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…

Children who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often fail to show equivalence class formation. This may be related to their difficulty in learning the programmed baseline conditional discriminations. The present study investigated equivalence class formation after training visual identity-matching performance with auditory…

Auditory speech appears to be linked to visual articulatory gestures and orthography through different mechanisms. Yet, both types of visual information have a strong influence on speech processing. The present study directly compared their contributions to speech processing using a novel word learning paradigm. Native speakers of French, who were…

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…

Speech, reading, and writing are the basic forms of linguistic communication. Therefore, it is very important to diagnose any problems with them as early and completely as possible, particularly in children with special needs. One of the methods that focuses primarily on the diagnosis and therapy of such learning difficulties is the one developed…

Schizophrenia patients exhibit perceptual and cognitive deficits, including in visual motion processing. Given that cognitive systems depend upon perceptual inputs, improving patients' perceptual abilities may be an effective means of cognitive intervention. In healthy people, motion perception can be enhanced through perceptual learning, but it…

Training improves the ability of human observers to discriminate between two similar directions of motion. This gradual improvement is specific to the direction on which an observer is trained, enduring for several months. Improvement does not affect motion perception generally, nor does it depend on recognition of details of the movement. (Author)

Research indicates that young children seem to have considerable difficulty in discrimination between the letters b, c, p, and q. Also, 4-year-olds appear to commonly make rotation and reversal errors with letter-like forms. Whether young children will perform significantly better or not in deciding whether two shapes are called same or different…

Cumulative evidence obtained from this and other studies suggests that perceptual training to attend to shape and object contours will affect representational drawing. (Authors/MB)

Children were individually administered the Matching Familiar Figures (MFF) Test and the Haptic Matching Task. Impulsives received either reflective scanning strategy training or control procedures and were retested. Visual training decreased errors only on the MFF and increased latency on both tasks. Haptic training decreased errors and increased…

Two experiments studied the influence of an individual's cognitive style on concept identification. Subjects were high school males, classified into levels of cognitive style according to their performance on the Hidden Figures Test. For the first experiment, three non-overlapping groups of 30 each were required to classify figural patterns, which…