Figure/ground assignment--determining which part of the visual image is foreground and which background--is a critical step in early visual analysis, upon which much later processing depends. Previous research on the assignment of figure and ground to opposing sides of a contour has almost exclusively involved static geometric factors--such as…

Speech production involves the integration of auditory, somatosensory, and motor information in the brain. This article describes a model of speech motor control in which a feedforward control system, involving premotor and primary motor cortex and the cerebellum, works in concert with auditory and somatosensory feedback control systems that…

The suggestion that coherent motion may serve as a test of magnocellular sensitivity is problematic. However, the nature of the problems depends on how the "magnocellular system" is defined. If this term is limited to subcortical entities, the problems are that subcortical neurons are not directionally selective, and that their receptive fields…

Previous studies show that following disorientation children use the geometry of an enclosed space to locate an object hidden in one of the corners [e.g. (Harmer, L., & Spelke, E. (1996). Modularity and development: A case of spatial reorientation. "Cognition, 61," 195-232)]. These studies have used a disorientation procedure that involves…

This study compares the tendency for numerals to elicit spontaneous perceptions of colour or taste (synaesthesia) with the tendency to visualise numbers as occupying particular visuo-spatial configurations (number forms). The prevalence of number forms was found to be significantly higher in synaesthetes experiencing colour compared both to…

Purpose: This study investigated the opinions of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) regarding their role, education, and training in serving students with communication disorders who have been involved in violence. Method: A survey consisting of 26 items was given to 598 SLPs from eight states representing geographic regions of the United…

Studies on functional hemispheric asymmetries have suggested that the right vs. left hemisphere should be predominantly involved in low vs. high spatial frequency (SF) analysis, respectively. By manipulating exposure duration of filtered natural scene images, we examined whether the temporal characteristics of SF analysis (i.e., the temporal…

Four experiments investigated how readily infants achieve perceptual organization by lightness and form similarity. Infants were (a) familiarized with elements that could be organized into rows or columns on the basis of lightness or form similarity and tested with vertical versus horizontal bars depicting the familiar versus novel organization or…

The natural input memory (NAM) model is a new model for recognition memory that operates on natural visual input. A biologically informed perceptual preprocessing method takes local samples (eye fixations) from a natural image and translates these into a feature-vector representation. During recognition, the model compares incoming preprocessed…

A perceptual learning experiment provides evidence that the mental lexicon cannot consist solely of detailed acoustic traces of recognition episodes. In a training lexical decision phase, listeners heard an ambiguous [f-s] fricative sound, replacing either [f] or [s] in words. In a test phase, listeners then made lexical decisions to visual…

Vidic and Haaf (2004) questioned the idea that infants use head information to categorize cats as distinct from dogs (Quinn & Eimas, 1996) and argued instead that the torso region is important. However, only null results were observed in the critical test comparisons between modified and unmodified stimuli. In addition, a priori preferences for…

One of the difficulties faced by cochlear implant (CI) recipients is perception of low-intensity speech cues. A. E. Vandali (2001) has developed the transient emphasis spectral maxima (TESM) strategy to amplify short-duration, low-level sounds. The aim of the present study was to determine whether speech scores would be significantly higher with…

In this investigation participants formulated a grip aperture (GA) consistent with the size of an object embedded within a Muller-Lyer (ML) figure prior to initiating visually guided grasping movements. The accuracy of the grasping response was emphasized to determine whether or not the visuomotor system might resolve the premovement bias in GA…

Four experiments addressed the question of whether attention may be captured when the visual system is in the midst of an attentional blink (AB). Participants identified 2 target letters embedded among distractor letters in a rapid serial visual presentation sequence. In some trials, a square frame was inserted between the targets; as the only…

According to the hybrid theory of object recognition (J. E. Hummel, 2001), ignored object images are represented holistically, and attended images are represented both holistically and analytically. This account correctly predicts patterns of visual priming as a function of translation, scale (B. J. Stankiewicz & J. E. Hummel, 2002), and…