The Saliency of Snake Scales and Leopard Rosettes to Infants: Its Relevance to Graphical Patterns Portrayed in Prehistoric Art.

Geometrically arranged spots and crosshatched incised lines are frequently portrayed in prehistoric cave and mobiliary art. Two experiments examined the saliency of snake scales and leopard rosettes to infants that are perceptually analogous to these patterns. Experiment 1 examined the investigative behavior of 23 infants at three daycare facilities.

Poetry corner.

Presents a piece of poetry by A. A. Milne who is now best known as the author of the (1926) book but was quite well reputed before its publication for his plays and his poetry, including collections such as (1924).

Insights from studying prejudice in the context of American atheists.

Our research on non-religion supports the proposed shift toward more interactive models of prejudice. Being nonreligious is easily hideable and, increasingly, of low salience, leading to experiences not easily understood via traditional or contemporary frameworks for studying prejudice and prejudice reduction. This context affords new opportunity to observe reverse forms of interactive prejudice, which can interfere with prejudice reduction.

Ecological psychology and social psychology: continuing discussion.

What form would an ideal merger of ecological and social psychology take? Is that ideal attainable? Many researchers and theorists are working to answer these questions. Charles (2009, 2011a) offered insights from E. B.

Ecological psychology and social psychology: it is Holt, or nothing!

What is the greatest contribution that ecological psychologists can offer social psychology? Ideally, ecological psychologists could explain how people directly perceive the unique properties of their social partners. But social partners are distinguished from mundane objects because they possess mental traits, and tradition tells us that minds cannot be seen. When considering the ideal possibility, we reject that doctrine and posit minds as perceivable.

Object permanence and method of disappearance: looking measures further contradict reaching measures.

Piaget proposed that understanding permanency, understanding occlusion events, and forming mental representations were synonymous; however, accumulating evidence indicates that those concepts are not unified in development. Infants reach for endarkened objects at younger ages than for occluded objects, and infants' looking patterns suggest that they expect occluded objects to reappear at younger ages than they reach for them. We reaffirm the latter finding in 5- to 6-month-olds and find similar responses to faded objects, but we fail to find that pattern in response to endarkened objects.

Development of Multimodal Processing in Infancy.

A number of studies have investigated infants' abilities to extract and discriminate number from multimodal events. These results have been mixed for several possible reasons, including aspects of the experimental design that provide perceptual cues that are unrelated to number, and are known to influence looking preferences. This experiment used a preferential looking paradigm to investigate whether 6- to 9-month-old infants can extract the amodal property of number from an arbitrarily related multimodal event sequence when nonnumerical confounds are removed.

The (old) New Realism: what Holt has to offer for ecological psychology.

As Ecological Psychology pushes into new areas, success will be made easier by a rediscovery its theoretical history, in particular the "New Realism", lead in part by E. B. Holt.

The beyond must also be useful: the burden of alternative approaches.

Advocates of many different approaches have, for years, attempted to usurp cognitive psychology's dominance in the field of psychology. Unfortunately, none of these approaches have yet made a convincing case that they could take cognitive psychology's place. Because of its explicit use of the mind-as-computer model, cognitivism gains a false sense of concreteness, and becomes pragmatically useful.

Missed opportunities: speculation on what Japanese psychology could have been.

Takasuna (Integr. Physiol. Behav.

The correction for attenuation due to measurement error: clarifying concepts and creating confidence sets.

The correction for attenuation due to measurement error (CAME) has received many historical criticisms, most of which can be traced to the limited ability to use CAME inferentially. Past attempts to determine confidence intervals for CAME are summarized and their limitations discussed. The author suggests that inference requires confidence sets that demarcate those population parameters likely to have produced an obtained value--rather than indicating the samples likely to be produced by a given population--and that most researchers tend to confuse these 2 types of confidence sets.