 teaching…

Infants younger than 20 months of age interpret both words and symbolic gestures as object names. Later in development words and gestures take on divergent communicative functions. Here, we examined patterns of brain activity to words and gestures in typically developing infants at 18 and 26 months of age. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were…

Teachers may resist the notion of teaching as a performance but his or her voice, gestures, and movement in the classroom can help or harm student attentiveness. Strong skills in voice and movement can help illuminate a teacher's questions and ideas for students, drawing attention to what matters, holding their attention through a long class, and…