Almost all behavioral studies of sound localization have used either an approach-to-target or pointing/orienting task to assess absolute sound localization performance, yet there are very few direct comparisons of these measures. In an approach-to-target task, the subject is trained to walk to a sound source from a fixed location. In an orienting task, finger, head and/or eye movements are moni...

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by significant social impairments, including deficits in orienting attention following social cues. Behavioral studies investigating social orienting in ASD, however, have yielded mixed results, as the use of naturalistic paradigms typically reveals clear deficits whereas computerized laboratory experiments often report normative behavior. The p...

Turning the eyes and the head to an object when it suddenly appears in the visual f ield, producing what is called exploration behavior, is a common experience for everyone. Sokolov (1963) described this phenomenon as the orienting reflex. The purpose of the orienting reflex is to allow the central system to identify the new element that has just occurred in order to prepare the whole organism ...

Eye gaze is a powerful cue for orienting attention in space. Studies examining whether gaze and symbolic cues recruit the same neural mechanisms have found mixed results. We tested whether there is a specialized attentional mechanism for social cues. We separately measured BOLD activity during orienting and reorienting attention following predictive gaze and symbolic cues. Results showed that g...

Research of tutoring in parent-infant interaction has shown that tutors – when presenting some action – modify both their verbal and manual performance for the learner (‘motherese’, ‘motionese’). Investigating the sources and effects of the tutors’ action modifications, we suggest an interactional account of ‘motionese’. Using video-data from a semi-experimental study in which parents taught th...

Conventional human-computer interfaces for the exploration of volume datasets employ the mouse as an input device. Specifying an oblique orientation for a crosssectional plane through the dataset using such interfaces requires an indirect approach involving a combination of actions that must be learned by the user. In this paper we propose a new interface model that aims to provide an intuitive...

People with high levels of trait anxiety are said to orient attention selectively to threatening stimuli (Bradley, Mogg, White, Groom, & de Bono, 1999; MacLeod, Mathews, & Tata, 1986), but this effect is sometimes difficult to replicate. We suggest a reason for this difficulty is that typical tests of the spatial attention bias in anxiety failed to consider together: (1) the differential effect...