The periodical press in the early nineteenth century was a site of dynamic exchange between men of science and men of letters, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was a particularly rich site of expression for medical ideas. This chapter explores the symbiotic relationship between the Blackwoodian prose fiction and the scientific and medical investigations of the Glaswegian surgeon and writer, R...

Perceptual expertise, even within the visual domain, can take many forms, depending on the goals of the practiced task and the visual information available to support performance. Given the same goals, expertise for different categories can recruit common perceptual resources, which could lead to interference during concurrent processing. We measured whether irrelevant characters of one writing...

A fundamental issue about memory and its different forms is whether learning can occur without the development of conscious knowledge of what is learned. Amnesic patients and control subjects performed a serial reaction time task, exhibiting equivalent learning of an imbedded repeating sequence as measured by gradually improving reaction times. In contrast, four tests of declarative (explicit) ...

Systems Factorial Technology is a powerful framework for investigating the fundamental properties of human information processing such as architecture (i.e., serial or parallel processing) and capacity (how processing efficiency is affected by increased workload). The Survivor Interaction Contrast (SIC) and the Capacity Coefficient are effective measures in determining these underlying properti...

Dividing auditory sequence into groups, or imposing rhythmic, tonal, or spatial structure during presentation, improves recall performance. Several competing computational models have been proposed to account for these effects, but little is known about the neural correlates of grouping and hence the representations that encode grouped sequences. The present study used functional magnetic reson...

BACKGROUND It is well documented that East Asians differ from Westerners in conscious perception and attention. However, few studies have explored cultural differences in unconscious processes such as implicit learning. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS The global-local Navon letters were adopted in the serial reaction time (SRT) task, during which Chinese and British participants were instructe...

Suggested citation for this article: Wilcox LS. A long way to travel. Prev Chronic Dis [serial online] 2005 Oct [date cited]. The travel experiences of one Lemuel Gulliver were first published in 1726 (1). Captain Gulliver, an ordinary, middle class Englishman, has a series of remarkable adventures , beginning with his trip to the island of Lilliput. Gulliver awakes on the island after survivin...

Three experiments measured serial position functions for character-in-string identification in peripheral vision. In Experiment 1, random strings of five letters (e.g., P F H T M) or five symbols (e.g., λ Б Þ Ψ ¥) were briefly presented to the left or to the right of fixation, and identification accuracy was measured at each position in the string using a post-cued two-alternative forced-choice...

We describe a modiied Sag-Szekeres multidimensional quadrature algorithm and discuss its implementation as a general-purpose library procedure on serial and parallel architectures. Examples illustrate its eeectiveness for both smooth and singular integrands.

A sentence is readily understood and recalled when presented 1 word at a time using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at 10 words/s (Potter, 1984). In contrast, selecting just 2 colored letters at 10 letters/s results in easy detection of the first target but poor recall for the second when it appears 200-500 ms later. This attentional blink disappears when all letters must be reported; i...