Examining Functional Spatial Perception in 10-Year-Olds and Adults.

This study examined a specific type of spatial perception, functional spatial perception, in 10-year-old children and adults. Functional spatial perception involves anticipating actions made with objects to fulfill a function, or, in this case, fitting objects through openings. We examined accuracy, sensitivity, and consistency in participants' abilities to adjust a window to the smallest opening through which a small wooden cube would fit.

Visual Occlusion Decreases Motion Sickness in a Flight Simulator.

Sensory conflict theories of motion sickness (MS) assert that symptoms may result when incoming sensory inputs (e.g., visual and vestibular) contradict each other.

Perception-action development from infants to adults: perceiving affordances for reaching through openings.

Perceiving possibilities for action-affordances-requires sensitivity, accuracy, and consistency. In the current study, we tested children of different ages (16-month-olds to 7-year-olds) and adults to examine the development of affordance perception for reaching through openings of various sizes. Using a psychophysical procedure, we estimated individual affordance functions to characterize participants' actual ability to fit their hand through openings and individual decision functions to characterize attempts to reach.

The sickening rug: a repeating static pattern that leads to motion-sickness-like symptoms.

The nauseogenic properties of a patterned rug that reputedly caused motion-sickness-like symptoms in those who viewed it was the topic of this study. Naive observers viewed a 1:1 scale image of the black-and-white patterned rug and a homogeneous gray region of equivalent luminance in a counterbalanced within-subjects design. After 5 min of viewing, symptoms were assessed with the simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ), yielding a total SSQ score and sub-scores for nausea, oculomotor symptoms, and disorientation.

Perceiving affordances for fitting through apertures.

Affordances--possibilities for action--are constrained by the match between actors and their environments. For motor decisions to be adaptive, affordances must be detected accurately. Three experiments examined the correspondence between motor decisions and affordances as participants reached through apertures of varying size.

Locomotor experience and use of social information are posture specific.

The authors examined the effects of locomotor experience on infants' perceptual judgments in a potentially risky situation--descending steep and shallow slopes--while manipulating social incentives to determine where perceptual judgments are most malleable. Twelve-month-old experienced crawlers and novice walkers were tested on an adjustable sloping walkway as their mothers encouraged and discouraged descent. A psychophysical procedure was used to estimate infants' ability to crawl/walk down slopes, followed by test trials in which mothers encouraged and discouraged infants to crawl/walk down.

When infants take mothers' advice: 18-month-olds integrate perceptual and social information to guide motor action.

The social cognition and perception-action literatures are largely separate, both conceptually and empirically. However, both areas of research emphasize infants' emerging abilities to use available information--social and perceptual information, respectively--for making decisions about action. Borrowing methods from both research traditions, this study examined whether 18-month-old infants incorporate both social and perceptual information in their motor decisions.