Recent work has shown that perceptual training can be used to improve the performance of novices in real-world visual classification tasks with medical images, but it is unclear which perceptual training methods are the most effective, especially for difficult medical image discrimination tasks. We investigated several different perceptual…

People often misrecognize objects that are similar to those they have previously encountered. These mnemonic discrimination errors are attributed to shared memory representations (gist) typically characterized in terms of meaning. In two experiments, we investigated multiple semantic and perceptual relations that may contribute: at the concept…

The golden section has become a well-known concept in the study and practice of music. However, no study has examined why the golden section may have become so popular in both music practice and analysis. The meta-analysis reported here reveals that the golden section has been related to one or more pieces of music in 113 items of published…

The purpose of the study is to determine the visual and auditory reaction time, perception, attention and memory levels of PE teacher candidates and computer teacher candidates. For this purpose, after giving necessary information to the teacher candidates of the Department of Physical Education and Sports and the candidates of Computer Teaching…

Visual expertise covers a broad range of types of studies and methodologies. Many studies incorporate some measure(s) of observer performance or how well participants perform on a given task. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis is a method commonly used in signal detection tasks (i.e., those in which the observer must decide whether…

How does the concurrent use of language affect perception and memory for exemplars? Labels cue more general category information than a specific exemplar. Applying labels can affect the resulting memory for an exemplar. Here 3 alternative hypotheses are proposed for the role of labeling an exemplar at encoding: (a) labels distort memory toward the…

Faces are processed holistically, so selective attention to 1 face part without any influence of the others often fails. In this study, 3 experiments investigated what type of facial information (shape or surface) underlies holistic face processing and whether generalization of holistic processing to nonexperienced faces requires extensive…

Inversion effect in biological motion perception has been recently attributed to an innate sensitivity of the visual system to the gravity-dependent dynamic of the motion. However, the specific cues that determine the inversion effect in naïve subjects were never investigated. In the present study, we have assessed the contribution of the local…

Atypical sensory responses are common in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). While evidence suggests impaired auditory-visual integration for verbal information, findings for nonverbal stimuli are inconsistent. We tested for sensory symptoms in children with ASD (using the Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile) and examined unisensory and bisensory…

Many species, including humans, display group behavior. Thus, perceiving crowds may be important for social interaction and survival. Here, we provide the first evidence that humans use ensemble-coding mechanisms to perceive the behavior of a crowd of people with surprisingly high sensitivity. Observers estimated the headings of briefly presented…

Does a visual mask need to be perceptually present to disrupt processing? In the present research, we proposed to explore the link between perceptual and memory mechanisms by demonstrating that a typical sensory phenomenon (visual masking) can be replicated at a memory level. Experiment 1 highlighted an interference effect of a visual mask on the…

In this study the visual working memory (VWM) and perception speed of 60 children between the ages of three and six years were tested with an age-based, easy-to-handle Matrix Film Battery Test (reliability R?=?0.71). It was thereby affirmed that the VWM is age dependent (correlation coefficient r?=?0.66***) as expected. Furthermore, a significant…

When we look at a scene, we are conscious of only a small fraction of the available visual information at any given point in time. This raises profound questions regarding how information is selected, when awareness occurs, and the nature of the mechanisms underlying these processes. One tool that may be used to probe these issues is…

Perceptual simulations are unconscious and automatic, whereas perceptual imagery is conscious and deliberate, but it is unclear how easily one can transfer perceptual information from unconscious to conscious awareness. We investigated whether it is possible to be aware of what one is mentally representing; that is, whether it is possible to…

In cart-pole balancing, one moves a cart in 1 dimension so as to balance an attached inverted pendulum. We approached perception-action and learning in this task from an ecological perspective. This entailed identifying a space of informational variables that balancers use as they perform the task and demonstrating that they improve by traversing…