Recent findings have ignited a controversy over whether the hippocampus is critical for visual perception as well as memory. Some studies have shown that hippocampal damage impairs perception of scenes, but others found no evidence for hippocampal involvement. These studies measured perception as a unitary phenomenon, but recent findings indicate that perceptual discriminations can be based on ...

This study investigated global versus local pitch pattern perception in children with dyslexia aged between 8 and 11 years. Children listened to two consecutive 4-tone pitch sequences while performing a same/different task. On the different trials, sequences either preserved the contour (local condition) or they violated the contour (global condition). Compared to normally developing children, ...

Visual attention affects both perception and neuronal responses. Whether the same neuronal mechanisms mediate spatial attention, which improves perception of attended locations, and nonspatial forms of attention has been a subject of considerable debate. Spatial and feature attention have similar effects on individual neurons. Because visual cortex is retinotopically organized, however, spatial...

This study investigates the perception of historic changes in climate and associated impact on local agriculture among smallholders in pastoral/agropastoral systems of Borana in southern Ethiopia. We drew on empirical data obtained from farm household surveys conducted in 5 districts, 20 pastoral/agropastoral associations and 480 farm households. Using this data, this study analyses smallholder...

Object motion perception depends on the integration of form and motion information into a unified neural representation. Historically, form and motion perception are thought to be independent processes; however, research has demonstrated that these processes interact in numerous and complex ways. For example, an object's orientation relative to its direction of motion will influence its perceiv...

We present three experiments that investigated the perception of animacy and direction from local biological motion cues. Coherent and scrambled point-light displays of humans, cats, and pigeons that were upright or inverted were embedded in a random dot mask and presented to naive observers. Observers assessed the animacy of the walker on a six-point Likert scale in Experiment 1, discriminated...

This paper presents our ongoing work towards fusing RGB-D images with data from contact and proximity sensors embedded in a robotic hand for improved object perception, recognition and manipulation. Optical depth information from multiple sensors is often inaccurate and inconsistent. These problems arise from problems with sensor calibration, but also occlusion of objects by other objects or th...

Four pairs of spots rotating around their common centers, each pair a "doublet", were arranged in a square formation. The doublets initially appear to rotate "locally", but then coalesce into two large squares that slide over each other along circular paths ("global" motion). This perceptual transition from local to global motion occurred within and across a series of repeat trials (Experiment ...