Face perception is critical for social communication. Given its fundamental importance in the course of evolution, the innate neural mechanisms can anticipate the computations necessary for representing faces. However, the effect of visual deprivation on the formation of neural mechanisms that underlie face perception is largely unknown. We previously showed that sighted individuals can recogni...

There is substantial evidence that congenitally blind individuals perform better than normally sighted controls in a variety of auditory, tactile and olfactory discrimination tasks. However, little is known about the capacity of blind individuals to make fine discriminatory judgments in the thermal domain. We therefore compared the capacity to detect small temperature increases in innocuous hea...

The effects of selectively different experience of eye contact and gaze behaviour on the early development of five sighted infants of blind parents were investigated. Infants were assessed longitudinally at 6-10, 12-15 and 24-47 months. Face scanning and gaze following were assessed using eye tracking. In addition, established measures of autistic-like behaviours and standardized tests of cogni...

The study of voice perception in congenitally blind individuals allows researchers rare insight into how a lifetime of visual deprivation affects the development of voice perception. Previous studies have suggested that blind adults outperform their sighted counterparts in low-level auditory tasks testing spatial localization and pitch discrimination, as well as in verbal speech processing; how...

Compared with the echolocation performance of a blind expert, sighted novices rapidly learned size and position discrimination with surprising precision. We use a novel task to characterize the population distribution of echolocation skill in the sighted and report the highest known human echolocation acuity in our expert subject.

Citation: Wilson RM, Tyson RB, Nelson JA, Balmer BC, Chanton JP and Nowacek DP (2017) Niche Differentiation and Prey Selectivity among Common Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) Sighted in St. George Sound, Gulf of Mexico. Front. Mar. Sci. 4:235. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2017.00235 Niche Differentiation and Prey Selectivity among Common Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) Sighted in St. Geo...

Connectivity among demes in a metapopulation depends on both the landscape’s and the focal organism’s properties (including its mobility and cognitive abilities). Using individual-based simulations, we contrast the consequences of three different cognitive strategies on several measures of metapopulation connectivity. Model animals search suitable habitat patches while dispersing through a mode...

We have shown in previous research (Thaler L, Arnott SR, Goodale MA. PLoS One 6: e20162, 2011) that motion processing through echolocation activates temporal-occipital cortex in blind echolocation experts. Here we investigated how neural substrates of echo-motion are related to neural substrates of auditory source-motion and visual-motion. Three blind echolocation experts and twelve sighted ech...

This article seeks to analyze the sociological dimension of social modernization and its effect on family formation among university students in Golestan province. This article is based on data gathered by a survey on 400 young educated students, 18 to 50 years old, from all levels of university education in Golestan province. The stratified random sampling method  based on a given volume was u...