Separation thresholds for groups of 26 dyslexic and normal children attending the first year of secondary school were obtained with pairs of identically-oriented and spatially-overlapping straight lines presented at orientations varying from zero to 90 degrees. (Editor)

It is much easier to look for an unfamiliar character (such as an upside down A) embedded among familiar ones than to look for a familiar character (A) among unfamiliar ones. Furthermore, the nature of the background seems more important toperformance than the nature of the target. (Editor)

This experiment was designed to explore the claim that the form of children's drawings reflects the nature of their representation of pictured objects in memory. Subjects were 64 children (16 each from nursery school and grades 1, 3, and 6). (MS)

Five experiments investigated children's understanding that expectations based on prior experience may influence a person's interpretation of ambiguous visual information. Results suggest that understanding of interpretation begins at approximately six years of age. (HTH)

Examined effects on duration of gaze of infant- and adult-directed (ID and AD) speech signalling presentation of adult faces. Found that, when ID speech segments signaled presentation of a smiling, sad, fearful, or angry face, significant and comparable conditioning occurred with the smiling and sad faces, whereas nonsignificant and more variable…

Notes that in phonetic categorization, listeners hear a range of speech sounds forming a continuum of ambiguous sounds between two endpoints and are required to identify the sounds as one or other of the endpoints. Points out that this task has been used in phonetics and in psycholinguistics to study categorical perception, selective adaptation,…

Three studies investigated whether eye gaze cueing in 4-month-old infants is the result of a domain-specific module or reflects the activity of domain-general processes. In two of three experiments, infants perceived apparent motion of the pupils, and this directly elicited saccades, but only when this motion was preceded by a period of direct…

Discusses why public perceptions of the importance of Kettlewell's investigations on the phenomenon of industrial melanism diverge from those of researchers who actually work on the phenomenon. Explains the important role photographic and film depictions of differential bird predation play in Kettlewell's popularizations. (Author/SOE)

Discussion of multimedia libraries and the need for storage, indexing, and retrieval techniques focuses on the combination of computer vision and data mining techniques to model high-level concepts for image retrieval based on perceptual features of the human visual system. Uses fuzzy set theory to measure users' assessments and to capture users'…

Administered phonological awareness and phoneme identification tasks to dyslexic children and chronological age (CA) and reading-level (RL) comparison groups. Found no real differences in categorical perception between dyslexic and RL groups; however, more dyslexics (7 of 25) had abnormal identification functions. Results suggest that some…

A new qualitative scoring system for the Rey Visual Memory Test was tested for its ability to distinguish between malingerers and nonmalingerers. The new system, based on the types of errors made, was able to distinguish between 53 psychiatrically disabled and 64 normal nonmalingerers, and between nonmalingerers and 91 possible malingerers. (SLD)

Experiments involving a total of 114 college students from Indiana and Israel demonstrate that the initial analysis of visual objects into features from different dimensions strongly constrains postperceptual processes of response selection. A model of response selection is proposed to account for the findings. (SLD)

Used a habituation-dishabituation procedure to test ability of 4-, 5-, and 7-month-olds to differentiate between a subjective ellipse and a nonsubjective pattern that were constructed by displacing the inducing elements of the illusory figure. Found that even 4-month-olds discriminated between the subjective ellipse and nonillusory display. This…

Examines Tomlin and Villa's (1994) analysis of attention and Leow's (1998) attempt to operationalize this model. Argues that Leow's efforts to provide empirical support for the model fall short of that goal. (Author/VWL)