The classical receptive field (RF) concept-the idea that a visual neuron responds to fixed parts and properties of a stimulus-has been challenged by a series of recent physiological results. Here, we extend these findings to human vision, demonstrating that the extent of spatial averaging in contrast perception is also flexible, depending strongly on stimulus contrast and uniformity. At low con...

The spatial acuity of the skin for pressure stimuli has been explored extensively, but there have been few attempts to study spatial resolution for vibratory stimuli of the type used in tactile aids for sensory disability or to augment communication. Because vibrotactile spatial acuity has never been empirically determined at such sites, pattern perception with these devices might be poorer tha...

Two experiments examined how categories derived from experience and those derived from perception affect spatial memory. Four kinds of objects were distributed within a circle and spatially clustered so that all objects of each kind appeared within the same spatial region. These identity-based categories were either aligned with or in opposition to the perceptuallybased quadrant categories that...

People who are blind face a series of challenges and limitations resulting from their lack of being able to see, forcing them to either seek the assistance of a sighted individual or work around the challenge by way of a inefficient adaptation (e.g. following the walls in a room in order to reach a door rather than walking in a straight line to the door). These challenges are directly related t...

The two-thirds power law, postulating an inverse local relation between the velocity and cubed root of curvature of planar trajectories, is a long-established simplifying principle of human hand movements. In perception, the motion of a dot along a planar elliptical path appears most uniform for speed profiles closer to those predicted by the power law than to constant Euclidean speed, a kineti...

A new discrimination procedure based on the measurement of visual orientation latency to speech stimuli is introduced. Each participant listens to a series of short familiarization test trials. In each trial, 5 to 7 centrally-presented familiarization stimuli are followed by laterally-presented test stimuli. Infants were found to orient faster to different-category than to same-category test st...

To understand the mechanisms underlying visual motion analyses for perceptual and oculomotor responses and their similarities/differences, we analyzed eye movement responses to two-frame animations of dual-grating 3f5f stimuli while subjects performed direction discrimination tasks. The 3f5f stimulus was composed of two sinusoids with a spatial frequency ratio of 3:5 (3f and 5f), creating a pat...

Do cultural models facilitate particular ways of perceiving interactions in nature? We explore variability in folkecological principles of reasoning about interspecies interactions (specifically, competitive or cooperative). In two studies, Indigenous Panamanian Ngöbe and U.S. participants interpreted an illustrated, wordless nonfiction book about the hunting relationship between a coyote and b...

Double E(2)N(2) scaling, i.e. magnifying size and contrast, allows modelling of the deterioration of face recognition performance with increasing eccentricity (E) and the size (N) of the set from which a target face has to be identified. E(2) and N(2) values represent the eccentricities and set sizes at which stimulus size and contrast must double in order to keep performance unchanged, whilst ...

Pre-service teachers responded to two questionnaires exploring perceptions of school violence. Responses to the “Teachers’ Attitudes about Bullying” and “Trainee Teachers’ Bullying Attitudes” questionnaires suggest that teachers across all academic divisions view bullying as a serious concern with implications for their role within the profession. There were considerable differences regarding w...