Functional relationships between praxic performance and visual recognition ability of mentally retarded adults are discussed, in an attempt to integrate findings from developmental disorders of action with those described in the adult literature. Three groups of participants took part in the study: adults with Down's syndrome (D), Mentally…

Limb apraxia is a common symptom of corticobasal degeneration (CBD). While previous research has shown that individuals with CBD have difficulty imitating transitive (tool-use actions) and intransitive non-representational gestures (nonsense actions), intransitive representational gestures (actions without a tool) have not been examined. In the…

A successful vision system must solve the problem of deriving geometrical information about three-dimensional objects from two-dimensional photometric input. The human visual system solves this problem with remarkable efficiency, and one challenge in vision research is to understand how neural representations of objects are formed and what visual…

We explored the effect of the degree of conceptual similarity between a witnessed event and an extra-event narrative on eyewitness suggestibility. Experiments 1A and 1B replicated Allen and Lindsay's (1998) finding that subjects sometimes intrude details from a narrative description of one event into their reports of a different visual event.…

The ability to read music accurately at sight is an extremely important, if not indispensable, qualification of both professional and amateur musicians. Sight-reading can be defined as the ability to translate musical symbols and terms into a musical performance using strict time limits. The musician must quickly perceive symbols ahead while…

Social threat captures attention and is processed rapidly and efficiently, with many lines of research showing involvement of the amygdala. Visual search paradigms looking at social threat have shown angry faces "pop-out" in a crowd, compared to happy faces. Autism and Asperger Syndrome (AS) are neurodevelopmental conditions…

Some models of object recognition propose that items from structurally crowded categories (e.g., living things) permit faster access to superordinate semantic information than structurally dissimilar categories (e.g., nonliving things), but slower access to individual object information when naming items. We present four experiments that utilize…

The commentary by S. T. Klapp (see record 2005-09704-010) on our recent article (A. Lleras & J. T. Enns, [see record 2004-21166-001]) proposes that the empirical finding of negative compatibility in masked priming be attributed to 2 distinct theoretical constructs: (a) perceptual priming through object updating, as described in our article, and…

Distractor interference effects were compared between distractors in the periphery and those placed at fixation. In 6 experiments, the authors show that fixation distractors produce larger interference effects than peripheral distractors. However, the fixation distractor effects are modulated by perceptual load to the same extent as are peripheral…

Observers performed a preview search task in which, on some trials, they had to indicate the presence of a briefly presented probe-dot. Probes could be presented on locations corresponding to old or new elements and prior to or after the presentation of the new elements. After the presentation of the new elements, probes were generally detected…

Recent research demonstrates neurologic and behavioral differences in people's responses to the space that is within and beyond reach. The present studies demonstrated a perceptual difference as well. Reachability was manipulated by having participants reach with and without a tool. Across 2 conditions, in which participants either held a tool or…

The authors tested whether the effects of the Ebbinghaus illusion on grasping are corrected during late phases of the movement. Surprisingly, the grasp aperture was corrected neither under no-vision (N = 52) nor under full-vision (N = 48) conditions. The authors show that previous reports of a correction (e.g., S. Glover & P. Dixon, 2002a) are due…

If after teaching a label for 1 object, a speaker does not name a nearby object, 3-year-olds tend to reject the label for the nearby object (W.E. Merriman, J.M. Marazita, L.H. Jarvis, J.A. Evey-Burkey, and M. Biggins, 1995a). In Studies 1 (5-year-olds) and 3 (3-year-olds), this effect depended on object similarity. In Study 2, when a speaker used…

This article takes a brief walk through two complex cultures, looking at similarities and differences between them. Visual perception is vital to both art and science, for to see is to understand. The article compares how education in each subject fosters visualization and creative thinking.

Responses by 156 Canadian college and university professionals who provide disability-related services to students were used to construct, develop, and validate the Accessibility of Campus Computing for Students With Disabilities Scale (ACCSDS): Service Provider Version. This is a 19-item, self-administered tool that evaluates institutional…