In some contexts, a photograph may be worth a thousand words. Previous research revealed a dialectical character of photographs: they simultaneously lack determinacy and exhibit an excess of meaning. The purpose of this study was to understand how, under this condition, high school students interpret photographs that were accompanied by different…

The study examined whether people can extract speech related information from the talker's upper face that was presented using either normally textured videos (Experiments 1 and 3) or videos showing only the outlined of the head (Experiments 2 and 4). Experiments 1 and 2 used within- and cross-modal matching tasks. In the within-modal task,…

Here, we demonstrate that action video game play enhances subjects' ability in two tasks thought to indicate the number of items that can be apprehended. Using an enumeration task, in which participants have to determine the number of quickly flashed squares, accuracy measures showed a near ceiling performance for low numerosities and a sharp drop…

The eugenics era (c. 1900?1930) produced a strong desire among mental retardation professionals to recognize and control "the feeble-minded." Some eugenicists believed it was possible to classify individuals visually by learning to recognize what they believed to be observable characteristics of idiocy and imbecility. In this paper I used…

We investigated the coupling between a speaker's and a listener's eye movements. Some participants talked extemporaneously about a television show whose cast members they were viewing on a screen in front of them. Later, other participants listened to these monologues while viewing the same screen. Eye movements were recorded for all speakers and…

Background: The study is concerned with the cognitive abilities of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Previous research has indicated that children with SLI demonstrate difficulties with certain cognitive tasks despite normal non-verbal IQ scores. It has been suggested that a general processing limitation might account for the…

The visual system continually selects some information for processing while bypassing the processing of other information, and as a consequence, participants often fail to notice large changes to visual stimuli. In the present studies, the authors investigated whether knowledge about the probability of particular changes occurring over time…

The authors examined the effects of suboptimally presented facial expressions on emotional and attentional responses and memory among 39 young adults viewing video (business news) messages from a small screen. Facial electromyography (EMG) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia were used as physiological measures of emotion and attention, respectively.…

In this study, visual-orthographic skills were defined as the ability to recognize whether letters and numerals are correctly oriented. Aims were to investigate whether visual-orthographic skills would contribute independent variance to reading, and whether children with a visual-orthographic deficit would be more impaired readers than similar…

Viewers who study photographs of scenes tend to remember having seen beyond the boundaries of the view ["boundary extension"; J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 15 (1989) 179]. Is this a fundamental aspect of scene representation? Forty undergraduates explored bounded regions of six common (3D) scenes, visually or haptically (while blindfolded)…

The present work aims at demonstrating that visual training associated with the act of reading modifies the way we perceive printed words. As reading does not train all parts of the retina in the same way but favors regions on the side in the direction of scanning, visual word recognition should be better at retinal locations that are frequently…

Two alternative hypotheses can be used to explain how young children acquire the cardinal meaning of small-number words. The first stresses the role of counting and predicts better performance when the items are presented in succession. The second considers the role of subitizing and predicts better performance when the items are presented…

This study explored asymmetries for movement, expression and perception of visual speech. Sixteen dextral models were videoed as they articulated: "bat," "cat," "fat," and "sat." Measurements revealed that the right side of the mouth was opened wider and for a longer period than the left. The asymmetry was accentuated at the beginning and ends of…

Several studies have reported that individuals with autism and Asperger's syndrome show a local processing bias on tasks involving features and configurations. This study assessed whether this bias results from differences in the perception of features or a cognitive bias to attend to features in autism as a consequence of a deficit in attending…

The marks awarded to 130 second year undergraduate word processed essays were assessed in relation to their use of different typographic features. By and large most of these features had little effect on the essay grades. However, essays printed in 12-point type gained significantly higher marks (mean = 56.8) than essays printed in 10-point type…