Examined rate-based intersensory matching in infants by habituating them to concordant or discordant auditory-visual stimuli. Found a preference for the visual stimulus that moved at a novel velocity, indicating that the temporal attributes of the visual component dominated responsiveness. Found only limited evidence of intersensory matching. (WP)

Looking preferences to visual temporal frequencies were examined in 77 infants at 3 ages (newborn, 1 month, and 4 months) in 3 conditions: less aroused (after feeding), more aroused-internal (before feeding), and more aroused-external (after feeding with 8 Hertz visual stimulation). Found that infants preferred faster stimuli when less aroused and…

Results of 3 experiments indicated that 12 month olds, but not 8 and 10 month olds, looked longer at objects of a different shape from test objects than at the test objects. Twelve month olds recognized rectilinear, but not curvilinear, forms. They recognized differences in forms for three-dimensional, but not two-dimensional, objects. (BC)

Seven experiments with a total of 480 subjects indicated that subjects visually imaging classical ambiguous figures have difficulty reconstructing the images, and that their construal of the image strongly influences what is depicted within the image. Image content, rather than image inspection, appears to be selective. (SLD)

Groups of 10 and 15 year olds were shown a capital letter visual stimulus followed by a masking grid pattern. Sensory transmission time was the same in both groups. Older children showed a greater rate of information accrual and a greater amount of information extraction than did members of the younger group. (BC)

Three experiments with 29 college students and 8 members of a university community demonstrate that shape recognition processes influence perceived figure-ground relationships in 3-dimensional displays when the edge between 2 potential figural regions is both a luminance contrast edge and a disparity edge. Implications for shape recognition and…

Four experiments examined exogenous orienting in 3.5-month-olds. Found that sensitivity to a small moving bar was lower when most of the red bars were in the visual field contra-lateral to this probe. The distribution of color within the visual field biased attention, making it either more or less likely that the infant detected a moving stimulus.…

This study examined the influence of shape similarity and labels on 13-month-olds' inductive inferences. In 3 experiments, 123 infants were presented with novel target objects with or without a nonvisible property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity. When objects were not labeled, infants generalized the nonvisible property…

When normal participants are presented with written verbal short-term memory tasks (e.g., remembering a set of letters for immediate spoken recall) there is evidence to suggest that the information is re-coded into phonological form. This paper presents a single case study of MJK whose reading follows the pattern of phonological dyslexia. In…

In visual search tasks, if a set of items is presented for 1 s before another set of new items (containing the target) is added, search can be restricted to the new set. The process that eliminates old items from search is visual marking. This study investigates the kind of memory that distinguishes the old items from the new items during search.…

This study examined the role of stimulus characteristics in a visuospatial order reconstruction task in which participants were required to recall the order of sequences of spatial locations. The complexity of the to-be-remembered sequences, as measured by path crossing, path length, and angles, was found to affect serial memory, in terms of both…

Disentangling bottom-up and top-down processing in adult category learning is notoriously difficult. Studying category learning in infancy provides a simple way of exploring category learning while minimizing the contribution of top-down information. Three- to 4-month-old infants presented with cat or dog images will form a perceptual category…

P. A. van der Helm and E. L. J. Leeuwenberg (1996; see record 1996-01780-002) outlined a holographic account of figural goodness of a perceptual stimulus. The theory is mathematically precise and can be applied to a broad spectrum of empirical data. The authors argue, however, that the account is inadequate on both theoretical and empirical…

The present experiments examined the extent to which two possible sources of error affect healthy subjects' performance in a rule-shift task. All 115 participants first received a discrimination learning task, in which a pair of different visual stimuli was presented on each trial, one of which had to be identified as "correct." Each stimulus…

Recent research indicates that infants first use form and then surface features as the basis for individuating objects. However, very little is known about the underlying basis for infants' differential sensitivity to form than surface features. The present research assessed infants' sensitivity to luminance differences. Like other surface…