A remarkable amount of perceptual development occurs in the first year after birth. In this article, we spotlight the case of color perception. We outline how within just 6 months, infants go from very limited detection of color as newborns to a more sophisticated perception of color that enables them to make sense of objects and the world around…

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…

In this article, the authors focus on children's and adults' analyses and interpretations of the artwork and design of Peter Brown's "Mr. Tiger Goes Wild." Sipe (2008b) noted how the body of research on "children's visual meaning making from picturebooks" would benefit from "more studies combining careful and theoretically…

In humans, visual information is processed via parallel channels: the parvocellular (P) pathway analyzes color and form information, whereas the magnocellular (M) stream plays an important role in motion analysis. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show superior performance in processing fine detail, but impaired performance in…

Recent work on event perception suggests that perceptual processing increases when events change. An important question is how such changes influence the way other information is processed, particularly during dual-task performance. In this study, participants monitored a long series of distractor items for an occasional target as they…

The "other-race" effect describes the phenomenon in which faces are difficult to distinguish from one another if they belong to an ethnic or racial group to which the observer has had little exposure. Adult observers typically display multiple forms of recognition error for other-race faces, and infants exhibit behavioral evidence of a developing…

A recent study [Keri, S., & Benedek, G. (2009). Visual pathway deficit in female fragile x premutation carriers: A potential endophenotype. "Brain and Cognition", 69, 291-295] has found Vernier acuity deficiencies together with contrast sensitivity defects consistent with a magnocellular deficit in female fragile x premutation carriers. This may…

In the current study, we explored the influence of synesthesia on memory for word lists. We tested 10 grapheme-color synesthetes who reported an experience of color when reading letters or words. We replicated a previous finding that memory is compromised when synesthetic color is incongruent with perceptual color. Beyond this, we found that,…

Color and intensity coding provide perceptual cues to segregate categories of objects within a visual display, allowing operators to search more efficiently for needed information. Even within a perceptually distinct subset of display elements, however, it may often be useful to prioritize items representing urgent or task-critical information.…

Mathematicians have proven that four colors are sufficient to color 2-D maps so that no neighboring regions share the same color. Here we consider the psychological 4-color problem: Identifying which 4 colors should be used to make a map easy to use. We build a model of visual search for this design task and demonstrate how to apply it to the task…

Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM) is a standardised test that is commonly used to obtain a non-verbal reasoning score for children. As the RCPM involves the matching of a target to a pattern it is also considered to be a visuo-spatial perception task. RCPM is therefore frequently used in studies in Williams Syndrome (WS), in order to…

We show that perceptual sensitivity to visual stimuli can be modulated by matches between the contents of working memory (WM) and stimuli in the visual field. Observers were presented with an object cue (to hold in WM or to merely attend) and subsequently had to identify a brief target presented within a colored shape. The cue could be…

Two experiments examined developmental changes in children's visual recognition of common objects during the period of 18 to 24 months. Experiment 1 examined children's ability to recognize common category instances that presented three different kinds of information: (1) richly detailed and prototypical instances that presented both local and…

We combine the Dimension-Action (DA) model with translational models to account for both the Stroop and the flanker effects. The basic assumption of the model is that there are distinct visual modules, each of which is endowed with both perception and response selection processes. We contrast this model with an alternative widespread view, the…

World knowledge influences how we perceive the world. This study shows that this influence is at least partly mediated by declarative memory. Dutch and German participants categorized hues from a yellow-to-orange continuum on stimuli that were prototypically orange or yellow and that were also associated with these color labels. Both groups gave…