An object that moves is spotted almost effortlessly; it "pops out." When the observer is stationary, a moving object is uniquely identified by retinal motion. This is not so when the observer is also moving; as the eye travels through space all scene objects change position relative to the eye producing a complicated field of retinal motion.…

The voluntary and reflexive orienting abilities of persons with Down syndrome and fragile X syndrome, at average MA levels of approximately 4 and 7 years, were compared with an RT task. Reflexive orienting abilities appeared to develop in accordance with MA for the participants with Down syndrome but not for those with fragile X syndrome. However,…

Phillips-Silver and Trainor (Phillips-Silver, J., Trainor, L.J., (2005). Feeling the beat: movement influences infants' rhythm perception. "Science", 308, 1430) demonstrated an early cross-modal interaction between body movement and auditory encoding of musical rhythm in infants. Here we show that the way adults move their bodies to music…

Reading disability is associated with phonological problems which might originate in auditory processing disorders. The aim of the present study was 2-fold: first, the perceptual skills of average-reading children and children with dyslexia were compared in a categorical perception task assessing the processing of a phonemic contrast based on…

We present a descriptive case study of Terrascope, an innovative, year-long, project-based learning community at MIT. Each year, Terrascope students study a particular environmental or Earth-system problem from a multidisciplinary perspective. Terrascope includes both academic and non-academic components; this paper focuses on the academic…

Observers given brief exposures of pairs of colored bars and asked to report both the color and the orientation of each bar showed evidence of stochastic independence between reports of the 4 features (2 colors and 2 orientations). The authors also found virtually perfect stochastic independence between reports of colors and directions of motion…

In this study, the authors used a dual-task flanker paradigm to investigate the degree to which flankers are coprocessed with the target as a function of whether flankers have to be used as stimuli for a second task. A series of experiments, in which performance in dual tasks was compared with that in single tasks, revealed that participants had a…

Purpose: To describe cochlear implant users' phoneme labeling, discrimination, and prototypes for a vowel and a sibilant contrast, and to assess the effects of 1 year's experience with prosthetic hearing. Method: Based on naturally produced clear examples of "boot," "beet," "said," and "shed" by 1 male and 1 female speaker, continua with 13…

Olfactory memory is especially persistent. The current study explored whether this applies to a form of perceptual learning, in which experience of an odor mixture results in greater judged similarity between its elements. Experiment 1A contrasted 2 forms of interference procedure, "compound" (mixture AW, followed by presentation of new mixtures…

An exercise based on images that might shift the balance in favor of students who have superior visual perception and possibly those with language problems and specific learning disabilities, was reviewed. The pictorial format of learning exercise not only increased the students' performance, but also helped students with specific learning…

We explore in this study how infants may derive phonetic categories from adult input that are highly variable. Neural networks in the form of self-organizing maps (SOMs; Kohonen, 1989, 1995) were used to simulate unsupervised learning of Mandarin tones. In Simulation 1, we trained the SOMs with syllable-sized continuous F[subscript 0] contours,…

This study endeavored to determine (1) the reliability with which selected individual tests of language, visual and auditory perception, and auditory-visual perceptual integration can be administered through group testing; (2) the decrease in administration and scoring time by using these instruments in a group manner, and (3) the relationships…

This study examines the educational persistence of women of African descent (WOAD) in pursuit of a doctorate degree at universities in the southeastern United States. WOAD are women of African ancestry born outside the African continent. These women are heirs to an inner dogged determination and spirit to survive despite all odds (Pulliam, 2003,…

This dissertation compares the phonetic and phonological features of adult non-speakers' productions of words in an endangered Native American language, Oregon Northern Paiute (also known, and hereafter referred to, as Numu), to productions by fluent speakers. The purpose of this comparison is two-fold. The first purpose is to examine the…

An effective way to teach the concept of image is to give students a model of human vision which incorporates a simple mechanism of depth perception. In this study two almost identical versions of a curriculum in geometrical optics were created. One used a mechanistic, interpretive eye model, and in the other the eye was modeled as a passive,…