In this paper, we present a case study that explores the nature and development of the mechanisms by which language interacts with and influences our ability to represent and retain information from one of our most important non-linguistic systems--vision. In previous work (Dessalegn & Landau, 2008), we showed that 4 year-olds remembered…

Vision of the body modulates somatosensation, even when entirely non-informative about stimulation. For example, seeing the body increases tactile spatial acuity, but reduces acute pain. While previous results demonstrate that vision of the body modulates somatosensory sensitivity, it is unknown whether vision also affects metric properties of…

Humans can rapidly extract object and category information from an image despite surprising limitations in detecting changes to the individual parts of that image. In this article we provide evidence that the construction of a perceptual whole, or Gestalt, reduces awareness of changes to the parts of this object. This result suggests that the…

The present study investigated the mechanisms responsible for the difference between visual processing of stimuli near and far from the observer's hands. The idea that objects near the hands are immediate candidates for action led us to hypothesize that vision near the hands would be biased toward the action-oriented magnocellular visual pathway…

Mechanisms of selective attention exert a powerful influence on visual perception. We examined whether attentional selection is necessary for generation of the vivid colours experienced by individuals with grapheme-colour synaesthesia. Twelve synaesthetes and matched controls viewed rapid serial displays of nonsense characters within which were…

The ability to predict the effects of actions is necessary to behave properly in our physical and social world. Here, we describe how the ability to predict the consequence of complex gestures can change the way we integrate sight and sound when relevant visual information is missing. Six drummers and six novices were asked to judge audiovisual…

The present study explored the manner in which hand position may affect visual processing. We studied three classic visual attention tasks (visual search, inhibition of return, and attentional blink) during which the participants held their hands either near the stimulus display, or far from the display. Remarkably, the hands altered visual…

We examined 6-month-olds' abilities to represent occluded objects, using a corneal-reflection eye-tracking technique. Experiment 1 compared infants' ability to extrapolate the current pre-occlusion trajectory with their ability to base predictions on recent experiences of novel object motions. In the first condition infants performed at asymptote…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) and attention are both thought to have a capacity limit of four items [e.g. Luck, S. J., & Vogel, E. K. (1997). The capacity of visual working memory for features and conjunctions. Nature, 309, 279-281; Pylyshyn, Z. W., & Storm, R. W. (1988). Tracking multiple independent targets: evidence for a parallel tracking…

In conditions of slow passive transport without vision, even tenuous inertial signals from semi-circular canals and the haptic-kinaesthetic system should provide information about changes relative to the environment provided that it is possible to command the direction of the body's movements voluntarily. Without such control, spatial updating…

The purpose of the present study is twofold: the first objective is to evaluate the importance of visual experience for the ability to form a spatial representation (spatial mental model) of fairly elaborate spatial descriptions. Secondly, we examine whether blind people exhibit the same preferences (i.e. level of performance on spatial tasks) as…

Viewers who study photographs of scenes tend to remember having seen beyond the boundaries of the view ["boundary extension"; J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 15 (1989) 179]. Is this a fundamental aspect of scene representation? Forty undergraduates explored bounded regions of six common (3D) scenes, visually or haptically (while blindfolded)…