Making sense of the visual world requires keeping track of objects as the same persisting individuals over time and occlusion. Here we implement a new paradigm using 10-month-old infants to explore the processes and representations that support this ability in two ways. First, we demonstrate that persisting object representations can be maintained…

We report a new method for calibrating differences in perceptual salience across feature dimensions, in infants. The problem of inter-dimensional salience arises in many areas of infant studies, but a general method for addressing the problem has not previously been described. Our method is based on a preferential looking paradigm, adapted to…

Very young infants orient overtly with eye and head movements to salient events in their visual environments, but those events rarely occur in the absence of competing visual stimuli. Two different models of how this kind of orienting is related to number and distribution of elements in the stimulus field were tested with infants across the age…

Four experiments evaluated AMLA temporal version accuracy to measure relative luminosity in people with and without color blindness and, consequently, to provide the essential information to avoid poor figure-background combinations in any possible "specific screen-specific observer" pair. Experiment 1 showed that two very different…

We asked whether honeybees, "Apis mellifera," could solve a transitive inference problem. Individual free-flying bees were conditioned with four overlapping premise pairs of five visual patterns in a multiple discrimination task (A+ vs. B-, B+ vs. C-, C+ vs. D-, D+ vs. E-, where + and - indicate sucrose reward or absence of it,…

Fear extinction refers to the ability to adapt as situations change by learning to suppress a previously learned fear. This process involves a gradual reduction in the capacity of a fear-conditioned stimulus to elicit fear by presenting the conditioned stimulus repeatedly on its own. Fear extinction is context-dependent and is generally considered…

The present study investigated reinstatement of conditioned responses in humans by using a differential Pavlovian conditioning procedure. Evidence for reinstatement was established in a direct (fear rating) and in an indirect measure (secondary reaction time task) of conditioning. Moreover, the amount of reinstatement in the secondary reaction…

Freezing to a tone following auditory fear conditioning is commonly considered as a measure of the strength of the tone-shock association. The decrease in freezing on repeated nonreinforced tone presentation following conditioning, in turn, is attributed to the formation of an inhibitory association between tone and shock that leads to a…

Using pharmacological techniques, it has been demonstrated that both consolidation and extinction of Pavlovian fear conditioning are dependent to some extent upon L-type voltage-gated calcium channels (LVGCCs). Although these studies have successfully implicated LVGCCs in Pavlovian fear conditioning, they do not provide information about the…

Many transformations that take place over time can only occur in one temporal direction, and adults are highly sensitive to the differences between forward and backward presentations of such events. In seven experiments using two selective-looking paradigms, 4- and 8-month-olds were shown forward and backward videotapes of events involving the…

The model of a single central bottleneck for human information processing is critically examined. Most evidence cited in support of the model has been observed within the overlapping tasks paradigm. It is shown here that most findings obtained within that paradigm and that were used to support the model are also consistent with a simple resource…

This paper presents a cognitive approach to on-line spatial perception within scenes. A theoretical framework is developed, based on the idea that experience with a scene can activate a complex representation of layout that facilitates subsequent processing of spatial relations within the scene. The representations integrate significant, relevant…

In two experiments on very young children's response to the orientation of pictures and objects, 18-, 24- and 30-month-old children showed no preference for upright pictures over inverted ones. More importantly, we found that children in all three age groups were equally accurate and equally fast at identifying depicted objects regardless of…

Sound-symbolism is the idea that the relationship between word sounds and word meaning is not arbitrary for all words, but rather that there are subsets of words in the world's languages for which sounds and their symbols have some degree of correspondence. The present research investigates sound-symbolism as a possible route to the learning of an…

This study investigates the practice of presenting multiple supporting examples in parallel form. The elements of parallelism and its use in argument were first illustrated by Aristotle. Although real texts may depart from the ideal form for presenting multiple examples, rhetorical theory offers a rationale for minimal, parallel presentation. The…