Two experiments explored repetition priming benefits in the left and right cerebral hemispheres. In both experiments, a lateralized lexical decision task was employed using repeated target stimuli. In the first experiment, all targets were repeated in the same visual field, and in the second experiment the visual field of presentation was switched…

Performance in 2 versions of a computer-animated task was compared. Participants either indicated the time of arrival of a target that rolled off a horizontal surface and fell--hidden from view--onto a landing point (production task) or judged flight time on a rating scale (judgment task). As predicted, performance was significantly better in the…

A brief target that is visible when displayed alone can be rendered invisible by a trailing stimulus (metacontrast masking). It has been difficult to determine the temporal dynamics of masking to date because increments in stimulus duration have been invariably confounded with apparent brightness (Bloch's law). In the research reported here,…

Does repetition blindness represent a failure of perception or of memory? In Experiment 1, participants viewed rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sentences. When critical words (C1 and C2) were orthographically similar, C2 was frequently omitted from serial report; however, repetition priming for C2 on a postsentence lexical decision task was…

We test 3 theories of global and local scene information acquisition, defining global and local in terms of spatial frequencies. By independence theories, high- and low-spatial-frequency information are acquired over the same time course and combine additively. By global-precedence theories, global information acquisition precedes local…

People frequently analyze the actions of other people for the purpose of action coordination. To understand whether such self-relative action perception differs from other-relative action perception, the authors had observers either compare their own walking speed with that of a point-light walker or compare the walking speeds of 2 point-light…

The authors present 2 experiments that establish the presence of knowledge partitioning in perceptual categorization. Many participants learned to rely on a context cue, which did not predict category membership but identified partial boundaries, to gate independent partial categorization strategies. When participants partitioned their knowledge,…

This study of the haptic exploratory strategies used by nine children with visual impairments and additional disabilities when interacting with portable and freely manipulable objects found that a broader approach to assessment and analysis is required than is used with typically developing children. An "adaptive-tasks" approach is proposed as a…

Eighty 5.5- to 12.5-month-old infants participated in 4 delayed-response procedures challenging shortterm visuospatial memory (STVM), 2 that varied the time between presentation and search and 2 that varied the number of locations. Within each type of challenge, 1 task required a gaze response and 1 required a reach response. There was little…

Are words read visually (by means of a direct mapping from orthography to semantics) or phonologically (by mapping from orthography to phonology to semantics)? The authors addressed this long-standing debate by examining how a large-scale computational model based on connectionist principles would solve the problem and comparing the model's…

In this study the authors address the issue of how the perceptual usefulness of nonliteral imagery should be evaluated. Perceptual performance with nonliteral imagery of natural scenes obtained at night from infrared and image-intensified sensors and from multisensor fusion methods was assessed to relate performance on 2 basic perceptual tasks to…

John Willinsky's view that imperialism and its legacy remain the driving force that divides the world into "superior" and "inferior" cultures fails to take into account other forces that also encourage peoples of different cultures to emphasize the differences between themselves. He is correct in noting that imperialism led to much injustice and…

Fire is a challenge in the wildland-urban interface. Although resource managers encourage residents to create defensible space, many do not. This study illustrates the value of using a needs assessment to better understand perceptions of an audience in order to develop meaningful messages and materials. In this case, our audience is residents of…

In the good old days, the state that is Nebraska was identified as part of the Great American Desert. In many ways, in climate and terrain, it still bears a resemblance to a desert. As a frontier or a land of pioneers, it deserves recognition. Invisibility may be one of the greatest challenges women face. One of the great flaws in the writing of…

This study investigated the linguistic processing of visual speech (video of a talker's utterance without audio) by determining if such has the capacity to prime subsequently presented word and nonword targets. The priming procedure is well suited for the investigation of whether speech perception is amodal since visual speech primes can be used…