This paper studies the dynamics of attempting to access two spatial memories simultaneously and its implications for the accuracy of recall. Experiment 1 demonstrates in a range of conditions that two cues pointing to different experiences of the same object location produce little or no higher recall than that observed with a single cue.…

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…

Like faces, body postures are susceptible to an inversion effect in untrained viewers. The inversion effect may be indicative of configural processing, but what kind of configural processing is used for the recognition of body postures must be specified. The information available in the body stimulus was manipulated. The presence and magnitude of…

Recently developed accounts of language comprehension propose that sentences are understood by constructing a perceptual simulation of the events being described. These simulations involve the re-activation of patterns of brain activation that were formed during the comprehender's interaction with the world. In two experiments we explored the…

Two divided visual field lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the role of the cerebral hemispheres in transposed-letter similarity effects. In Experiment 1, we created two types of nonwords: nonadjacent transposed-letter nonwords ("TRADEGIA"; the base word was "TRAGEDIA," the Spanish for "TRAGEDY") and two-letter different…

In 3 experiments the authors investigate how errors in perception produce errors in drawings. In Experiment 1, when Shepard stimuli were shown as a pair of tables, participants made severe errors in trying to adjust 1 part of the stimulus to match the other. When the table legs were removed, revealing a pair of parallelograms with minimal…

Many simple experiments can be performed in the classroom to explore the physics of vision. Students can learn of the two types of receptive cells (rods and cones), their distribution on the retina and the existence of the blind spot.

We studied how category typicality and out-of-category relatedness affect speeded category verification (vote ''yes'' if pictured object is clothing) in typically developing 4- to 14-year-olds and adults. Stimuli were typical and atypical category objects (e.g., pants, glove) and related and unrelated out-of-category objects (e.g., necklace,…

Understanding the intentional actions of others is a fundamental part of human social cognition and behavior. An important question is therefore whether other animal species, especially our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, also understand the intentional actions of others. Here we show that chimpanzees spontaneously (without training) behave…

It only makes sense to talk about the position of a moving object if one specifies the time at which its position is of interest. The authors here show that when a flash or tone specifies the moment of interest, subjects estimate the moving object to be closer to where it passes the fixation point and further in its direction of motion than it…

In a previous study, it was shown that the attentional blink (AB)--the failure to recall the 2nd of 2 visual targets (T1 and T2) presented within 500 ms in rapid serial visual presentation--is reduced when T2 is preceded by a distractor that shares a feature with T2 (e.g., color; Nieuwenstein, Chun, van der Lubbe & Hooge, 2005). Here, this cuing…

Visual attention is preattentively drawn to abrupt onsets of stimuli appearing in a visual array. In this experiment, I examined the speed of attentional capture for persons with and without mental retardation. Participants identified target stimuli that were signaled by a valid location cue (20% of the time), an invalid location cue (60% of the…

Fifteen young adults with intellectual disability and 17 college students learned the locations of 5 landmarks on an island map and then scanned from one landmark to another. In the perception condition, the landmarks were visible; in the imagery condition, they were not. The rate of scanning over distance was similar for perception and imagery…

The authors investigated the effect of action gaming on the spatial distribution of attention. The authors used the flanker compatibility effect to separately assess center and peripheral attentional resources in gamers versus nongamers. Gamers exhibited an enhancement in attentional resources compared with nongamers, not only in the periphery but…

Purpose: To study the role of visual perception of phonemes in visual perception of sentences and words among normal-hearing individuals. Method: Twenty-four normal-hearing adults identified consonants, words, and sentences, spoken by either a human or a synthetic talker. The synthetic talker was programmed with identical parameters within phoneme…