The present study aims to investigate the interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication with respect to infants' perception of pointing gestures. Infants were presented with still images of pointing hands (cue) in combination with an acoustic stimulus. The communicative content of this acoustic stimulus was varied from being human and…

Although mindfulness has become a mainstream methodology in mental health treatment, it is a relatively new approach with adolescents, and perhaps especially youth with sexual behavior problems. Nevertheless, clinical experience and several empirical studies are available to show the effectiveness of a systematic mindfulness- based methodology for…

Can people make perfect use of task-relevant information in working memory (WM)? Specifically, when questioned about an item in an array that does not happen to be in WM, can participants take into account other items that are in WM, eliminating them as response candidates? To address this question, an ideal-responder model that assumes perfect…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) consistently show poor nonword repetition (NWR) performance. However, the reason for these difficulties remains a matter of intensive debate. Nonword repetition is a complex psycholinguistic task that heavily relies upon phonological segmentation and phonological knowledge, and even lexical…

Previous studies have suggested that the perception of vowels and consonants changes from language-universal to language-specific between 6 and 12 months of age. This report suggests that language-specific perception emerges even earlier for lexical tones. Experiment 1 tested English-learners' perception of Cantonese tones, replicating declines in…

Purpose: The main aim of this experiment was to investigate the perception of Foreign Accent Syndrome in comparison to speakers with an authentic foreign accent. Method: Three groups of listeners attributed accents to conversational speech samples of 5 FAS speakers which were embedded amongst those of 5 speakers with a real foreign accent and 5…

It has been shown that the left and right cerebral hemispheres (LH and RH) respectively process qualitative or "categorical" spatial relations and metric or "coordinate" spatial relations. However, categorical spatial information could be thought as divided into two types: semantically-coded and visuospatially-coded categorical information. We…

Spontaneous beat gestures are an integral part of the paralinguistic context during face-to-face conversations. Here we investigated the time course of beat-speech integration in speech perception by measuring ERPs evoked by words pronounced with or without an accompanying beat gesture, while participants watched a spoken discourse. Words…

Purpose: Previously, Gygi and Shafiro (2011) found that when environmental sounds are semantically incongruent with the background scene (e.g., horse galloping in a restaurant), they can be identified more accurately by young normal-hearing listeners (YNH) than sounds congruent with the scene (e.g., horse galloping at a racetrack). This study…

Three-dimensional (3D) object completion, the ability to perceive the backs of objects seen from a single viewpoint, emerges at around 6 months of age. Yet, only relatively simple 3D objects have been used in assessing its development. This study examined infants' 3D object completion when presented with more complex stimuli. Infants…

This study intends to investigate how multi-symbolic representations (text, digits, and colors) could effectively enhance the completion of co-located/distant collaborative work in a virtual reality context. Participants' perceptions and behaviors were also studied. A haptics-enhanced virtual reality task was developed to conduct…

There are few direct examinations of whether face-processing difficulties in autism are disproportionate to difficulties with other complex non-face stimuli. Here we examined discrimination ability and memory for faces, cars, and inverted faces in children and adolescents with and without autism. Results showed that, relative to typical children,…

Recent research on eye movements during scene viewing has primarily focused on where the eyes fixate. But eye fixations also differ in their durations. Here we investigated whether fixation durations in scene viewing are under the direct and immediate control of the current visual input. Subjects freely viewed photographs of scenes in preparation…

Many studies have examined the processes involved in recognizing types of human action through sound, but little is known about whether the physical characteristics of an action (such as kinetic and kinematic parameters) can be perceived and imitated from sound. Twelve young healthy adults listened to recordings of footsteps on a gravel path taken…

Consistent with long-standing findings from behavioral studies, neuroimaging investigations have identified a region of the inferior temporal cortex that, in adults, shows greater face selectivity in the right than left hemisphere and, conversely, a region that shows greater word selectivity in the left than right hemisphere. What has not been…