Monday, September 19, 2011

Learning to see: How vision sharpens – The Chart - CNN.com Blogs

Learning to see: How vision sharpens :

"The champion of the infant visual system is motion, which develops early and is relatively difficult to disrupt. At four weeks of age, babies can detect a flickering stimulus in a single location almost as well as adults. Babies can discriminate motion direction around seven weeks and speed by twenty weeks. Perception of global motion patterns, like raindrops seen through the windshield of a moving car, improves rapidly between three and five months and then continues to develop slowly through middle childhood. This aspect of motion processing, the most vulnerable to disruption, is impaired in some developmental disorders, including dyslexia, autism, fragile-X syndrome, and Williams syndrome."

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Sunday, September 18, 2011

Six Johns Hopkins Faculty Named Guggenheim Fellows | R&D Mag

Six Johns Hopkins Faculty Named Guggenheim Fellows | R&D Mag:

"Barbara Landau is the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor and chair of the Department of Cognitive Science. Her work focuses on language learning, spatial representation and the relationships between these foundational systems of human knowledge. "The fellowship will allow me to work full-time during my sabbatical this coming year on a book that illuminates the nature of spatial knowledge in people with an unusual genetic deficit that results in severely impaired understanding of space," Landau said. The book, she said, will be titled 'Gene, Brain, Mind and Development: The Puzzle of Williams Syndrome' and is under contract with Oxford University Press. "I'll be spending most of the year here at Johns Hopkins but will also be traveling a bit to work with colleagues who specialize in the nature of human spatial knowledge," she said."

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