This paper investigates the idea that perception can be, at once, a mode of direct awareness of the world and an encounter, in the first instance, with mere appearances. In developing this point, I introduce a sensorimotor account of perception according to which the senses are ways of exploring the environment mediated by different patterns of sensorimotor contingency (i.e. by the distinctive ...

Have you ever wondered how you know what you see? For example, when you see a round, red object at the grocery store, how do you know that it is called an apple and that it can be eaten? This type of knowledge is called semantic memory. Semantic memories are learned over a lifetime and can be accessed without remembering a specific experience. In other words, you do not need to remember details...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the visual modality is useful for the perception of prosody. An audiovisual corpus consisting of four focus conditions (subject, verb, object focus and broad focus) was recorded from a male native speaker of French. A preliminary production study showed that there are visible correlates of contrastive focus in French a) increase in lip area and...

Copyright © 2012 Massachusetts Medical Society. Sixty-eight years after the inaugural issue of The New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, Sir William Osler introduced the term “pediatrics.”1 Although “diseases peculiar to children” had figured in Benjamin Rush’s lectures at the University of Pennsylvania since 1789, most physicians in the early 19th century did not recognize children as a...