Patterns of animate and inanimate systems show remarkable similarities in their aggregation. One similarity is the double-Pareto distribution of the aggregate-size of system components. Different models have been developed to predict aggregates of system components. However, not many models have been developed to describe probabilistically the aggregate-size distribution of any system regardles...

Our objective was to demonstrate that human population-level, right-handedness, is not species specific, precipitated from language areas in the brain, but rather is context specific and inherited from a behavior common to both humans and great apes. In general, previous methods of assessing human handedness have neglected to consider the context of action, or employ methods suitable for direct...

A large body of research has documented infants' ability to classify animate and inanimate objects based on static or dynamic information. It has been shown that infants less than 1 year of age transfer animacy-specific expectations from dynamic point-light displays to static images. The present study examined whether basic motion cues that typically trigger judgments of perceptual animacy in o...

Is the sound of a train whistling more similar to the sound of the wheels of a train or to the sound of your whistle? This question addresses the comparative relevance of acoustical and conceptual information to the perceived similarity of sound events. The answer to this question has theoretical and methodological consequences for the field of sound source perception, and for the behaviorally ...

Early cognitive development benefits from nonilnguistic representations of skeietai sets of domain-specific principles and complementary domain-relevant doto obstroction processes. The principles outline the domain, identify relevant inputs, and structure coherently what is learned. Knowledge acquisition within the domoin is a faint function of such domain-specific principles and domain-general...

Major theories for explaining the organization of semantic memory in the human brain are premised on the often-observed dichotomous dissociation between living and nonliving objects. Evidence from neuroimaging has been interpreted to suggest that this distinction is reflected in the functional topography of the ventral vision pathway as lateral-to-medial activation gradients. Recently, we obser...

The problem of the origins of the perception of causality in infancy has received relatively little attention in the literature despite its obvious importance. Two experiments with infants 4 1/2 and 8 months old are reported which seek to investigate sensitivity to spatiotemporal continuity in simple causal events with a differential dishabituation-of-looking technique. In the first experiment ...

In the future, human-like robots will live among people to provide company and help carrying out tasks in cooperation with humans. These interactions require that robots understand not only human actions, but also the way in which we perceive the world. Human perception heavily relies on the time dimension, especially when it comes to processing visual motion. Critically, human time perception ...