As a child matures from infancy to early childhood, a shift occurs in his sensory hierarchy from tactile to auditory to visual. The transition between the predominance of the auditory sense and visual sense takes place in about grades four and five. Although the sensory systems do not function singularly (but are integrated in the total action…

Examined critical features of tactile and kinesthetic processes by administering 8 traditional psychometric instruments and 14 measures of tactile and kinesthetic perceptual processes to 116 female college students in Australia. Results show, as is consistent with earlier findings, that visual-spatial processes are difficult to separate from…

Over the course of the first year of life, infants develop from being generalized listeners, capable of discriminating both native and non-native speech contrasts, into specialized listeners whose discrimination patterns closely reflect the phonetic system of the native language(s). Recent work by Maye, Werker and Gerken (2002) has proposed a…

Humans spend a considerable amount of time remembering other individuals' actions. Nevertheless, it is unclear how the visual system stores information about the identities of agents and their actions. To address this, I used a change detection method where observers were asked to remember agents and the actions they performed. Results show that…

The auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) pathway that is necessary for delay eyeblink conditioning was investigated using reversible inactivation of the medial auditory thalamic nuclei (MATN) consisting of the medial division of the medial geniculate (MGm), suprageniculate (SG), and posterior intralaminar nucleus (PIN). Rats were given saline or…

When we move to music we feel the beat, and this feeling can shape the sound we hear. Previous studies have shown that when people listen to a metrically ambiguous rhythm pattern, moving the body on a certain beat-adults, by actively bouncing themselves in synchrony with the experimenter, and babies, by being bounced passively in the…

One hallmark of holistic face processing is an inability to selectively attend to 1 face part while ignoring information in another part. In 3 sequential matching experiments, the authors tested perceptual and decisional accounts of holistic processing by measuring congruency effects between cued and uncued composite face halves shown in spatially…

Inattentional blindness is the failure to detect unexpected events when attention is otherwise engaged. Previous research indicates that inattentional blindness increases as perceptual demands intensify. The authors present 6 cuing experiments that manipulated both the perceptual demands of a primary letter-naming task and the expectations of the…

Perception is influenced by the perceiver's ability to perform intended actions. For example, when people intend to reach with a tool to targets that are just beyond arm's reach, the targets look closer than when they intend to reach without the tool (J. K. Witt, D. R. Proffitt, & W. Epstein, 2005). This is one of several examples demonstrating…

In this article, we investigate the relationship between preservice teachers' inquiry experience and their capacity to reflect on the challenges involved in implementing inquiry into classrooms. For data, we draw on the personal narratives of preservice science teachers enrolled in science instruction courses. Preservice teachers with extensive…

Listeners are exquisitely sensitive to fine-grained acoustic detail within phonetic categories for sounds and words. Here we show that this sensitivity is optimal given the probabilistic nature of speech cues. We manipulated the probability distribution of one probabilistic cue, voice onset time (VOT), which differentiates word initial labial…

G. P. Bingham, R. C. Schmidt, and L. D. Rosenblum (1989) found that, by hefting objects of different sizes and weights, people could choose the optimal weight in each size for throwing to a maximum distance. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated this result. G. P. Bingham et al. hypothesized that hefting is a smart mechanism that allows objects…

This special section was motivated by a resurgence in the view that it is impossible to investigate perceptual and cognitive development without considering how it is affected by, and intertwined with, infants' and children's action in the world. This view has long been foundational to the field, yet contemporary investigations of the effects of…

Previous studies have shown that children suffering from developmental dyslexia have a deficit in categorical perception of speech sounds. The aim of the current study was to better understand the nature of this categorical perception deficit. In this study, categorical perception skills of children with dyslexia were compared with those of…

Visual backward masking is a versatile tool for understanding principles and limitations of visual information processing in the human brain. However, the mechanisms underlying masking are still poorly understood. In the current contribution, the authors show that a structurally simple mathematical model can explain many spatial and temporal…