In this paper we posit a domain-general principle that may account for the improvement that is observed in several aspects of perceptual development over the first years of life. Development during this time frame is characterized by a process of perceptual narrowing, whereby the discrimination of perceptual information is broadly tuned at first, and then narrows to more selective levels with e...

Ecological traps arise when animals choose to settle in poor-quality habitats, leading to a reduction in their survival or productivity. Although this phenomenon has received comprehensive theoretical treatment in the recent literature, the corollary of the ecological trap (when animals choose to avoid good-quality habitats) is rarely discussed. Failure to recognize high-quality sites could inf...

We study the dynamical exponent z for the directed percolation depinning (DPD) class of models for surface roughening in the presence of quenched disorder. We argue that z for d 1 1 dimensions is equal to the exponent dmin characterizing the shortest path between two sites in an isotropic percolation cluster in d dimensions. To test the argument, we perform simulations and calculate z for DPD, ...

We show that generic, slow dynamics can occur in the contact process on complex networks with a tree-like structure and a superimposed weight pattern, in the absence of additional (nontopological) sources of quenched disorder. The slow dynamics is induced by rare-region effects occurring on correlated subspaces of vertices connected by large weight edges and manifests in the form of a smeared p...

We have studied numerically the dynamics of sliding charge-density waves ~CDW’s! in the presence of impurities in d51,2. The model considered exhibits a first-order dynamical transition at a critical driving force Fc between ‘‘rough’’ ~disorder dominated! (F,Fc) and ‘‘flat’’ (F.Fc) sliding phases where disorder is washed out by the external drive. The effective model for the sliding CDW’s in th...

The specific heat corresponding to systems with deterministic fractal energy spectra is known to present logarithmic-periodic oscillations as a function of the temperature T in the low T region around a mean value given by a characteristic dimension of the energy spectrum. In general, it is considered that the presence of disorder does not affect strongly these results, and that the fractal str...

This study assessed the ability of seven children to accurately judge relative durations of auditory and visual stimuli before and after participation in a language remediation program. The goal of the intervention program is to improve the children's ability to detect and identify rapidly changing auditory stimuli, and thereby improve their language-related skills. Children showed improved acc...

Holistic processing (HP) of faces can be inferred from failure to selectively attend to part of a face. We explored how encoding time affects HP of faces by manipulating exposure duration of the study or test face in a sequential matching composite task. HP was observed for exposure as rapid as 50 ms, and was unaffected by whether exposure of the study or test face was limited. Holistic effects...