Six results are reported. (a) Reaching accuracy increases when visual capture of the target is allowed (e.g., target on vs. target off at saccade onset). (b) Whatever the visual condition, trajectories diverge only after peak acceleration, suggesting that accuracy is improved through feedback mechanisms. (c) Feedback corrections are smoothly…

Accumulating evidence suggests the existence of a processing bias in favor of threat-related stimulation in anxious individuals. Using behavioral and ERP measures, the present study investigated the deployment of attention to face stimuli with different emotion expressions in high-anxious and low-anxious participants. An attention-shifting…

Behavioral preferences for consonance over dissonance were tested in hearing infants of deaf parents and in hearing infants of hearing parents when they were 2 days old. Using a modified visual-fixation-based, auditory-preference procedure, I found that both 2-day-old infants of deaf parents and those of hearing parents looked longer at a visual…

Sequences of notes contain several different types of pitch cues, including both absolute and relative pitch information. What factors determine which of these cues are used when learning about tone sequences? Previous research suggests that infants tend to preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, while other…

The perirhinal cortex is known to be important for memory, but there has recently been interest in the possibility that it might also be involved in visual perceptual functions. In four experiments, we assessed visual discrimination ability and visual discrimination learning in severely amnesic patients with large medial temporal lobe lesions that…

We have previously reported that sound sequence discrimination learning requires cholinergic inputs to the auditory cortex (AC) in rats. In that study, reward was used for motivating discrimination behavior in rats. Therefore, dopaminergic inputs mediating reward signals may have an important role in the learning. We tested the possibility in the…

Reviews of the dyslexia literature often seem to suggest that children with dyslexia perform at a lower level on almost any task. Richards et al. (Dyslexia 2002; 8: 1-8) note the importance of being able to demonstrate dissociations between tasks. However, increasingly elegant experiments, in which dissociations are found, almost inevitably find…

This study demonstrates that listeners use lexical knowledge in perceptual learning of speech sounds. Dutch listeners first made lexical decisions on Dutch words and nonwords. The final fricative of 20 critical words had been replaced by an ambiguous sound, between [f] and [s]. One group of listeners heard ambiguous [f]-final words (e.g.,…

Dyslexia is a persistent problem in written language, consisting of a severe difficulty in word recognition. It is characterized by low reading performance, while other skills are not impaired, being normal or even superior in some cases. This paper reviews different proposals for defining and clarifying causes of dyslexia. Additionally, we…

A review of the history of working memory (WM) studies finds that the concept of WM evolved from short-term memory to a multi-component system. Comparison between contemporary WM models reveals: (1) consensus that the content of WM includes not only task-relevant information, but also task-irrelevant information; (2) consensus that WM consists of…

A Cantonese syllable-spotting experiment was conducted to examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC), proposed by Norris, McQueen, Cutler, and Butterfield (1997), can apply in Cantonese speech segmentation. In the experiment, listeners were asked to spot out the target Cantonese syllable from a series of nonsense sound strings. Results…

A multiple baseline across behaviors design was used to evaluate the efficacy of embedded instruction with 3 students with developmental disabilities who were enrolled in general education classes. Two general education teachers and 1 paraprofessional delivered embedded instruction to students during regularly scheduled instructional activities.…

Meaningful visual experience requires computations that identify objects as the same persisting individuals over time, motion, occlusion, and featural change. This article explores these computations in the tunnel effect: When an object moves behind an occluder, and then an object later emerges following a consistent trajectory, observers…

Memory for scene changes that were identified immediately (passive encoding) or following systematic and effortful search (generative encoding) was compared across groups differing in age and intelligence. In the context of flicker methodology, generative search for the changing object involved selection and rejection of multiple potential…

Purpose: Speech perception in participants with auditory neuropathy (AN) was systematically studied to answer the following 2 questions: Does noise present a particular problem for people with AN: Can clear speech and cochlear implants alleviate this problem? Method: The researchers evaluated the advantage in intelligibility of clear speech over…