We examined infants’ sensitivity to articulatory organ congruency between audio-only and silent-video consonants (lip vs. tongue tip closure) to evaluate three theoretical accounts of audio-visual perceptual development for speech: 1) learned audio-visual associations; 2) intersensory perceptual narrowing; 3) amodal perception of articulatory gestures. Effects of language experience were invest...

Sensory experience can reorganize cortical sensory representations in an epoch of early development. During this period, cortical sensory neurons may shift their response selectivity and become tuned to more frequently occurring stimuli. Although this enlarged cortical representation is believed to underlie improved sensory processing of the experienced stimuli, its precise perceptual consequen...

Highly emotional events are associated with vivid "flashbulb" memories. Here we examine whether the flashbulb metaphor characterizes a previously unknown emotion-enhanced vividness (EEV) during initial perceptual experience. Using a magnitude estimation procedure, human observers estimated the relative magnitude of visual noise overlaid on scenes. After controlling for computational metrics of ...

In its search for neural codes, the field of visual neuroscience has uncovered neural representations that reflect the structure of stimuli of variable complexity from simple features to object categories. However, accumulating evidence suggests an adaptive neural code that is dynamically shaped by experience to support flexible and efficient perceptual decisions. Here, we review work showing t...

Experimental research on decision making has been mainly focused on binary perceptual tasks. The generally accepted models describing the decision process in these tasks are the integrator models. These models suggest that perceptual evidence is accumulated over time until a decision is made. Therefore, the final decision is based solely on recent perceptual information. In behaviorally more re...

away from its details in order to reach a more general rationale for thinking that perceptual content is determined by the perceiver’s environment in the right way. In the last section, I argued that perceptual capacities function to single out particulars. If the fact that such capacities single out particulars in some situations but not in others has any semantic significance, then the conten...

Humans share with non-human animals perceptual biases that might form the basis of complex cognitive abilities. One example comes from the principles described by the iambic-trochaic law (ITL). According to the ITL, sequences of sounds varying in duration are grouped as iambs, whereas sequences varying in intensity are grouped as trochees. These grouping biases have gained much attention becaus...

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...

Conceptualism conceives of perceptual experience as a source of reasons. This claim can be read in two ways: in a strong reading, perceptual experience is taken to provide necessary and sufficient conditions to justify doxastic states. In a weak reading, it is assumed to provide only the materials to form reasons, which are conceived as " hybrid entities " made from perceptual contents plus dox...