Four experiments tested whether there are enduring spatial representations of objects' locations in memory. Previous studies have shown that under certain conditions the internal consistency of pointing to objects using memory is disrupted by disorientation. This disorientation effect has been attributed to an absence of or to imprecise enduring…

Attributions of responsibility play a critical role in many group interactions. This paper explores the role of causal and counterfactual reasoning in blame attributions in groups. We develop a general framework that builds on the notion of pivotality: an agent is pivotal if she could have changed the group outcome by acting differently. In three…

In a word learning experiment, 14- and 18-month-old infants are tested on their perceptual sensitivity to coda-consonant omissions. The results indicate that 14-month-olds are not sensitive to coda consonant omissions, showing a parallel with the omission of target coda consonants in early child language productions. At 18 months, infants are…

Light is the origin of vision. The pattern of shading reflected from object surfaces is one of several optical features that provide fundamental information about shape and surface orientation. To understand how surface and object shading is processed by birds, six pigeons were tested with differentially illuminated convex and concave curved…

Children learning the inflections of their native language show the ability to generalize beyond the perceptual particulars of the examples they are exposed to. The phenomenon of "rule learning"--quick learning of abstract regularities from exposure to a limited set of stimuli--has become an important model system for understanding generalization…

Five experiments investigated whether observer locomotion provides specialized information facilitating novel-view scene recognition. Participants detected a position change after briefly viewing a desktop scene when the table stayed stationary or was rotated and when the observer stayed stationary or locomoted. The results showed that 49[degrees]…