Background: People are better at recognizing faces of their own race than faces of another race. Such race specificity may be due to differential expertise in the two races. Method: In order to find out whether this other-race effect develops as early as face-recognition skills or whether it is a long-term effect of acquired expertise, we tested…

This article presents an insider view of an online community of adults involved in sharing digital photography through a host website, Flickr. It describes how reciprocal teaching and learning partnerships in a dynamic multimodal environment are achieved through the creation of a "Third Space" or "Affinity Space", where "Funds of Knowledge" are…

When a visual target is identified, there is a period of several hundred milliseconds when the processing of subsequent targets is impaired, a phenomenon labeled the attentional blink (AB). The emerging consensus is that the identification of a visual target temporarily occupies a limited attentional resource that is essential for all visual…

Infants' understanding of "toy model-real exemplar" relations was assessed through preferential looking and habituation tasks. Results from the preferential looking task suggest that 18-month toddlers are just beginning to demonstrate comprehension of symbolic relations between iconic models and their real object counterparts. Performance of 10-…

A pair of monozygotic twins discordant for symptoms of Asperger syndrome was evaluated at the age of 13.45 years using psychometric, morphometric, behavioural, and functional imaging methods. The lower-functioning twin had a smaller brain overall, a smaller right cerebellum, and a disproportionately large left frontal lobe, and manifested almost…

Examinations of interference between verbal and visual materials in working memory have produced mixed results. If there is a central form of storage (e.g., the focus of attention; N. Cowan, 2001), then cross-domain interference should be obtained. The authors examined this question with a visual-array comparison task (S. J. Luck & E. K. Vogel,…

Four experiments are reported exploring whether distractor pictures activate their phonological properties in the course of speech production. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with two pictures and were asked to name one while ignoring the other. Distractor pictures were phonologically related, semantically related or unrelated to the…

We measured infants' recognition of familiar and unfamiliar 3-D objects and their 2-D representations using event-related potentials (ERPs). Infants differentiated familiar from unfamiliar objects when viewing them in both two and three dimensions. However, differentiation between the familiar and novel objects occurred more quickly when infants…

Visual discrimination tasks are increasingly used to explore the neurobiology of vision in rodents, but it remains unclear how the animals solve these tasks: Do they process shapes holistically, or by using low-level features such as luminance and angle acuity? In the present study we found that when discriminating triangles from squares, rats did…

Motor learning in the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) and eyeblink conditioning use similar neural circuitry, and they may use similar cellular plasticity mechanisms. Classically conditioned eyeblink responses undergo extinction after prolonged exposure to the conditioned stimulus in the absence of the unconditioned stimulus. We investigated the…

A prototype of a biofeedback system designed to treat dyslexia by improving heart-rate variability was evaluated in a single blind study of dyslexic adults. Treatment consisted of four 15 minute exposures to a visual display synchronized with either the participant's own cardiac cycle (intervention condition), or of a synthesized cardiac cycle…

The present study investigated processing of morphologically complex words in three different frequency ranges in monolingual Finnish speakers and Finnish-Swedish bilinguals. By employing a visual lexical decision task, we found a differential pattern of results in monolinguals vs. bilinguals. Monolingual Finns seemed to process low frequency and…

This paper provides evidence for imitative abilities in neonatal chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes"), our closest relatives. Two chimpanzees were reared from birth by their biological mothers. At less than 7 days of age the chimpanzees could discriminate between, and imitate, human facial gestures (tongue protrusion and mouth opening). By the time…

Infants follow the gaze direction of others from the middle of the first year of life. In attempting to determine how infants understand the looking behavior of adults, a number of recent studies have blocked the adult's line of sight in some way (e.g. with a blindfold or with a barrier). In contrast, in the current studies an adult looked behind…

Neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency were orthogonally varied in two experiments on Italian nonwords. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency on visual lexical decision was found: The presence of one high-frequency neighbor increased response latencies and error rates to nonwords. By contrast, no effect of…