Even if objectively presented with similar visual stimuli, children younger than 6 years of age exhibit a strong attraction to local visual information (e.g., the trees), whereas children older than 6 years of age, similar to adults, exhibit a visual bias toward global information (e.g., the forest). Here, we studied the cortical thickness changes that underlie this bias shift from local to glo...

The goal of pre-attentive segmentation is to mark conspicuous image locations such as region boundaries, smooth contours and popout targets against backgrounds. This salience detection relies on not only feature similarity analysis but also local feature contrast. We identify these two measures with attraction and nondirectional repulsion, and unify the dual processes of association by attracti...

—The anomaly zone presents a major challenge to the accurate resolution of 1 many parts of the Tree of Life. The anomaly zone is defined by the presence of a gene tree 2 topology that is more probable than the true species tree. This discrepancy can result from 3 consecutive rapid speciation events in the species tree. Similar to the problem of 4 long-branch attraction, including more data (loc...

Concerns about the deleterious effects of missing data may often determine which characters and taxa are included in phylogenetic analyses. For example, researchers may exclude taxa lacking data for some genes or exclude a gene lacking data in some taxa. Yet, there may be very little evidence to support these decisions. In this paper, I review the effects of missing data on phylogenetic analyse...