Perseverative responding is often seen in children's performance in a variety of contexts. One such context is symbolic comprehension in which 2- and 2½-year-olds demonstrate difficulty in appreciating the association of symbols (pictures and scale models) and their referents and show a high proportion of perseverative responding. Representational-level explanations of perseveration were explor...

Perceptual Grouping organizes image parts in clusters based on psychophysically plausible similarity measures. We propose a novel grouping method in this paper, which stresses connectedness of image elements via mediating elements rather than favoring high mutual similarity. This grouping principle yields superior clustering results when objects are distributed on lowdimensional extended manifo...

We used eyetracking, perceptual discrimination, and production tasks to examine the influences of perceptual similarity and linguistic experience on word recognition in nonnative (L2) speech. Eye movements to printed words were tracked while German and Dutch learners of English heard words containing one of three pronunciation variants (/t/, /s/, or /f/) of the interdental fricative /θ/. Irresp...

The current study examined the role of native language on the perceptual similarity space of regional dialect variation. Native and non-native speakers of American English were asked to group a set of talkers by regional dialect in a free classification task. The two listener groups exhibited similar dialect classification strategies and perceptual similarity structures. However, the non-native...

Perceptual grouping is usually defined by principles that associate distinct elements by virtue of image properties, such as proximity, similarity, and occurrence within common regions. What role does learning play in forming a perceptual group? This study provides evidence that learning of shape associations leads to perceptual grouping. Subjects were repeatedly exposed to pairs of unique shap...

Effects of similarity in colour, luminance, size, and shape on apparent motion and perceptual grouping were examined in part 1 in two parallel experiments on the same seven subjects. In both experiments, the effect of similarity was compared with that of proximity in competitive, bistable stimulus situations. A combination of a larger horizontal separation between the homogeneous stimulus eleme...

Studies of the effect of affect on perception often show consistent directional effects of a person's affective state on perception. Unpleasant emotions have been associated with a "locally focused" style of stimulus evaluation, and positive emotions with a "globally focused" style. Typically, however, studies of affect and perception have not been conducted under the conditions of perceptual u...

This study investigated odor-category organization in three cultures by evaluating (i) the relationship between linguistic and perceptual categorization and (ii) the existence of an internal structure of odor categories. In the first experiment, three groups of 30 participants from American, French and Vietnamese cultures performed a sorting task. The first group sorted 40 odorants on the basis...

Geographical masks are a group of location protection methods for the dissemination and publication of confidential and sensitive information, such as healthand crime-related geo-referenced data. The use of such masks ensures that privacy is protected for the individuals involved in the datasets. Nevertheless, the protection process introduces spatial error to the masked dataset. This study qua...