Visual working memory provides an essential link between past and future events. Despite recent efforts, capacity limits, their genesis and the underlying neural structures of visual working memory remain unclear. Here we show that performance in visual working memory--but not iconic visual memory--can be predicted by the strength of mental imagery as assessed with binocular rivalry in a given ...

In this study of primary school children, a novel 'symbol-string' task is used to assess sensitivity to the position of briefly presented non-alphabetic but letter-like symbols. The results demonstrate that sensitivity in the symbol-string task explains a unique proportion of the variability in children's contextual reading accuracy. Moreover, developmental dyslexic readers show reduced sensiti...

Displays of eight capital letters were presented in a circular arrangement around a central fixation point at tachistoscopic durations. Under different experimental conditions, one or two indicators, presented either 250 msec before, simultaneously with, or after the display, designated the letters that S was to report. The arrangement of conditions permitted inferences as to the order in which...

In this paper, we present a computational investigation into the compositionality of iconic gestures by trying to learn a motor grammar. We propose a grammar formalism that learns (1) the salient, invariant features of single movement segments (motor primitives) and (2) the hierarchical organization of these segments in complex gesturing. The formalism is applied to a dataset of natural iconic ...

Iconicity - the correspondence between form and meaning - may help young children learn to use new words. Early-learned words are higher in iconicity than later learned words. However, it remains unclear what role iconicity may play in actual language use. Here, we ask whether iconicity relates not just to the age at which words are acquired, but also to how frequently children and adults use t...

Memory has become an important area of research in historical archaeology over the last decade with an increasing focus on retrieving the narratives of subaltern groups and painful memories of conflict, displacement and loss. Drawing on ethnographic research, I explore how archaeological excavation provides an arena for sharing, negotiating and contesting difficult forms of memory associated wi...

Iconicity is a property that pervades the lexicon of many sign languages, including American Sign Language (ASL). Iconic signs exhibit a motivated, nonarbitrary mapping between the form of the sign and its meaning. We investigated whether iconicity enhances semantic priming effects for ASL and whether iconic signs are recognized more quickly than noniconic signs are (controlling for strength of...