Little is known about the acoustic cues infants might use to selectively attend to one talker in the presence of background noise. This study examined the role of talker familiarity as a possible cue. Infants either heard their own mothers (maternal-voice condition) or a different infant's mother (novel-voice condition) repeating isolated words while a female distracter voice spoke fluently in ...

Previous studies have found that individuals from rural areas in Malaysia and in El Salvador prefer heavier women than individuals from urban areas. Several explanations have been proposed to explain these differences in weight preferences but no study has explored familiarity as a possible explanation. We therefore sought to investigate participants' face preferences while also examining the f...

A typical web search engine returns a mix of introductory and advanced documents (around 50%) in response to a random selection of queries. Depending on a web searcher’s familiarity with a query’s target topic, it may be more appropriate to show her introductory or advanced documents. We conceptualize the notion of introductory and advanced documents in a way that obviates additional user-inter...

OBJECTIVES Lack of familiarity between teammates is linked to worsened safety in high risk settings. The emergency department (ED) is a high risk healthcare setting where unfamiliar teams are created by diversity in clinician shift schedules and flexibility in clinician movement across the department. We sought to characterise familiarity between clinician teammates in one urban teaching hospit...

Recent evidence suggests that increased liking of exposed stimuli-a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect-is dependent on experiencing the stimuli in the same context at exposure and test. Three experiments extended this work by examining the effect of presenting target stimuli in single and multiple exposure contexts. Target face stimuli were repeatedly paired with nonsense words, which...

Previous observational research suggests that stretching is contagious in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus). Here we report the first experimental evidence of this response through a reanalysis of a previous experiment testing for contagious yawning in this species. Using a repeated measures design, 16 birds were tested as pairs alongside familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics with and withou...

In a previous article, Moore, Rosenberg and Coleman (Brain and Language, 2005, 94, 72-85) reported evidence for significant improvements in phonological awareness in mainstream children following 6 h of exposure to a commercially available phoneme discrimination training programme, but not in a control group. In a follow-up study, we failed to replicate this finding, despite using an almost ide...

It is found that when we name an object or a face, we often use basic level name (e.g., dog) rather than a name at superordinate level (e.g., animal) or subordinate level (e.g., Labrador). In addition, although abundant evidence generally suggested that both familiarity and typicality influence object recognition, how each of the two factors involves categorization in terms of naming is not ful...

BACKGROUND Two experiments investigated the effect of features of human behaviour on the quality of interaction with an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA). METHODS In Experiment 1, visual prominence cues (head nod, eyebrow raise) of the ECA were manipulated to explore the hypothesis that likeability of an ECA increases as a function of interpersonal mimicry. In the context of an error detect...

We investigated the contribution of familiarity and recollection to associative retrieval of word pairs depending on the extent to which the pairs have been unitized through task instructions in the encoding phase. Participants in the unitization condition encoded word pairs in the context of a definition that tied them together such that they were treated as a coherent new item, while in the c...