Soft biometrics continues to attract research interest. Traditional body and face soft biometrics have been the main research focus and have been proven, by many researchers, to be usable for identification and retrieval. Also, soft biometrics have been shown to provide several advantages over classic biometrics, such as invariance to illumination and contrast. Other than body and face, little ...

The two-fold aim of this chapter is to present the design process of an interface for a mobile navigational aid for blind pedestrians and a set of rules for producing route descriptions for these users, as well as the methodology used to develop them, rooted in a userand activity-centered approach. We first present the state of the art of wearable verbal navigational aids and what might still b...

All sciences use models of some variety to understand complex phenomena. In developmental science, however, modeling is mostly limited to linear, algebraic descriptions of behavioral data. Some researchers have suggested that complex mathematical models of developmental phenomena are a viable (even necessary) tool that provide fertile ground for developing and testing theory as well as for gene...

Describing unidentified sounds with words is a frustrating task and vocally imitating them is often a convenient way to address the issue. This article reports on a study that compared the effectiveness of vocal imitations and verbalizations to communicate different referent sounds. The stimuli included mechanical and synthesized sounds and were selected on the basis of participants' confidence...

The present study investigated the difficulties encountered by children with non-verbal learning disability (NLD) and reading disability (RD) when processing spatial information derived from descriptions, based on the assumption that both groups should find it more difficult than matched controls, but for different reasons, i.e., due to a memory encoding difficulty in cases of RD and to spatial...

Neural systems activated in a coordinated way during rest, known as the default mode network (DMN), also support autobiographical memory (AM) retrieval and social processing/mentalizing. However, little is known about how individual variability in reliance on personal memories during social processing relates to individual differences in DMN functioning during rest (intrinsic functional connect...

There is considerable forensic import to the hypothesis that the quality of an eyewitness' description of a face is useful for predicting the accuracy of a subsequent identification. Although previous studies have failed to support this hypothesis, those studies were designed to test only whether witnesses who are good describers also are good identifiers. The current study used 88 different ta...

OBJECTIVE Inaccurate parental perception of their child's weight status is commonly reported in Western countries. It is unclear whether similar misperception exists in Asian populations. This study aimed to evaluate the ability of Singaporean mothers to accurately describe their three-year-old child's weight status verbally and visually. METHODS At three years post-delivery, weight and heigh...