People have strong intuitions about the influence objects exert upon one another when they collide. Because people's judgments appear to deviate from Newtonian mechanics, psychologists have suggested that people depend on a variety of task-specific heuristics. This leaves open the question of how these heuristics could be chosen, and how to…

Loss of previously established behaviors in early childhood constitutes a markedly atypical developmental trajectory. It is found almost uniquely in autism and its cause is currently unknown (Baird et al., 2008). We present an artificial neural network model of developmental regression, exploring the hypothesis that regression is caused by…

It is argued that a reflectance channel that requires priority information is shown to be less plausible for the human visual system than J. L. Dannemiller (1989) argued. In the response, Dannemiller replies that lightness is not an illuminant invariant surface descriptor when daylight illuminant substitutions are considered. (SLD)

George A. Miller's essay gives a clear account of information theory and demonstrates how the concept of limited channel capacity can be applied across sensory dimensions. Its major influence has been demonstrating that immediate memory span is relatively insensitive to the amount of information per item. (SLD)

The use of the terms "sensitivity, threshold, bias, and ratio scale" in psychophysics is discussed, with special reference to the statistical decision theory of sensory discrimination and its application to signal detection and classical psychophysical procedures. (Editor)

Neuropsychological findings relevant to the question of whether visual imagery is visual or perceptual are reviewed and compared to cognitive psychology theories. Imagery does not appear to represent information acquired through visual sensory channels; rather, it seems to use some of the same neural representational machinery as does vision. (SLD)

Current theories and research on distributed activation in sleep are reviewed, and a neurocognitive theory of sleep is presented that is based on distributed activation. Neural and cognitive relationships described by the theory are translated into connectionist models, and simulations are described. (SLD)

A model is presented that describes four types of emotion-activating systems, three of which involve noncognitive information processing. The four systems are neural, sensorimotor, motivational, and cognitive. They may be seen as a loosely organized hierarchical arrangement, operating under a number of constraints. (SLD)

Following a brief summary of the ideas and assumptions of L. L. Thurstone's law of comparative judgment, this article reviews the subsequent major developments of this model in the sensory area. The law of comparative judgments is part of the body of work called Thurstonian scaling. (SLD)

A theory of visual information acquisition and visual memory is described that conjoins two models that have been used to describe low-level perceptual and higher level cognitive processes. Six experiments with 21 adult observers generally support the theory, although some weakness is discussed. (SLD)

A new theoretical analysis of the stop-signal model is proposed. Within the concepts of crude- and net-hazard functions, the nonobservable control-latency distribution can be estimated from observable reaction times. This result allows a test of the Logan and Cowan model (1984) without simplifying assumptions. (SLD)

The Perky effect, identified in 1910, is the reduction in performance from the no-imagery to the imagery condition. A series of experiments with over 100 undergraduates and graduates shows that the reduction reflects a true reduction in visual sensitivity, not just alteration in criteria for responding or response organization. (SLD)

Absolute judgment may be characterized as a special case of paired-associate learning in which the stimuli and responses are ordered, and responses are assigned to stimuli in serial order. (Authors)

Evidence from 5 experiments with over 150 newborns suggests that infants are born with some information about the structure of faces. This information, termed CONSPEC, is contrasted with CONLERN, a device for learning visual characteristics of conspecifics. Distinction between these mechanisms allows for reconciling conflicting data about face…