"Pusher syndrome" is a clinical disorder following left or right brain damage in which patients actively push away from the nonhemiparetic side, leading to a loss of postural balance. The mechanism underlying this disorder and its related anatomy have only recently been identified. Investigation of patients with severe pushing behavior has shown that perception of body posture in relation to gr...

Despite ample explorations the nature of neural mechanisms underlying human expertise in face perception is still undetermined. Here we examined the response of two electrophysiological signals, the N170 ERP and induced gamma-band activity (>20 Hz), to face orientation and familiarity across two blocks, one in which the face identity was task-relevant and one in which it was not. N170 amplitude...

Infants younger than 1 year do not correctly count the number of objects in a scene by using differences among their properties, unless these differences cross the broad category boundaries separating humans, animals, and artifacts. Here we show that face orientation influences whether 10- and 12-month-old infants count correctly or incorrectly. When infants saw two puppets appearing and disapp...

Although, ordinarily, upright objects are readily recognized by observers who are tilted, it is hypothesized that this is achieved by a process of correction. The first stage of that process is held to be a description of the object in relation to the biologically more primitive system of retinal coordinates. In order to test this hypothesis, tilted subjects were required to view figures under ...

In multiple-stimulus presentation, orientation disparity has been known to be more discriminable than disparity in line arrangement (e.g., J. Beck, 1972). The source of the effect and its locus were studied in 7 experiments. In different experiments a discrimination between an upright T and either a tilted T or an L, or a discrimination between a tilted T and an L, was required, either in a sin...

Three experiments investigated the role of attention in visual priming across rotations in the picture plane. Experiment 1 showed that naming latencies increased with the degree of misorientation for objects commonly seen in an upright view (base objects) but not for objects seen familiarly from many views (no-base objects). In Experiment 2, no-base objects revealed a priming pattern identical ...

Newborn infants respond preferentially to simple face-like patterns, raising the possibility that the face-specific regions identified in the adult cortex are functioning from birth. We sought to evaluate this hypothesis by characterizing the specificity of infants' electrocortical responses to faces in two ways: (1) comparing responses to faces of humans with those to faces of nonhuman primate...

The orientation of the body in space can influence perception of verticality leading sometimes to biases consistent with priors peaked at the most common head and body orientation, that is upright. In this study, we investigate haptic perception of verticality in sighted individuals and early and late blind adults when tilted counterclockwise in the roll plane. Participants were asked to perfor...

The "body inversion effect" refers to superior recognition of upright than inverted images of the human body and indicates typical configural processing. Previous research by Reed et al. using static images of the human body shows that people with autism fail to demonstrate this effect. Using a novel task in which adults, adolescents with autism, and typically developing adolescents judged whet...

Emotion influences memory in many ways. For example, when a mood-dependent processing shift is operative, happy moods promote global processing and sad moods direct attention to local features of complex visual stimuli. We hypothesized that an emotional context associated with to-be-learned facial stimuli could preferentially promote global or local processing. At learning, faces with neutral e...