In real-world settings, vision language models (VLMs) should robustly handle naturalistic, noisy visual content as well as domain-specific language and concepts. For example, K-12 educators using digital learning platforms may need to examine and provide feedback across many images of students' math work. To assess the potential of VLMs to support…

Mental color imagery abilities are commonly measured using paradigms that involve naming, judging, or comparing the colors of visual mental images of well-known objects (e.g., "Is a sunflower darker yellow than a lemon"?). Although this approach is widely used in patient studies, differences in the ability to perform such color…

Current debate in mental imagery research revolves around the perceptual and cognitive role of eye movements to "nothing" (Ferreira, Apel, & Henderson, 2008; Richardson, Altmann, Spivey, & Hoover, 2009). While it is established that eye movements are comparable when inspecting a scene (or hearing a scene description) as when…

As knowledge production, interpretation, and representation in educational settings rolls along Guttenberg's (text-based) track, the twenty-first-century world outside the doors of the schools and universities is exploding with visual ways of knowing and being. As visual text is silenced in education, it is simultaneously exploited in the…

Behavioural, neuroimaging and neurophysiological approaches emphasise the active and constructive nature of visual perception, determined not solely by the environmental input, but modulated top-down by prior knowledge. For example, degraded images, which at first appear as meaningless "blobs", can easily be recognized as, say, a face, after…

Four visual imagery tasks were presented to three groups of adolescents with or without spastic diplegic cerebral palsy. The first group was composed of six adolescents with cerebral palsy who had associated visual-perceptual deficits (CP-PD), the second group was composed of five adolescents with cerebral palsy and no associated visual-perceptual…

In this study the authors address the issue of how the perceptual usefulness of nonliteral imagery should be evaluated. Perceptual performance with nonliteral imagery of natural scenes obtained at night from infrared and image-intensified sensors and from multisensor fusion methods was assessed to relate performance on 2 basic perceptual tasks to…

The main purpose of this study was to determine whether partially imposed imagery can be faciliatative in children's oral prose learning at an age where fully induced imagery is not. The results of this experiment are somewhat consistent with this speculation. While kindergarten subjects benefited only with fully imposed imagery, second grade…

Children and adults were more likely to claim a word was presented as a picture than vice versa. Results indicated the absence of developmental differences in reality monitoring and similarity in representational processes of children and adults. (BC)

Language delay and impairment are salient features of autism. More specifically, there is evidence of atypical semantic organization in autism, but the functional brain correlates are not well understood. The current study used functional MRI to examine activation associated with semantic category decision. Ten high-functioning men with autism…

Studied whether patterns of developmental progression in reality monitoring were present in visual and auditory modalities and the role of cross-modal imagery in reality-monitoring tasks. Found scores revealed evidence of developmental progression in both auditory and visual source-monitoring tasks, but no effect of cross-modal imagery. (Author)

Two groups of children took part in this longitudinal study of eidetic imagery (EI). The New Haven sample consisted of 12 elementary school children, and the Rochester sample consisted of 23 children (aged 7 to 11 years at the beginning of the study). The study was designed to find out some of the qualities of EI and its relationship to memory. An…

Finke and Kurtzman report that fields of resolution increase with increases in the diameter of both perceived and imagined circular patterns. In contrast, we find no such increase for imagined circular patterns when the experimenter is not aware of the experimental predictions, even though our subjects received imagery training. (Author/RD)