Behavioral experiments addressing the conceptualization of geographic events are few and far between. Our research seeks to address this deficiency by developing an experimental framework on the conceptualization of movement patterns. In this paper, we report on a critical experiment that is designed to shed light on the question of cognitively salient invariants in such conceptualization. Inva...

People perceive and evaluate others on the basis of social categories, such as race, gender and age. Initial processing of targets in terms of visually salient social categories is often characterized as inevitable. In the current study, we investigated the influence of processing goals on the representation of race in the visual processing stream. Participants were assigned to one of two mixed...

We report three experiments where we investigated the role of movement in object recognition. Previous studies have suggested a distinct and separate mechanism for object motion encoding, related to the action or motor-based system. To date, however, the role of an object's motion in long-term memory representations has not been explicitly tested. Here we were specifically interested in whether...

Studies using backward masked emotional stimuli suggest that affective processing may occur outside visual awareness and imply primacy of affective over semantic processing, yet these experiments have not strictly controlled for the participants' awareness of the stimuli. Here we directly compared the primacy of affective versus semantic categorization of biologically relevant stimuli in 5 expe...

Different patterns of performance across vowels and consonants in tests of categorization and discrimination indicate that vowels tend to be perceived more continuously, or less categorically, than consonants. The present experiments examined whether analogous differences in perception would arise in nonspeech sounds that share critical transient acoustic cues of consonants and steady-state spe...

In this large scale, individual differences study (N = 521), the effects of cardinal axes of an environment and the path taken between locations on distance comparisons were assessed. The main goal was to identify if and to what extent previous findings in simple 2D tasks can be generalized to a more dynamic, three-dimensional virtual reality environment. Moreover, effects of age and gender wer...

We investigated effects of sign language experience on deaf and hearing participants' categorical perception of minimal manual contrast stimuli that met key criteria of speech perception research. A continuum of meaningless dynamic stimuli was created with a morphing approach, which manipulated videorecorded productions of phonotactically permissible pseudosigns differing between American Sign ...

We describe a dynamic Web-based digital video library browsing system (VIDSEEK) that allows users to preview the contents of the VISION digital video library via automatically selected and organized keyframes. Our system supports dynamic clustering-on-demand, which allows users organize the digital video library clips into clusters based on multiple user-specified video features. The system als...

The two common strategies for learning categories can be characterized as holistic categorization and analytic categorization. In holistic categorization, which is also called exemplar-based categorization, people rely on global similarity between items across all or most of their attributes. In analytic categorization, which is also called rule-based categorization, people learn to identify th...

In this paper, the problem of semantic place categorization in mobile robotics is addressed by considering a time-based probabilistic approach called Dynamic Bayesian Mixture Model (DBMM), which is an improved variation of the Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN). More specifically, multi-class semantic classification is performed by a DBMM composed of a mixture of heterogeneous base classifiers, usi...