G. P. Bingham, R. C. Schmidt, and L. D. Rosenblum (1989) found that, by hefting objects of different sizes and weights, people could choose the optimal weight in each size for throwing to a maximum distance. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated this result. G. P. Bingham et al. hypothesized that hefting is a smart mechanism that allows objects…

This special section was motivated by a resurgence in the view that it is impossible to investigate perceptual and cognitive development without considering how it is affected by, and intertwined with, infants' and children's action in the world. This view has long been foundational to the field, yet contemporary investigations of the effects of…

Previous studies have shown that children suffering from developmental dyslexia have a deficit in categorical perception of speech sounds. The aim of the current study was to better understand the nature of this categorical perception deficit. In this study, categorical perception skills of children with dyslexia were compared with those of…

Visual backward masking is a versatile tool for understanding principles and limitations of visual information processing in the human brain. However, the mechanisms underlying masking are still poorly understood. In the current contribution, the authors show that a structurally simple mathematical model can explain many spatial and temporal…

Recent findings suggest the involvement of the cerebellum in perceptual and cognitive tasks. Our study investigated whether cerebellar patients show musical priming based on implicit knowledge of tonal-harmonic music. Participants performed speeded phoneme identification on sung target chords, which were either related or less-related to prime…

The study investigated the origins of the ability to recognize faces despite rotations in depth. Four experiments are reported that tested, using the habituation technique, whether 1-to-3-day-old infants are able to recognize the invariant aspects of a face over changes in viewpoint. Newborns failed to recognize facial perceptual invariances…

Perceptual grouping is a pre-attentive process which serves to group local elements into global wholes, based on shared properties. One effect of perceptual grouping is to distort the ability to estimate the distance between two elements. In this study, biases in distance estimates, caused by four types of perceptual grouping, were measured across…

This study reports a shadowing experiment, in which one has to repeat a speech stimulus as fast as possible. We tested claims about a direct link between perception and production based on speech gestures, and obtained two types of counterevidence. First, shadowing is not slowed down by a gestural mismatch between stimulus and response. Second,…

This article introduces a phenomenological understanding of embodiment and discusses it in relation to a somatic approach to teaching dance. The nature of bodily knowledge is scrutinized especially through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of perception, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. The article offers insight into the relationship…

Newborns' memory abilities have been shown in a number of studies. Yet little is known about whether many of the factors that are known to affect encoding, storage, and retrieval in older children and adults are also integral to memory processes at birth. Here we tested for the presence at birth of the retroactive interference and repetition…

The role of selective attention in infant phonetic perception was examined using a distraction masker paradigm. We compared perception of /bu/ versus /gu/ in 6- to 8-month-olds using a visual fixation procedure. Infants were habituated to multiple natural productions of 1 syllable type and then presented 4 test trials (old-new-old-new). Perception…

Pyramidal neurons in the piriform cortex from olfactory-discrimination (OD) trained rats undergo synaptic modifications that last for days after learning. A particularly intriguing modification is reduced paired-pulse facilitation (PPF) in the synapses interconnecting these cells; a phenomenon thought to reflect enhanced synaptic release. The…

Probability matching is a classic choice anomaly that has been studied extensively. While many approaches assume that it is a cognitive shortcut driven by cognitive limitations, recent literature suggests that it is not a strategy per se, but rather another outcome of people's well-documented misperception of randomness. People search for patterns…

Five experiments demonstrate auditory-semantic distraction in tests of memory for semantic category-exemplars. The effects of irrelevant sound on category-exemplar recall are shown to be functionally distinct from those found in the context of serial short-term memory by showing sensitivity to: The lexical-semantic, rather than acoustic,…

College trustees are stepping up their oversight as institutions seek new revenue sources and as government scrutiny of higher education continues to increase, a panel of management experts said last week at the annual conference of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Across the country, board members are hiring…