Purpose: The purpose of this clinical focus article is to provide (a) a detailed description of a school-based intervention designed to teach children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HF-ASDs) and other social cognition challenges both the "how" and the "why" of conversation and (b) a preliminary evaluation of…

The ultimate aim of artistic exploration is to explore the claim that objects are different from experience and beauty is just a by-product of the exploration. In other words, the truth in the eyes of each person may quite literally not be the same. This indicates that differences in the visual apparatus influence the viewing body's mastery of the…

A sudden change applied to a single component can cause its segregation from an ongoing complex tone as a pure-tone-like percept. Three experiments examined whether such pure-tone-like percepts are organized into streams by extending the research of Bregman and Rudnicky (1975). Those authors found that listeners struggled to identify the…

Most theories of categorization emphasize how continuous perceptual information is mapped to categories. However, equally important are the informational assumptions of a model, the type of information subserving this mapping. This is crucial in speech perception where the signal is variable and context dependent. This study assessed the…

Adults perceive emotional facial expressions categorically. In this study, we explored categorical perception in 3.5-year-olds by creating a morphed continuum of emotional faces and tested preschoolers' discrimination and identification of them. In the discrimination task, participants indicated whether two examples from the continuum "felt the…

We test theories about the functional organization of the human cortex by correlating brain activity with demands on perception versus action selection. Subjects covertly searched for a target among an array of 4, 8, or 12 items (perceptual manipulation) and then, depending on the color of the array, made a saccade toward, away from, or at a right…

Difficulty with literacy acquisition is only one of the symptoms of developmental dyslexia. Dyslexic children also show poor motor coordination and postural control. Those problems could be associated with automaticity, i.e., difficulty in performing a task without dispending a fair amount of conscious efforts. If this is the case, dyslexic…

Drosophila larvae combine a numerically simple brain, a correspondingly moderate behavioral complexity, and the availability of a rich toolbox for transgenic manipulation. This makes them attractive as a study case when trying to achieve a circuit-level understanding of behavior organization. From a series of behavioral experiments, we suggest a…

Purpose: To determine the effect of hearing loss (HL) on children's performance for an auditory task under demanding listening conditions and to determine the effect of digital noise reduction (DNR) on that performance. Method: Fifty children with normal hearing (NH) and 30 children with HL (8-12 years of age) categorized words in the presence of…

It is unclear whether there is hemispheric specialization for prosodic perception and, if so, what the nature of this hemispheric asymmetry is. Using the lesion-approach, many studies have attempted to test whether there is hemispheric specialization for emotional and linguistic prosodic perception by examining the impact of left vs. right…

Schopenhauer's account of sense perception contains an acute critique of Kant's theory of cognition. His analysis of the role of the understanding in perception may be closer to Kant's than he conceded, but his physiological analysis of the role of the senses nonetheless proffers a more plausible account than Kant's transcendental conception of…

The effects of selective adaptation on familiar face perception were examined. After prolonged exposure to photographs of a celebrity, participants saw a series of ambiguous morphs that were varying mixtures between the face of that person and a different celebrity. Participants judged fewer of the morphs to resemble the celebrity to which they…

A recent theory of pigeons' equivalence-class formation (Urcuioli, 2008) predicts that reflexivity, an untrained ability to match a stimulus to itself, should be observed after training on two "mirror-image" symbolic successive matching tasks plus identity successive matching using some of the symbolic matching stimuli. One group of pigeons was…

Disturbing sounds are often referred to as noise, and if extreme enough in degree, intensity or frequency, it is referred to as noise pollution. Achievement refers to a change in study behavior in relation to their noise sensitivity and learning in the educational sense by achieving results in changed responses to certain types of stimuli like…

Working memory is typically defined as a system devoted to the simultaneous maintenance and processing of information. However, the interplay between these 2 functions is still a matter of debate in the literature, with views ranging from complete independence to complete dependence. The time-based resource-sharing model assumes that a central…