Previous research has demonstrated that people's movements can become unintentionally coordinated during interpersonal interaction. The current study sought to uncover the degree to which visual and verbal (conversation) interaction constrains and organizes the rhythmic limb movements of coactors. Two experiments were conducted in which pairs of…

Three experiments investigated the role of egocentric orientation in subsequent memory for layouts learned via route (ground-level) and survey (aerial or overview) perspectives. Participants learned virtual environments from text descriptions (Experiment 1) or visual presentation (Experiments 1-3). In all experiments, scene recognition for route…

Lip reading is the ability to partially understand speech by looking at the speaker's lips. It improves the intelligibility of speech in noise when audio-visual perception is compared with audio-only perception. A recent set of experiments showed that seeing the speaker's lips also enhances "sensitivity" to acoustic information,…

The line-bisection task, adapted to utilise a wooden rod as the bisection stimulus, has revealed that patients with visuo-spatial neglect may be more accurate at bisection when asked to pick up the rod, compared to pointing to its centre. We recently reported that neurologically intact participants show a similar dissociation on this…

We investigated the effect of legato and staccato articulation styles on the perception of modulated tempos. Ninety music majors served as participants. Listeners heard music examples that had been selected from two pieces, each of which included staccato and legato passages. Excerpts were presented to listeners in three conditions of tempo…

Faces are perceived holistically, a phenomenon best illustrated when the processing of a face feature is affected by the other features. Here, the authors tested the hypothesis that the holistic perception of a face mainly relies on its low spatial frequencies. Holistic face perception was tested in two classical paradigms: the whole-part…

Linguistic prominence is defined as words or syllables perceived auditorily as standing out from their environment. It is explored through changes in pitch, duration and loudness. In this study, phonetic realization and perception of prominence among lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese was investigated in two experiments. Experiment 1 explored…

Short term synaptic plasticity is a phenomenon which is commonly found in the central nervous system. It could contribute to functions of signal processing namely, temporal integration and coincidence detection by modulating the input synaptic strength. This dissertation has two parts. First, we study the effects of short term synaptic plasticity…

For the past few years, virtual environments (VEs) have gained broad attention from both scholarly and practitioner communities. However, in spite of intense and widespread efforts, most VE-related research has focused on the technical aspects of applications, and the necessary theoretical framework to assess the quality of interfaces and designs…

Critical thinking is often a desired competency for graduates of a technology program. Organizational members have uttered concern about students' inability to think critically. Although traditional pedagogical techniques, such as lectures and examinations, center on knowledge acquisition, debates in the technology classroom can effectively…

Neuroimaging studies investigating the neural network of visuospatial processing have revealed a right hemisphere network of activation including inferior parietal lobe, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and extrastriate regions. Impaired visuospatial processing, indicated by the Judgment of Line Orientation (JLO), is commonly seen in individuals…

Language comprehension occurs when the left-hemisphere (LH) and the right-hemisphere (RH) share information derived from discourse [Beeman, M. J., Bowden, E. M., & Gernsbacher, M. A. (2000). Right and left hemisphere cooperation for drawing predictive and coherence inferences during normal story comprehension. "Brain and Language, 71", 310-336].…

Sensation (noun) is emergent in joint acts of sensing (verb). To sense, in other words, is to make sense, and sense making entails what we call "somatic work." We investigate these dynamics in the context of olfaction, highlighting how olfaction intersects with social, cultural, and moral order--thus compelling reflexive forms of somatic…

This study investigated whether children with high-functioning autism/Asperger's syndrome have a different spontaneous processing style than typically developing children, that is, a style where they prefer details over meaning. Participants were 25 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 25 typically developing children matched by age,…

Many models of learning rely on accessing internal knowledge states. Yet, although infants and young children are recognized to be proficient learners, the ability to act on metacognitive information is not thought to develop until early school years. In the experiments reported here, 3.5-year-olds demonstrated memory-monitoring skills by…