The golden section has become a well-known concept in the study and practice of music. However, no study has examined why the golden section may have become so popular in both music practice and analysis. The meta-analysis reported here reveals that the golden section has been related to one or more pieces of music in 113 items of published…

Visual expertise covers a broad range of types of studies and methodologies. Many studies incorporate some measure(s) of observer performance or how well participants perform on a given task. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis is a method commonly used in signal detection tasks (i.e., those in which the observer must decide whether…

Our first review article (Wagemans et al., 2012) on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Gestalt psychology focused on perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. It concluded that further progress requires a reconsideration of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the Gestalt approach, which is provided here. In…

The high sky phenomenon (difficulty in perceiving a ball against a backdrop of a clear or dark sky) often reported by baseball players is examined. (MM)

Empirical data suggest that there is at most a very small sex difference in general mental ability, but men clearly perform better on visuospatial tasks while women clearly perform better on tests of verbal usage and perceptual speed. In this study, we integrated these overall findings with predictions based on the Verbal-Perceptual-Rotation (VPR)…

An inquiry into the origins of dynamical awareness shows that impressions of dynamical quantities are not generally correlated with the values that these quantities take in equations of motion but are highly correlated with simple ratios of kinematic quantities or with specific kinematic features that do not specify underlying dynamics. (SLD)

Three experiments investigated the role of egocentric orientation in subsequent memory for layouts learned via route (ground-level) and survey (aerial or overview) perspectives. Participants learned virtual environments from text descriptions (Experiment 1) or visual presentation (Experiments 1-3). In all experiments, scene recognition for route…