Hearing shape

In 4 experiments, participants listened to suspended occluded objects set into vibration by a pendular hammer. In Experiment 1, participants provided analogue measures of the heights and widths of 3 rectangular steel plates equal in area and weight. The same report method and rectangular dimensions were used in Experiment 2 with 3 plates each of steel, wood, and Plexiglas. Heights and widths were distinguished and perceived in similar proportions to the actual dimensions regardless of material composition. In Experiments 3 and 4, participants successfully identified circular, triangular, and rectangular plates of a single material (Experiment 3) and of 3 different materials (Experiment 4). Discussion focuses on the dependency of perceived dimensions on the physical properties and linear dimensions of the plates and the acoustic structure determined by the solutions to the 2-dimensional wave equation.     

The Muddle of Anticipation

In J. J. Gibson's classic paper “The Problem of Temporal Order in Stimulation and Perception” (1966a Gibson, J. J. (1966a). The problem of temporal order in stimulation and perception. Journal of Psychology, 62, 141–149.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), he referred to the difficulties encountered when attempting a sharp distinction between memory and perception as “the muddle of memory.” Resolution of the muddle by J. J. Gibson proceeded by blurring the distinction itself. We develop the conjugate “muddle of anticipation” similarly by blurring the sharp distinction traditionally drawn between anticipation and perception. The subsequent redefinition of the problem is grounded in strong anticipation equated with anticipating synchronization—that which arises from a system itself via lawful regularities embedded in the system's ordinary mode of function. We identify the fit of strong anticipation's properties to J. J. Gibson's ecological approach and in so doing introduce the possibility of a potentially deep connection between them, namely, that the coordination of perception with surroundings (direct perception) is a special case of strong anticipation.     

Is alphabet biasing in bialphabetical word perception automatic and prelexical?

Phonologically ambiguous Serbo-Croatian words are identified more slowly and erroneously than their phonologically unique counterparts. Five experiments addressed the reduction of these ambiguity effects when Roman (Cyrillic) targets are preceded by consonants unique to the Roman (Cyrillic) alphabet. Alphabet-specific nonword contexts were presented briefly with masking. With forward masking, performance was better when the phonologically ambiguous target words and their preceding nonword contexts were alphabetically congruent. Similarly, where backward masked contexts acted themselves as backward masks for the target stimuli, identification was highest when the context masks were in the same alphabet as the targets. Results were discussed in terms of automatic, prelexical processes within a network model of visual word recognition in Serbo-Croatian.     

Grammatical priming of inflected nouns by the gender of possessive adjectives

Two experiments examined the effect on lexical decision times for inflected Serbo-Croatian nouns when the nouns were preceded by possessive adjectives (my, your, our). For any given pairing the possessive adjective and the noun agreed always in number (singular) and case (nominative) but only agreed half of the time in gender (masculine or feminine). Lexical decisions were faster when the noun targets were of the same gender as their primes. This gender congruency/incongruency effect was shown to hold whether the inflections of the adjective and noun were the same (as is the case for typical Serbo-Croatian nouns) or different (as is the case for atypical Serbo-Croatian nouns). The results are discussed in terms of a postlexical influence of grammatical processing on the recognition of individual words.