The critical examination of the film "American Beauty" reveals characteristics illustrative of the form of culture coextensive with modern technological societies. This form of culture creates an imbalance favoring the aesthetical over the ethical dimensions of human orientation. Absorption into the aesthetical dimension of the electronic or…

This study was designed to differentiate between structural description and bias accounts of performance in the possible/impossible object-decision test. Two event-related potential (ERP) studies examined how the visual system processes structurally possible and impossible objects. Specifically, the authors investigated the effects of object…

During locomotion, retinal flow, gaze angle, and vestibular information can contribute to one's perception of self-motion. Their respective roles were investigated during active steering: Retinal flow and gaze angle were biased by altering the visual information during computer-simulated locomotion, and vestibular information was controlled…

This study examined whether 16-month-old walking infants take the material composition of a handrail into account when assessing its effectiveness as a tool to augment balance. Infants were encouraged to cross from one platform to another via bridges of various widths (10, 20, 40cm) with either a wobbly (foam or latex) or a wooden handrail…

This study examined the underlying structure of transfer climate and those aspects of transfer climate that were related to pre-training self-efficacy, pre-training motivation, and post-training transfer implementation intentions. Positive and negative affectivity (PA and NA) were also measured in order to better understand the relationship of…

Using surface colours as stimuli, the present research was aimed at the two following goals: (1) To determine the chromatic angles related to categorical effects type B-B (Bezold-Brucke). (2) To determine the colourimetric characteristics compatible with each Spanish colour basic category. To get these goals the full set of tiles included in the…

Using electopalatography, this study investigated the production of sibilants produced by four adults who have severe-to-profound hearing loss and four speakers with normal hearing. Each speaker wore a Rion[R] semi-flexible electroplate while producing multiple repetitions of the utterances "see, sue, she, shoe." The speakers' productions were…

Although spoken language is communicated via a rapidly varying signal, human listeners recognize spoken words both quickly and accurately. Nonetheless, variability in speech does have implications for both the processes and representations involved in spoken language perception. Moreover, variability effects have been observed across the lifespan,…

Two experiments used a magnitude estimation paradigm to test whether perception of disfluency is a function of whether the speaker and the listener stutter or do not stutter. Utterances produced by people who stutter were judged as "less fluent," and, critically, this held for apparently fluent utterances as well as for utterances…

Learning tasks are typically thought to be either hippocampal-dependent (impaired by hippocampal lesions) or hippocampal-independent (indifferent to hippocampal lesions). Here, we show that conditioned taste aversion (CTA) learning fits into neither of these categories. Rats were trained to avoid two taste stimuli, one novel and one familiar.…

This study evaluated variables that determined the safety of 15 cane users who were using the touch technique. The results showed that none of the walkers used a touch technique as described and recommended in the literature, that the detection of obstacles was related mainly to the height of the cane tip during the sweep, and that the early…

We introduce computer-based methodologies for investigating object identification in 3- to 5-year-old children. In two experiments, preschool children and adults indicated when they could identify degraded pictures of common objects as those pictures either gradually improved or degraded in clarity. Clarity transformations were implemented in four…

Individuals with autism show relatively strong performance on tasks that require them to identify the constituent parts of a visual stimulus. This is assumed to be the result of a bias towards processing the local elements in a display that follows from a weakened ability to integrate information at the global level. The results of the current…

The Early Alert Alzheimer's Home Screening Test (AHST) is a variant of the Smell Identification Test (SIT) and the Cross-Cultural Smell Identification Test (CC-SIT), and recently became available for purchase by the general public. The validity and the practical utility of routine screening for individuals with asymptomatic cognitive impairment…

Two tasks of word identification were proposed to children in their last year of upper preschool classes. The results show that identification is not based on an holistic processing but on an analytic one: some letters are enough, especially the first ones. Moreover, their order does not matter. During this period where reading is visuo-semantic…