The present study was aimed at examining the factors inducing feature creation in the perceptual and semantic systems. The proposed research was guided by the hypothesis that due to the substantial load of categorization tasks, a preference exists for encoding features that are informative for the recognition of multiple categories. This claim extends theories stipulating that features are enco...

The categorization of art (paintings, literature) into distinct styles such as expressionism, or surrealism has had a profound influence on how art is presented, marketed, analyzed, and historicized. Here, we present results from several perceptual experiments with the goal of determining whether such categories also have a perceptual foundation. Following experimental methods from perceptual p...

Since Chomsky's pioneering work on syntactic structures, comparative psychologists interested in the study of language evolution have targeted pattern complexity, using formal mathematical grammars, as the key to organizing language-relevant cognitive processes across species. This focus on formal syntactic complexity, however, often disregards the close interaction in real-world signals betwee...

Hume’s scepticism was based, in part, on what he believed to be an inability of human observers to ever go beyond their perceptual experiences. How can an observer determine the veridicality of perception when her only access to the external world is mediated by perception itself? A related question may be asked about not the qualities of perception, but about the perceptual categories of biolo...

Audiovisual perceptual training of non-native phonetic contrasts was conducted for 10 naive Japanese adults using audiovisual recordings of 13 native English speakers articulating 90 rl minimal word pairs, and analyzed changes in perceptual and articulatory representations of non-native phonetic contrasts. The speech identification score drastically improved during the training. The improvement...