In two behavioral experiments involving lateralized stimulus presentation, we tested whether one of the most commonly used measures of holistic face processing--the composite face effect--would be more pronounced for stimuli presented to the right as compared to the left hemisphere. In experiment 1, we investigated the composite face effect in a…

The ability to predict the effects of actions is necessary to behave properly in our physical and social world. Here, we describe how the ability to predict the consequence of complex gestures can change the way we integrate sight and sound when relevant visual information is missing. Six drummers and six novices were asked to judge audiovisual…

The study examined the effects of two and three dimensional visual objects on learners' drawing skills in junior secondary schools in OsunState, Nigeria. It also determined students' ability to identify visual objects. Furthermore, it investigated the comparative effectiveness of two and three dimensional visual objects on drawing skills of junior…

The purpose of the present study was to test the efficacy of a visuospatial working memory (WM) training in terms of its transfer effects and maintenance effects, in the young-old and old-old. Forty young-old and 40 old-old adults took part in the study. Twenty participants in each age group received training with a visuospatial WM task, whereas…

This article discusses the role of assessment in a response-to-intervention model. Although assessment represents only 1 component in a response-to-intervention model, a well-articulated assessment system is critical in providing teachers with reliable data that are easily interpreted and used to make instructional decisions. Three components of…

In this article, the author reflects on findings from research on the role and impact of teaching assistants and experience of working as a special educational needs (SEN) officer. Research evidence suggests the reliance on teaching assistants to include pupils with Statements of SEN in mainstream settings masks a collective, though unintentional,…

This article considers the impact of the increasing use of the visual mode in texts found in urban landscapes on two 3-year-olds' understanding of communication practices. The data discussed are taken from a study into a group of 3- to 6-year-olds' interaction with and emerging comprehension of the visual mode and its connection to writing in…

This study examined the effect of short-term high-variability phonetic training on the perception of English /b/, /v/, /d/, /ð/, /ae/, /? /, /i/, and /i/ by Catalan/Spanish bilinguals learning English as a foreign language. Sixteen English-major undergraduates were tested before and after undergoing a four-session perceptual training program…

Three experiments investigate psychological, methodological, and domain-specific characteristics of loudness change in response to sounds that continuously increase in intensity (up-ramps), relative to sounds that decrease (down-ramps). Timbre (vowel, violin), layer (monotone, chord), and duration (1.8 s, 3.6 s) were manipulated in Experiment 1.…

Musical melodies are recognized on the basis of pitch and temporal relations between consecutive tones. Although some previous evidence (e.g., Saffran & Griepentrog, 2001) points to an absolute-to-relative developmental shift in listeners' perception of pitch, other evidence (e.g., Plantinga & Trainor, 2005; Schellenberg & Trehub,…

Five experiments demonstrate that when dots appear beside a briefly presented target object, and persist on view longer than the target, the flanked object is perceptually altered by the dots. Three methods are used to explore this "object trimming effect". Experiments 1-3 assess participants' conscious reports of trimmed digits, Experiment 4 uses…

Studies in rats and non-human primates suggest that medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures play a role in perceptual processing, with the hippocampus necessary for spatial discrimination, and the perirhinal cortex for object discrimination. Until recently, there was little convergent evidence for analogous functional specialisation in humans, or…

A well-documented experience of students of elementary Euclidean geometry is "seeing" a geometric result and being sure about its truth; this sort of experience gives rise to the notion of geometrical visualisation that is developed here. In this essay a philosophical argument for the epistemic potential of geometrical visualisation is reviewed,…

Central nervous networks, be they a part of the human brain or a group of neurons in a snail, may be designed to produce distinct patterns of movement. Central pattern generators can account for the development and production of normal vocal signals without auditory feedback in non-songbirds. Songbirds need auditory feedback to develop and…

We employ a single-trial correlational MEG analysis technique to investigate early processing in the visual recognition of morphologically complex words. Three classes of affixed words were presented in a lexical decision task: free stems (e.g., taxable), bound roots (e.g., tolerable), and unique root words (e.g., vulnerable, the root of which…