Background: The perceptual similarity between two objects, specifically similarity in the shape of the referents, is a crucial element for relating words in earlier stages of development. The role of this perceptual similarity has not been systematically explored in children with Down syndrome (DS). Method: The aim was to explore the role of…

Perception and perceptual memory play crucial roles in fear generalization, yet their dynamic interaction remains understudied. This research (N = 80) explored their relationship through a classical differential conditioning experiment. Results revealed that while fear context perception fluctuates over time with a drift effect, perceptual memory…

Perception is driven not only by current stimulation but also by previous sensory experience, which may serve as a perceptual prior for stimulus processing. A possible mechanism underlying this phenomenon is formalized in the internal reference model, which assumes that humans rely on an internal reference that updates continuously by integrating…

People are able to perceive emotions in the eyes of others and can therefore see emotions when individuals wear face masks. Research has been hampered by the lack of a good test to measure basic emotions in the eyes. In two studies respectively with 358 and 200 participants, we developed a test to see anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and…

Little is known about the mental representation of large multidigit numbers that are usually beyond our personal experience. The present study explored the processing mechanisms of these numbers in a series of experiments, using the numerical comparison task. Experiment 1 included within and between-scale comparisons of multidigit numbers varying…

Categorization researchers have long debated the possibility of multiple category-learning systems. The need persists for paradigms that dissociate explicit-declarative category-learning processes (featuring verbalizable category rules) from implicit-procedural processes (featuring stimulus-response associations lying beneath declarative…

Recent work has shown that perceptual training can be used to improve the performance of novices in real-world visual classification tasks with medical images, but it is unclear which perceptual training methods are the most effective, especially for difficult medical image discrimination tasks. We investigated several different perceptual…

Cognitive and behavioral studies ranging from biomechanics to motor functions and neural mirroring explorations have extensively investigated the communication of emotions in music and dance. Recognized for their ability to convey and elicit emotions, various studies aim to validate the extent to which auditory expressive cues and embodied…

Humans have the ability to learn surprisingly complicated statistical information in a variety of modalities and situations, often based on relatively little input. These statistical learning (SL) skills appear to underlie many kinds of learning, but despite their ubiquity, we still do not fully understand precisely what SL is and what individual…

While atypical sensory processes have become central to scientific explanatory models of autism, such models usually do not explicitly address first-person experiences of sensory processes by autistic individuals. Detailed phenomenological research of this subjective domain is nonetheless essential to ground explanatory accounts in the actual…

In this study, we investigated whether the difficulties in body motion (BM) perception may led to deficit in emotion recognition in Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To this aim, individuals with high-functioning ASD were asked to recognise fearful, happy, and neutral BM depicted as static images or dynamic point-light and full-light displays.…

Objects in early childhood education (ECEC) experiences have begun to receive a great deal more attention than ever before. Although much of this attention has emerged recently from new materialism, in this paper we turn to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological concern with the (in)visibility of 'things' to illuminate the presence of objects within…

The current study investigated perceptual simulation and its relationship with literacy ability in Chinese children. Ninety-three third-grade Hong Kong Chinese children completed a sentence-picture verification task for perceptual simulation. In this task, a sentence mentioning an object was presented first, followed by a picture involving the…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to use speech resynthesis to investigate the effects of changes to individual acoustic features on speech-based gender perception of transmasculine voice samples following the onset of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) with exogenous testosterone. We hypothesized that mean fundamental frequency (f[subscript 0])…

The typical trigonometry, precalculus, or calculus student might not agree that logarithms are hot stuff, but we drew motivation from chili peppers to help students get a better taste for logarithms. The Scoville scale, which ranges from 0 to 16,000,000, has been the sole quantitative metric to measure the pungency (spiciness) of peppers since its…