More than 50 years ago, Bongard introduced 100 visual concept learning problems as a challenge for artificial vision systems. These problems are now known as Bongard problems. Although they are well known in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, only very little progress has been made toward building systems that can solve a substantial…

When people perceive the world, what they see is based on the physics of light reflecting off surfaces and entering their eyes. Their brain then processes the raw data so that photoreceptor activity becomes perceptual awareness. Most textbooks and chapters on sensation and perception follow this formula, building student understanding of…

The development of numerical and arithmetic abilities constitutes a crucial cornerstone in our modern and educated societies. Difficulties to acquire these central skills can lead to severe consequences for an individual's well-being and nation's economy. In the present review, we describe our current broad understanding of the functional and…

This paper tries to explain the author's own curious and bothersome failure to see. About ten years ago, he lived in a small apartment in Tel Aviv, Israel just a few minutes walking distance from the beach. The short road from his apartment went up a small hill and through a laid-back park filled with tourists, local families, surfers, dog owners…

Visual expertise in medicine has been a subject of research since many decades. Interestingly, it has been investigated from two little related fields, namely the field that focused mainly on the visual search aspects whilst ignoring higher-level cognitive processes involved in medical expertise, and the field that mainly focused on these…

This paper explores what we can learn from research that early cognitive processes support the development of children's mathematics skills. The role of two cognitive processes in working memory in the development of early mathematics was investigated: executive functions (EF) and visual-spatial (VS) ability. Children's mathematical skills were…

In this reply to Salverda (2016), we address a critique of the claims made in our recent study of real-time processing of American Sign Language (ASL) signs using a novel visual world eye-tracking paradigm (Lieberman, Borovsky, Hatrak, & Mayberry, 2015). Salverda asserts that our data do not support our conclusion that native signers and…

We have a remarkable ability to accurately estimate average featural information across groups of objects, such as their average size or orientation. It has been suggested that, unlike individual object processing, this process of "feature averaging" occurs automatically and relatively early in the course of perceptual processing,…

When remembering a real-world scene, people encode both detailed information about specific objects and higher order information like the overall gist of the scene. However, formal models of change detection, like those used to estimate visual working memory capacity, assume observers encode only a simple memory representation that includes no…

In this review, a new model that is grounded in information-processing theory is proposed to account for gender differences in spatial ability. The proposed model assumes that the relative strength of working memory, as expressed by the ratio of visuospatial working memory to verbal working memory, influences the type of strategies used on spatial…

This literature review explores visualisation within the context of learning in design, engineering and technology education. The investigation first defines visualisation, providing examples of activities that utilise visualisation skills within an applied field. Then exploration of the mental mechanisms of visualisation used to engage with those…

This paper explores the question of whether the ability to spell depends mainly on visual perception and visual imagery, or on other equally important auditory, cognitive, and motor processes. The writer examines the evidence suggesting that accurate spelling draws on a combination of visual processing, visual memory, phonological awareness,…

Experimental evidence suggests that the content of a memory for even a simple display encoded in visual short-term memory (VSTM) can be very complex. VSTM uses organizational processes that make the representation of an item dependent on the feature values of all displayed items as well as on these items' representations. Here, we develop a…

We have previously found that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over right inferior frontal cortex (RIFC) enhances performance during learning of a difficult visual target detection task (Clark et al., 2012). In order to examine the cognitive mechanisms of tDCS that lead to enhanced performance, here we analyzed its differential…

Two separate lines of study have clarified the role of selectivity in conscious access to visual information. Both involve presenting multiple targets and distracters: one "simultaneously" in a spatially distributed fashion, the other "sequentially" at a single location. To understand their findings in a unified framework, we propose a…