The focus in this article is on the usefulness of spatial sequencing as a tactic for interpreting a map and organizing our memory of it. This skill is useful whenever some condition varies in a systematic way with distance. When students are asked whether they see a pattern on a map of a topic like wildfires or terrorist activity, some students…

Many models of recognition are derived from models originally applied to perception tasks, which assume that decisions from trial to trial are independent. While the independence assumption is violated for many perception tasks, we present the results of several experiments intended to relate memory and perception by exploring sequential…

An extraordinary variety of experimental (e.g., flicker, magnetic fields) and clinical (epilepsy, migraine) conditions give rise to a surprisingly common set of elementary hallucinations, including spots, geometric patterns, and jagged lines, some of which also have color, depth, motion, and texture. Many of these simple hallucinations fall into a…

The study examined the perception of random lines by people with gambling problems compared to people without gambling problems. The sample consisted of 67 probable pathological gamblers and 46 people without gambling problems. Participants completed a number of questionnaires about their gambling and were then presented with a series of random…

Feedback is a crucial form of information for learners. With the availability of new educational technologies, the manner in which feedback is delivered has changed tremendously. Existing research on the learning outcomes of the content and nature of computer mediated feedback is limited and contradictory. "Signals" is an educational data-mining…

In 6 experiments, the authors investigated the form of serial position functions for identification of letters, digits, and symbols presented in strings. The results replicated findings obtained with the target search paradigm, showing an interaction between the effects of serial position and type of stimulus, with symbols generating a distinct…

Learning in educational settings emphasizes declarative and procedural knowledge. Studies of expertise, however, point to other crucial components of learning, especially improvements produced by experience in the extraction of information: perceptual learning (PL). We suggest that such improvements characterize both simple sensory and complex…

Explores how a dyadic understanding of perception cancels the validity it might have as a model for the linguistic process. Discusses commonly misunderstood exhibits in the gallery of perception studies--the duck-rabbit and Magritte's pipe. (RS)

Investigates the ability of four-, seven-, and ten-month-old infants to perceive and base novelty responses on correlations among perceptual attributes in a category-like context. In a habituation-dishabituation paradigm, ten-month-old infants clearly responded on the basis of the correlation among attributes, while four- and seven-month-old…

Presented is experimental evidence that humans develop strong preferences for objects that become familiar through repeated exposure, even when the exposures are so degraded that they cannot be discriminated as stimuli previously seen. Implications are made regarding other studies where affective discriminations are made with very little stimulus…

Learning in educational settings most often emphasizes declarative and procedural knowledge. Studies of expertise, however, point to other, equally important components of learning, especially improvements produced by experience in the extraction of information: "Perceptual learning." Here we describe research that combines principles of…

A form perception theory is proposed in an attempt to understand problems in mental rotation and in perception of forms rotated in the frontal-parallel plane. The theory, along with distinctions among four types of information, was supported by two mental and three visual experiments with 74 undergraduate students. (TJH)

Two experiments with 100 undergraduates investigated effects of delay of feedback on immediate and delayed transfer tasks involving different pattern recognition strategies. Delay of feedback resulted in greater retention of the concepts underlying construction of the different patterns in all transfer tasks. Results support the Kulhavy-Anderson…

Examined 2-month-old infants' perception of sparse random-dot displays depicting an illusory shape against a background in three experiments in which background texture, luminance cues, and relative motion information were added or deleted. Found that infants preferred novel stimuli in each condition, revealing an early capacity to perceive shape…

A model of context effects in perception is applied to perception of letters. Perception results from excitatory and inhibitory interactions of detectors for visual features, letters, and words. The model produces facilitation for letters in pronounceable pseudowords as well as words and accounts for rule-governed performance without any rules.…