Four experiments tested four month olds on visual discrimination tasks. As the time allotted to solve these problems was shortened, infants who looked at stimuli for a short amount of time performed better than other infants, indicating that performance superiority was attributable to speed of processing. (BC)

Assessed 13- and 20-week-olds infants' discrimination between shearing stimuli, in which columns of dots move vertically on a screen at different velocities, and foil stimuli, in which all dots move at the same velocity. Results revealed the threshold levels of dot velocity in shearing stimuli at which discrimination occurred. (BC)

Three experiments examined how flexibly two- to four-year-old children use the words "big" and "little" in normative, perceptual, and functional contexts. Results showed that children switched easily from a normative context but made errors when asked to switch to a normative context. (MDM)

Children, ages 9 to 13 years, made judgments of proportion with a variety of graphical elements in 2 experiments. A characteristic pattern of over- and underestimation was observed; this pattern was also present, but previously unnoticed, in judgments made by adults. (MDM)

Infants were tested at 5, 8, and 13 months of age for numerosity perception. Subjects observed displayed figures on a screen moving at constant speed with irregular trajectories and occasional occlusions. Results demonstrated that discrimination of units, and not of characteristic patterns, underlies numerosity perception. (BC)

Suggests that the role of phonology may be more limited when reading text in Japanese relative to English, and that this difference is not due to variations in orthographic depth. Proposes key factors are the greater visual discriminability of kanji words under degraded conditions and the less important role of word order as a syntactic cue. (SR)

A preferential looking procedure was used to investigate 7-month-olds' perception of positive and negative affective facial expressions in which a single vocal expression was concordant or discordant with the videotaped facial expression. Results indicated that 7-month-olds discriminated among happy, interested, angry, and sad expressions.…

We trained four pigeons to discriminate a Michotte launching animation from three other animations using a go/no-go task. The pigeons received food for pecking at one of the animations, but not for pecking at the others. The four animations featured two types of interactions among objects: causal (direct launching) and noncausal (delayed, distal,…

Three pigeons discriminated between two sample stimuli (intensities of red light). The difficulty of the discrimination was varied over four levels. At each level, the relative reinforcer magnitude for the two correct responses was varied across conditions, and the reinforcer rates were equal. Within levels, discriminability between the sample…

Previous research suggests that model competence does not emerge until relatively late in infancy (20-26 months). Development was systematically analyzed within 3 key areas--count noun learning, dual representation, and categorization--hypothesized to support the emergence of model competence in the second year. In an object-handling preferential…

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a severe impairment in identifying faces that is present from early in life and that occurs despite no apparent brain damage and intact visual and intellectual function. Here, we investigated what aspects of face processing are impaired/spared in developmental prosopagnosia by examining a relatively large group…

Previous studies have demonstrated the sensitivity of chimpanzees to facial configurations. Three studies further these findings by showing this sensitivity to be specific to second-order relational properties. In humans, this type of configural processing requires prolonged experience and enables subordinate-level discriminations of many…

Patients with unilateral (left or right) medial temporal lobe lesions and normal control (NC) volunteers participated in two experiments, both using a duration bisection procedure. Experiment 1 assessed discrimination of auditory and visual signal durations ranging from 2 to 8 s, in the same test session. Patients and NC participants judged…

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…

Two experiments were conducted to understand the processes through which 5th graders discriminate relevant from irrelevant information when solving mathematical story problems. Visual scanning was recorded and coded as directed toward relevant information, irrelevant information, the question, workspace, and elsewhere. Experiment 1 focused on the…