We explore the following two cognitive questions regarding crosslinguistic variation in lexical semantic systems: Why are some linguistic categories--that is, the associations between a term and a portion of the semantic space--harder to learn than others? How does learning a language-specific set of lexical categories affect processing in that…

Categorical perception (CP) effects manifest as faster or more accurate discrimination between objects that come from different categories compared with objects that come from the same category, controlling for the physical differences between the objects. The most popular explanations of CP effects have relied on perceptual warping causing…

We extended past observational learning research by incorporating stimuli already known to participants into training. We used a multiple-baseline design across three participants to determine the effects of discrimination training on the discrimination of consequences applied to modeled responses using both known and unknown pictures. During…

Visual categorization is ubiquitous in many professions, yet training programs are typically time- and effort-intensive. This work focuses on developing methods to improve human learning and performance on challenging visual categorization tasks, e.g., bird species identification, diagnostic dermatology. As part of the general approach, we infer…

The study of looking dynamics and discrimination form the backbone of developmental science and are central processes in theories of infant cognition. Looking dynamics and discrimination change dramatically across the 1st year of life. Surprisingly, developmental changes in looking and discrimination have not been studied together. Recent…

Hippocampal-dependent episodic memory and stimulus discrimination abilities are both compromised in the elderly. The reduced capacity to discriminate between similar stimuli likely contributes to multiple aspects of age-related cognitive impairment; however, the association of these behaviors within individuals has never been examined in an animal…

Category-specific deficits have rarely been reported in semantic dementia (SD). To our knowledge, only four previous studies have documented category-specific deficits, and these have focused on the living versus non-living things contrast rather than on more fine-grained semantic categories. This study aimed to determine whether a…

The present study used the stimulus onset delay paradigm to investigate eye movement control in reading and in scene viewing in a within-participants design. Short onset delays (0, 25, 50, 200, and 350 ms) were chosen to simulate the type of natural processing difficulty encountered in reading and scene viewing. Fixation duration increased…

Autistic people are better at perceiving details. Major theories explain this in terms of bottom-up sensory mechanisms or in terms of top-down cognitive biases. Recently, it has become possible to link these theories within a common framework. This framework assumes that perception is implicit neural inference, combining sensory evidence with…

People tend to look at other people's eyes, but whether this bias is automatic or volitional is unclear. To discriminate between these two possibilities, we used a "don't look" (DL) paradigm. Participants looked at a series of upright or inverted faces, and were asked either to freely view the faces or to avoid looking at the eyes, or as a…

There is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that individuals with autism have difficulty with face processing. One basic cognitive ability that may underlie face processing difficulties is the ability to abstract a prototype. The current study examined prototype formation with natural faces using eye-tracking in high-functioning adults with…

Decision-makers effortlessly balance the need for urgency against the need for caution. Theoretical and neurophysiological accounts have explained this tradeoff solely in terms of the "quantity" of evidence required to trigger a decision (the "threshold"). This explanation has also been used as a benchmark test for evaluating…

The authors report 9 new experiments and reanalyze 3 published experiments that investigate factors affecting the time course of perceptual processing and its effects on subsequent decision making. Stimuli in letter-discrimination and brightness-discrimination tasks were degraded with static and dynamic noise. The onset and the time course of…

Human observers are able to rapidly and accurately categorize natural scenes, but the representation mediating this feat is still unknown. Here we propose a framework of rapid scene categorization that does not segment a scene into objects and instead uses a vocabulary of global, ecological properties that describe spatial and functional aspects…

Lien, Ruthruff, Remington, & Johnston (2005) reported residual switch cost differences between stimulus-response (S-R) pairs and proposed the partial-mapping preparation (PMP) hypothesis, which states that advance preparation will typically be limited to a subset of S-R pairs because of structural capacity limitations, to account for these…