In Experiment 1, we trained four pigeons to concurrently discriminate displays of 16 same icons (16S) from displays of 16 different icons (16D) as well as between displays of same icons (16S) from displays that contained 15 same icons and one different icon (15S:1D). The birds rapidly learned to discriminate 16S vs. 16D displays, but they failed…

In 7 experiments, the authors explored whether visual attention (the ability to select relevant visual information) and visual working memory (the ability to retain relevant visual information) share the same content representations. The presence of singleton distractors interfered more strongly with a visual search task when it was accompanied by…

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,…

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…

All of the target articles in this issue are concerned with trajectories of development, with all focusing in one way or another on U-shaped functions. For purposes of this commentary, the author is primarily concerned with the Cashon and Cohen article. The mechanisms whereby one processes faces represent one of several perceptual/cognitive…

This study seeks information on the mental representation of Verb-Noun (VN) nominal compounds through neuropsychological methods. The lexical retrieval of compound nouns is tested in 30 aphasic patients using a visual confrontation naming task. The target names are VN compounds, Noun-Noun (NN) compounds, and long morphologically simple nouns…

This paper comments on the article by Plaut and Booth. Plaut and Booth's first simulation shows that there is essentially perfect discrimination between word and nonwords sharing the same orthographic structure when the simulation is carried out in the way we suggested. We take the view that Plaut and Booth's new simulation work settles little…

Two experiments were designed to investigate possible abnormal face processing strategies in children with autistic spectrum disorders. A group of 11 children with autism was compared to two groups of normally developing children matched on verbal mental age and on chronological age. In the first experiment, participants had to recognize faces on…

Six experiments investigated 7-month-old infants' capacity to learn about the self-propelled motion of an object. After observing 1 wind-up toy animal move on its own and a second wind-up toy animal move passively by an experimenter's hand, infants looked reliably longer at the former object during a subsequent stationary test, providing evidence…

Persons with mental retardation often exhibit greater interference in visual selective attention tasks than do persons matched with them on CA. My goal here was to evaluate whether differences in distractor interference between persons with and without mental retardation may be related to differences in negative priming. Fifteen participants with…

E-learning has acquired a prime place in many discussions recently. A number of research efforts around the world are trying to enhance education and training through improving e-learning facilities. This paper briefly explains one such attempt aimed at designing a system to support video clips in e-learning and explains how profiles of the…

Groups of Grade 3 children were tested on measures of word-level literacy and undertook tasks that required the ability to associate sounds with letter sequences and that involved visual, auditory and phonological-processing skills. These groups came from different language backgrounds in which the language of instruction was Arabic, Chinese,…

The perceived spatiotemporal continuity of objects depends on the way they appear and disappear as they move in the spatial layout. This study investigated whether infants' predictive tracking of a briefly occluded object is sensitive to the manner by which the object disappears and reappears. Five-, 7-, and 9-month-old infants were shown a ball…

A study of the differences in the estimates given by older and younger adults of the ages of stimulus persons distributed across the age continuum. (SDH)