The relationship between perceptual categorization and organization processes in 3‐ to 4‐month‐old infants was explored. The question was whether an invariant part abstracted during category learning could interfere with Gestalt organizational processes. Experiment 1 showed that the infants could parse a circle in accord with good continuation from visual patterns consisting of a circle and a complex polygon. In Experiments 2 and 3, however, this parsing was interfered with by a prior category familiarization experience in which infants were (...) presented with visual patterns consisting of a pacman shape and a complex polygon. Part 1 of Experiments 2 and 3 showed that the infants recognized the pacman as familiar, and Part 2 demonstrated that the representation of the pacman blocked the subsequent parsing of the circle. The results suggest that a cognitive system of flexible feature creation can override organizational principles with which a perceptual system may come pre‐equipped. (shrink)

Many of Margaret Cavendish’s criticisms of Thomas Hobbes in the Philosophical Letters (1664) relate to the disorder and damage that she holds would result if Hobbesian pressure were the cause of visual perception. In this paper, I argue that her “two men” thought experiment in Letter IV is aimed at a different goal: to show the explanatory potency of her account. First, I connect Cavendish’s view of visual perception as “patterning” to the “two men” thought experiment in Letter (...) IV. Second, I provide a potential reply on Hobbes’s behalf that appeals to physiological differences between perceivers’ sense organs, drawing upon Hobbes’s optics in De homine. Third, I argue that such a reply would misunderstand Cavendish’s objective of showing the limited explanatory resources available in understanding visual perception as pressing when compared to her view of visual perception as patterning. (shrink)

Most everyday tasks involve multiple modalities, which raises the question of how the processing of these modalities is coordinated by the cognitive system. In this paper, we focus on the coordination of visual attention and linguistic processing during speaking. Previous research has shown that objects in a visual scene are fixated before they are mentioned, leading us to hypothesize that the scan pattern of a participant can be used to predict what he or she will say. We test (...) this hypothesis using a data set of cued scene descriptions of photo-realistic scenes. We demonstrate that similar scan patterns are correlated with similar sentences, within and between visual scenes; and that this correlation holds for three phases of the language production process (target identification, sentence planning, and speaking). We also present a simple algorithm that uses scan patterns to accurately predict associated sentences by utilizing similarity-based retrieval. (shrink)

This study investigated eye-movement patterns during emotion perception for children with hearing aids and hearing children. Seventy-eight participants aged from 3 to 7 were asked to watch videos with a facial expression followed by an oral statement, and these two cues were either consistent or inconsistent in emotional valence. Results showed that while normal-hearing children paid more attention to the upper part of the face, children with hearing aids paid more attention to the lower face after the oral statement (...) was presented. When there was an inconsistency between the visual and auditory cues, children with hearing aids were likely to increase attention to the upper face. The results revealed the underlying mechanism of deficits in emotion perception for hearing-impaired children. (shrink)

What are the factors that contribute to (or inhibit) diachronic sound change? While acoustically motivated sound changes are well documented, research on the articulatory and audiovisual-perceptual aspects of sound change is limited. This paper investigates the interaction of articulatory variation and audiovisual speech perception in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS), a pattern of sound change observed in the Great Lakes region of the United States. We focus specifically on the maintenance of the contrast between the vowels /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, (...) both of which are fronted as a result of the NCVS. We present results from two experiments designed to test how the NCVS is produced and perceived. In the first experiment, we present data from an articulatory and acoustic analysis of the production of fronted /ɑ/ and /ɔ/. We find that some speakers distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ with a combination of both tongue position and lip rounding, while others do so using either tongue position or lip rounding alone. For speakers who distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ along only one articulatory dimension, /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ are acoustically more similar than for speakers who produce multiple articulatory distinctions. While all three groups of speakers maintain some degree of acoustic contrast between the vowels, the question is raised as to whether these articulatory strategies differ in their perceptibility. In the perception experiment, we test the hypothesis that visual speech cues play a role in maintaining contrast between the two sounds. The results of this experiment suggest that articulatory configurations in which /ɔ/ is produced with unround lips are perceptually weaker than those in which /ɔ/ is produced with rounding, even though these configurations result in acoustically similar output. We argue that these findings have implications for theories of sound change and variation in at least two respects: 1) visual cues can shape phonological systems through misperception-based sound change, and 2) phonological systems may be optimized not only for auditory but also for visual perceptibility. (shrink)

Abstnn Eye movements were monitored while subjects performed parallel and serial sarah tasks. In Experiment la, subjects searched for an “O' among "X"s (parallel condition) and for a 'T" among "L"s (serial condition). In the parallel condition of Eqcriment lb, “q)" was the target and “O"s were distractors; in the serial condition, time..