Pigeons are susceptible to several size and length illusions, but in some cases the bias has been shown to be opposite to that seen in humans. To further investigate how their perceptual system works, we asked how pigeons perceive orientation illusions. We used the Zollner illusion, in which parallel lines look non-parallel due to series of short…

This article presents a philosophical perspective on creativity as described in the writings of George Sudarshan, a highly accomplished theoretical physicist and natural philosopher whose vision of creativity was influenced by "the direct experience of transcendence." The article reviews his conceptualization of the various mental states…

Visual appearance is one of the main cues children rely on when categorizing novel objects. In 3 studies, testing 128 3-year-olds and 192 5-year-olds, we investigated how various kinds of information may differentially lead children to overlook visual appearance in their categorization decisions across domains. Participants saw novel animals or…

Introduction: In recent years, major progress has been made in understanding the human visual system because of new investigative techniques. These developments often contradict older concepts about visual function. Methods: A detailed literature search and interprofessional discussions. Results: Recent innovative neurological tests are described…

Purpose: Individuals who stutter show sensorimotor deficiencies in speech and nonspeech movements. For the mandibular system, the authors dissociated the sense of kinesthesia from the efferent control component to examine whether kinesthetic integrity itself is compromised in stuttering or whether deficiencies occur only when generating motor…

Here, we examine effects of the steroid hormone, 20-hydroxyecdysone (20-E), on associative olfactory learning in the honeybee, "Apis mellifera." 20-E impaired the bees' ability to associate odors with punishment during aversive conditioning, but did not interfere with their ability to associate odors with a food reward (appetitive…

Using an identification task, we examined lexical effects on the perception of vowel duration as a cue to final consonant voicing in 12 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 13 age-matched (6;6-9;6) peers with typical language development (TLD). Naturally recorded CVtsets [word-word (WW), nonword-nonword (NN), word-nonword (WN) and…

The increasing use of visual diagrams in educational and work environments, and even our daily lives, has created obstacles for individuals who are blind or visually impaired to "independently" access the information they represent. Although physical tactile pictures can be created to convey the visual information, it is typically a slow,…

An increasing amount of information content used in school, work, and everyday living is presented in graphical form. Unfortunately, it is difficult for people who are blind or visually impaired to access this information, especially when many diagrams are needed. One problem is that details, even in relatively simple visual diagrams, can be very…

Listening to another speak is a basic process in social cognition. In the social neurosciences, there are relatively few studies that directly bear on listening; however, numerous studies have investigated the neural bases of some of the likely constituents of successful listening. In this article, I review some of this work as it relates to…

Two experiments demonstrate that 5-month-olds are sensitive to local redundancy in visual-temporal sequences. In Experiment 1, 20 infants saw 2 separate sequences of looming colored shapes that possessed the same elements but contrasting transitional probabilities. One sequence was random whereas the other was based on bigrams. Without any prior…

Five experiments examined what is learned based on the perceptual and semantic information of objects in visual statistical learning (VSL). In the familiarization phase, participants viewed a sequence of line drawings and detected repetitions of various objects. In a subsequent test phase, they watched 2 test sequences (statistically related…

Two significant questions in cognitive and developmental science are first, whether objects and events are selected for attention based on their features (featural processing) or the configuration of their features (configural processing), and second, how these modes of processing develop. These questions have been addressed in part with…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between school counselor participants' perceived levels of job burnout, as measured by Lee's 2007 Counselor Burnout Inventory (CBI) with the assignment of non-counseling duties, as measured by Scarborough's 2005 School Counselors Activity Rating Scale (SCARS) and the alignment of their…

This study investigated children's tonal awareness by measuring their abilities to detect dissonance in major tonality using the author-created "Tonal Dissonance Detection Test." A two-way analysis of variance of 312 elementary school subjects' Tonal Dissonance Detection Test scores revealed that first- and second-graders' dissonance detection…