Calling cellphones

I was wondering, today in lab we had a teenaged son answer the phone when trying to call a baby and he gave the moms cell phone number. We didnt know if we should call that number or not so we have not yet. Just wondering!?

Returning to the question of species-specificity

Hi all,

I wanted to leave a link to an excellent article which discussed how studies of non-human animal perception contribute to our theories of human perception: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~lholt/publications/KluenderLottoHolt2005.pdf

Today's article

First of all, I'd like to thank you all for being so involved on today's topic - it was very exciting to see such profound interest and to hear such shrewd questions!

On to business now: I'll post the questions here, grouped into general topics, and hopefully we'll get to them all next Friday although most of them are so fundamental that decades of research have only begun to scratch the surface. Please feel free to post follow-up questions and comments!

Kuhl 2004: Neural commitment

As we get older, does our capacity for neural commitment lessen or does it only lessen for our ability to acquire language?

How does the neural commitment change/develop? Is this directly related to the critical period or are they different?

Kuhl 2004: Perceptual abilities

Why can't monkeys talk if they can perceive a little better than humans?

Are children's ears attuned sharper than adults to hear subtle acoustic changes?

I'm not very clear on the topics that include a continuum of sounds and why babies can distinguish these sounds but outgrow the ability

Kuhl 2004: Statistical distributions

Can we go over statistical distributions together sometime?

I don't understand question 11 ("What does Kuhl mean by infants tracking “statistical distributions”? [Hint: Do Japanese-learning infants hear both /r/ and /l/? How is Japanese- and English-learners’ input different?]")

Kuhl 2004: Categories

I had a difficult time understanding the perceptual magnet effect.

I'd like clarification on the perceptual magnet effect and prototype learning.

One of the questions asked about prototype perception, but I don't understand it. What is prototype perception?

Can you explain categorical perception? I am confused by the term.

This is a post for anonymous comments

Feel free to write down things you think we should work on! Leave anonymous comments here.