Social interactions within virtual communities are often described solely as being online experiences. Such descriptions are limited, for they fail to reference life external to the screen. The terms "virtual" and "real" have a negative connotation for many people and can even be interpreted to mean that something is "false" or "inauthentic."…

Most studies concerning psychological measurement scales of intensive attributes have concluded that these scales are of ratio type and that the psychophysical function is closely approximated by a power function. Experiments show, for such cases, that a commutativity property must hold under either successive increases or successive decreases…

Repetition blindness (RB) is the finding that observers often miss the repetition of an item within a rapid stream of words or objects. Recent studies have shown that RB for objects is largely unaffected by variations in viewpoint between the repeated items. In 5 experiments, we tested RB under different axes of rotation, with different types of…

Naive "Drosophila" larvae show vigorous chemotaxis toward many odorants including ethyl acetate (EA). Chemotaxis toward EA is substantially reduced after a 5-min pre-exposure to the odorant and recovers with a half-time of [image omitted]20 min. An analogous behavioral decrement can be induced without odorant-receptor activation through…

In the United States, a nationwide Commercial Mobile Alert Service (CMAS) is being planned to alert cellular mobile device subscribers to emergencies occurring near the location of the mobile device. The plan specifies a unique audio attention signal as well as a unique vibration attention signal (for mobile devices set to vibrate) to identify…

This article argues that while a semiotic analysis of composition in the screen, page and image has significant heuristic value, this would be further enhanced were it also to take into account surface and depth. It is argued that these two aspects of composition are critical for successful reading/viewing of images, and especially for digital…

This study evaluated the psychometric properties of a newly developed adolescent-reported domain-specific measure of parental behavioral control. In addition, this study examined the relationships between domains of perceived behavioral control and adolescent problem behaviors and tested whether psychological control played a mediating role in…

Using a set of psychophysical tests, we compared the olfactory abilities of 8 persons who became blind early in life and 16 sighted persons in a control group who were matched for age, sex, and handedness. The results indicated that those who became blind early in life developed compensatory perceptual mechanisms in the olfactory domain that…

This paper reports results from three experiments using the Musical Ear Test (MET), a new test designed for measuring musical abilities in both musicians and non-musicians in an objective way with a relatively short duration (less than 20 min.). In the first experiment we show how the MET is capable of clearly distinguishing between a group of…

Purpose: The effects of acoustic degradation and context use on sentence perception were evaluated in listeners differing in age of English acquisition. Method: Five groups of 8 listeners, native monolingual (NM), native bilingual (NB), and early, late, and very late non-native bilingual (NN-E, NN-L, and NN-VL, respectively), identified target…

In the "The Science Study Series" book "The Physics of Television", it is stated that persistence of vision lasts for about a tenth of a second. This will be a notional figure just as 25 cm is taken to be the least distance of distinct vision. Estimates range from 1/8 to 1/16 s.

People tend to think that streaks in random sequential events are rare and remarkable. When they actually encounter streaks, they tend to consider the underlying process as non-random. The present paper examines the time of pattern occurrences in sequences of Bernoulli trials, and shows that among all patterns of the same length, a streak is the…

Ambiguous (or bistable) figures are visual stimuli that have two mutually exclusive perceptual interpretations that spontaneously alternate with each other. Perceptual reversals, as compared with non-reversals, typically elicit a negative difference called reversal negativity (RN), peaking around 250 ms from stimulus onset. The cognitive…

We tested 3 mechanisms of involuntary attention: (1) a perceptual enhancement mechanism, (2) a response-decision mechanism, and (3) a serial-search mechanism. Experiment 1 used a response deadline technique to compare the perceptual enhancement and the decision mechanisms and found evidence consistent with the decision mechanism. Experiment 2 used…

The present experiment examined the effects of varying stimulus disparity and relative punisher frequencies on signal detection by humans. Participants were placed into one of two groups. Group 3 participants were presented with 1:3 and 3:1 punisher frequency ratios, while Group 11 participants were presented with 1:11 and 11:1 punisher frequency…