Successful navigation of information-rich, multimodal environments involves processing both auditory and visual information. The extent to which information within each modality is processed varies because of many factors, but the influence of auditory stimuli on the processing of visual stimuli in these multimodal environments is not well understood. Previous research has shown that a preceding sound

Most studies on person perception have primarily investigated static images of faces. However, real-life person perception also involves the body and often the gait of the whole person. Whereas some studies indicated that the face dominates the representation of the whole person, others have emphasized the additional contribution of the body and gait. Here, we compared models of whole-person perception

When two tasks, Task 1 and Task 2, are conducted in close temporal proximity and a separate speeded response is required for each target (T1 and T2), T2 report performance decreases as a function of its temporal proximity to T1. This so-called psychological refractory period (PRP) effect on T2 processing is largely assumed to reflect interference from T1 response selection on T2 response selection

A speech signal carries information about meaning and about the talker conveying that meaning. It is now known that these two dimensions are related. There is evidence that gaining experience with a particular talker in one modality not only facilitates better phonetic perception in that modality, but also transfers across modalities to allow better phonetic perception in the other. This finding suggests

Visual attention is often through to take the form of a spotlight or zoom lens that gradually focuses on goal-relevant features of a stimulus over the course of a trial. Several lines of evidence suggest that for spatially contiguous stimuli, the spotlight naturally takes on the shape of a horizontally biased ellipse. Analyses of group-level behavior in the presence of horizontally versus vertically

The natural environment is full of redundant information that the visual system compresses into an ensemble representation by averaging features of groups of items. Ensemble perception has been shown to operate with remarkable flexibility, efficiently integrating information across a variety of visual domains. In the current set of experiments, we tested whether average size representations reflect

Most visual scenes contain information at different spatial scales, including the local and global, or the detail and gist. Global processes have become increasingly implicated in research examining summary statistical perception, initially as the output of ensemble coding, and more recently as a gating mechanism for selecting which information is included in the averaging process itself. Yet local

Weber’s law predicts that stimulus sensitivity will increase proportionally with increases in stimulus intensity. Does this hold for the stimulus of time – specifically, duration in the milliseconds to seconds range? There is conflicting evidence on the relationship between temporal sensitivity and duration. Weber’s law predicts a linear relationship between sensitivity and duration on interval timing

The article was published with a typo in the article title. The word “corpusclel’s” should read “corpuscle”.

A core assumption of ideomotor theory is that learned bidirectional associations between actions and their effects enable agents to select and initiate actions by anticipating their sensory consequences. Although the acquisition of bidirectional action–effect (A-E) associations built on the experience of one’s own movements has received considerable empirical support, the available evidence for A–E

Humans and animals are capable of estimating and discriminating nonsymbolic numerosities via mental representation of magnitudes—the approximate number system (ANS). There are two models of the ANS system, which are similar in their prediction in numerosity discrimination tasks. The log-Gaussian model, which assumes numerosities are represented on a compressed logarithmic scale, and the scalar variability

People can relatively easily report summary properties for ensembles of objects, suggesting that this information can enrich visual experience and increase the efficiency of perceptual processing. Here, we ask whether the ability to judge diversity within object arrays improves with experience. We surmised that ensemble judgments would be more accurate for commonly experienced objects, and perhaps

Under a “cocktail-party” environment with simultaneous multiple talkers, recognition of target speech is effectively improved by a number of perceptually unmasking cues. It remains unclear whether emotions embedded in the target-speaker’s voice can either improve speech perception alone or interact with other cues facilitating speech perception against a masker background. This study used two target-speaker

People are sensitive to regularities in the environment. Recent studies employing the additional singleton paradigm showed that a singleton distractor that appeared more often in one specific location than in all other locations may lead to attentional suppression of high-probability distractor locations. This in turn effectively reduced the attentional capture effect by the salient distractor singleton

The early work of Charles W. Eriksen and colleagues provided us with both the flanker task and the concepts of response competition and continuous flow. The model of the flanker task that Eriksen and colleagues developed also includes the idea that processing occurs in two phases and the specific claim that pro-active response inhibition is employed to prevent errors under certain conditions. We first

Visual working memory (VWM) is typically considered to represent complete objects—that is, separate parts of an object are maintained as bound objects. Yet it remains unclear whether and how the features of disparate parts are integrated into a whole-object memory representation. Using a change detection paradigm, the present study investigated whether VWM performance varies as a function of grouping

How does the brain combine information predictive of the value of a visually guided task (incentive value) with information predictive of where task-relevant stimuli may occur (spatial certainty)? Human behavioural evidence indicates that these two predictions may be combined additively to bias visual selection (Additive Hypothesis), whereas neuroeconomic studies posit that they may be multiplicatively

Our conscious experience of the world seems to go in lockstep with our attentional focus: We tend to see, hear, taste, and feel what we attend to, and vice versa. This tight coupling between attention and consciousness has given rise to the idea that these two phenomena are indivisible. In the late 1950s, the honoree of this special issue, Charles Eriksen, was among a small group of early pioneers

Ensemble perception is efficient because it summarizes redundant and complex information. However, it loses the fine details of individual items during the averaging process. Such characteristics of ensemble perception are similar to those of coarse processing. Here, we tested whether extracting an average of a set was similar to coarse processing. To manipulate coarse processing, we used the fast

There has been a recent surge of research examining how the visual system compresses information by representing the average properties of sets of similar objects to circumvent strict capacity limitations. Efficient representation by perceptual averaging helps to maintain the balance between the needs to perceive salient events in the surrounding environment and sustain the illusion of stable and complete

Neurologically intact individuals usually show a leftward bias in spatial attention, known as pseudoneglect, likely reflecting a right-hemisphere dominance in the control of spatial attention. A leftward bias also seems to manifest when individuals are asked to provide aesthetic judgments about visual stimuli, like artworks. However, whether artwork perception affects the allocation of spatial attention

The present study used information theory to quantify the extent to which different spatial cues conveyed the entropy associated with the identity and location of a visual search target. Single-distribution cues reflected the probability that the target would appear at one fixed location whereas joint-distribution cues reflected the probability that the target would appear at the location where another

Ensemble coding has been demonstrated for many attributes including color, but the metrics on which this coding is based remain uncertain. We examined ensemble percepts for stimulus sets that varied in chromatic contrast between complementary hues, or that varied in luminance contrast between increments and decrements, in both cases focusing on the ensemble percepts for the neutral gray stimulus defining

Humans demonstrate enhanced processing of human faces compared with animal faces, known as own-species bias. This bias is important for identifying people who may cause harm, as well as for recognizing friends and kin. However, growing evidence also indicates a more general face bias. Faces have high evolutionary importance beyond conspecific interactions, as they aid in detecting predators and prey

During everyday tasks, salient distractors may capture our attention. Recently, it was shown that through implicit learning, capture by a salient distractor is reduced by suppressing the location where a distractor is likely to appear. In the current study, we presented distractors of different saliency levels at the same specific location, asking the question whether there is always one suppression

The presence of memory for rejected distractors during visual search has been heavily debated in the literature and has proven challenging to investigate behaviorally. In this research, we used an electrophysiological index of working memory (contralateral delay activity) to passively measure working memory activity during visual search. Participants were asked to indicate whether a novel target was

Information used in visual event perception includes both static image structure projected from opaque object surfaces and dynamic optic flow generated by motion. Events presented in static blurry grayscale displays have been shown to be recognized only when and after presented with optic flow. In this study, we investigate the effects of optic flow and color on identifying blurry events by studying

It is well established that ensemble coding is regulated by physical similarity and variance in a set of stimuli. For example, observers are more accurate at judging the mean size of objects in a set if the overall size variance in the set is small. However, sometimes similarity among set members can be purely subjective. For example, faces from another race tend to look more similar than faces from

Emotional states have been indicated to affect intentional binding, resulting in an increase or decrease as a function of valence and arousal. Sexual arousal is a complex emotional state proven to impair attentional and perceptual processes, and is therefore highly relevant to feeling in control over one’s actions. We suggest that sexual arousal affects intentional binding in the same way as highly

Science requires replicable tools to measure its intended constructs. Attention research has developed tools that have been used in mind-wandering research, but mind-wandering measures often rely on response-inhibition, which introduces speed-accuracy trade-offs that may conflate errors for mind-wandering. We sought to replicate three studies that used an improved mind-wandering measure: the Metronome

Four experiments investigated the extent to which a limited pool of resources can be shared between different tasks performed simultaneously when it is efficient to do so. The experiments used a prioritized processing paradigm, in which stimuli for both a primary task and a background task were presented in each trial. If the primary-task stimulus required a response in a trial, participants made only

Ensemble perception refers to the ability to report attributes of a group of objects, rather than focusing on only one or a few individuals. An everyday example of ensemble perception is the ability to estimate the numerosity of a large number of items. The time course of ensemble processing, including that of numerical estimation, remains a matter of debate, with some studies arguing for rapid, “preattentive”

This study explored developmental differences in the effects of event rate, temporal expectancy, and sensory modality on continuous performance. Children (ages 7–8 years) and college-aged adults completed visual and auditory continuous performance tasks (CPTs) that were equated at an intermediate (20 events/min) rate using the perceptual sensitivity index (d’) and then were compared at faster (40 events/min)

Early in his career C.W. Eriksen published in Psychological Review what turned out to be a highly impactful critique on methods and findings on the topic of unconscious influences on discrimination and awareness. His incisive commentary on extant methodology employed at that time – especially the heavy dependence on subjective reports – clearly was heard by others moving forward, as evidenced by the

Self-other sensory attribution is necessary to realize feedback control because the self-attribution of sensations can drive feedback control. Some studies have suggested that self-other attribution is realized by the integration of both sensorimotor cues, including internal prediction and/or sensory feedback, and cognitive cues, such as knowledge or thought. However, in motor control, it remains unclear

The congruency sequence effect (CSE) refers to the finding that the effect of cognitive conflict is smaller following conflicting, incongruent trials than after non-conflicting, congruent trials in conflict tasks, such as the Stroop, Simon, and flanker tasks. This is typically interpreted as an upregulation of cognitive control in response to conflict. Weissman, Jiang, & Egner (2014) investigated whether

Correctly assessing the emotional state of others is a crucial part of social interaction. While facial expressions provide much information, faces are often not viewed in isolation, but occur with concurrent sounds, usually voices, which also provide information about the emotion being portrayed. Many studies have examined the crossmodal processing of faces and sounds, but results have been mixed

It has been robustly shown that stimuli with reward history receive attentional priority. However, the majority of this research tests reward history effects on attentional bias using similar tasks for both the reward learning phase and the unrewarded testing phase, which limits our understanding of how the effects of reward history generalize beyond the trained tasks and mental sets. Across two new

It has recently been shown that the perception of visual features of the environment can influence thought content. Both low-level (e.g., fractalness) and high-level (e.g., presence of water) visual features of the environment can influence thought content in real-world and experimental settings where these features can make people more reflective and contemplative in their thoughts. It remains to

Feature-based attention allocates resources to particular stimulus features and reduces processing and retention of unattended features. We performed four experiments using self-paced video games to investigate whether sustained attentional selection of features could be created without a distractor task requiring continuous processing. Experiments 1 and 2 compared two versions of the game Two Dots

In the rubber hand illusion (RHI), simultaneous brush stroking of a subject’s hidden hand and a visible rubber hand induces a transient illusion of the latter to “feel like it’s my hand” and a proprioceptive drift of the hidden own hand toward the rubber hand. Recent accounts of the RHI have suggested that the illusion would only occur if weighting of conflicting sensory information and their subsequent

Many theories of numerical cognition assume that numbers and space share a common representation at the response level. For example, observers are faster to respond to small numbers with their left hand and large numbers with their right hand (the SNARC effect). There is also evidence that viewing numbers can produce spatial shifts of attention, suggesting that attention may play a role in the spatial

When presented with a set of possible reach targets, the movement trajectory can reveal aspects of the underlying competition for action selection. Current goals and physical salience can affect the trajectory of reaching movements to be attracted towards a distractor. Some studies demonstrated that stimuli associated with reward can also cause an attraction when reaching towards the reward stimulus

Selective attention affords scrutinizing items in our environment. However, attentional selection changes over time and across space. Empirically, repetition of visual search conditions changes attentional processing. Priming of pop-out is a vivid example. Repeatedly searching for the same pop-out search feature is accomplished with faster response times and fewer errors. We review the psychophysical

Action planning can be construed as the temporary binding of features of perceptual action effects. While previous research demonstrated binding for task-relevant, body-related effect features, the role of task-irrelevant or environment-related effect features in action planning is less clear. Here, we studied whether task-relevance or body-relatedness determines feature binding in action planning

North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota Little is known about infants' perception of depth from motion parallax, even though it is known that infants are sensitive both to motion and to depth-from-motion cues at an early age. The present experiment assesses whether infants are sensitive to the unambiguous depth specified by motion parallax and, if so, when this sensitivity first develops

Some features of linear perspective images may look distorted. Such distortions appear in two drawings by Jan Vredeman de Vries involving perceived elliptical, instead of circular, pillars and tilted, instead of upright, columns. Distortions may be due to factors intrinsic to the images, such as violations of the so-called Perkins's laws, or factors extrinsic to them, such as observing the images from

When the two eyes are presented with incompatible stimuli, the two monocular stimuli are seen alternately in a never-ending cycle. It is now widely accepted that the neural processes underlying this phenomenon, binocular rivalry, are distributed across a number of cortical stages. It is not clear, however, where binocular rivalry is initiated. We performed two experiments whose aim was to clarify this

Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured at a central focus of attention and at 20°, 40°, and 60° locations distant in azimuth. Measurements were taken with one target collocated with two maskers, or with maskers flanking the target by ±20°. For 80% of trials, the target was played from the attended location (“expected”), and 20% came from another (“unexpected”) location. For collocated stimuli

The spatial characteristics of thermal perception were studied in two experiments that examined how thermal stimuli are processed within the hands. A thermal display that simulates cues associated with making contact with different materials was used in these studies. In the first experiment, participants indicated which of two simulated materials that were presented to the index fingertip was cooler

People indicate the physical size or the parity status of small numbers faster by a left-hand key and those of larger numbers by a right-hand key. Because magnitude information is not required for successful performance in these tasks, the presence of a number-space association (the SNARC effect) has been taken to indicate the automatic activation of numerical magnitude in all tasks with numerals.

A total of 110 undergraduate students participated in a series of three experiments that explored the magnitude of the moon illusion in pictures. Experiment 1 examined the role of the number and salience of depth cues and background brightness. Experiment 2 examined the role of the horizon line, linear perspective, interposition, and background brightness. In Experiment 3, comparative distance judgments

The ability of younger and older observers to perceive surface slant was investigated in four experiments. The surfaces possessed slants of 20°, 35°, 50°, and 65°, relative to the frontoparallel plane. The observers judged the slants using either a palm board (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or magnitude estimation (Experiment 2). In Experiments 1–3, physically slanted surfaces were used (the surfaces possessed

We investigated perceived range, perceived velocity, and perceived duration of the body rotating in the frontal plane (in roll). Specifically, to examine how shear to the otoliths in the inner ears and tactile pressure to the trunk affect judgments of range and velocity, in two experiments, we manipulated rotating range (30°–160°), rotating velocity (1.8°/sec to 9.6°/sec), mean tilt of the body (−60°

Three experiments employed a metacontrast masking procedure to examine the extent and nature of priming effects from visual stimuli not consciously perceived. The results showed effects of unconscious stimuli on subsequent target responses that (1) were more consistent, reliable, and not subject to strategic control, as compared with consciously perceived stimuli (Experiment 1); (2) produced both facilitation

To compare the timing of perceptual and motor decisions, distinct tasks have been designed, all of which have yielded systematic differences between these two moments. These observations have been taken as evidence of a sensorimotor dissociation. Inasmuch as the distinction between perceptual and motor decision moments is conceptually warranted, this conclusion remains debatable, since the observed

Implicit contextual cuing refers to the ability to learn the association between contextual information of our environment and a specific target, which can be used to guide attention during visual search. It was recently suggested that the storage of a snapshot image of the local context of a target underlies implicit contextual cuing. To make such a snapshot, it is necessary to use peripheral vision

Recent studies of perceptual learning have explored and commented on variation in learning trajectories. Although several factors have been suggested to account for this variation, thus far the idea that humans vary in their perceptual learning capacities has received scant attention. In the present experiment, we aimed at providing a detailed picture of the variation in this capacity by investigating

Although several studies have examined infants' sensitivity to perceptual organizational cues, few have examined the functional relations among these cues. We examined how uniform connectedness (UC) functions in relation to shape and luminance similarity. UC has been characterized as the entry-level mechanism of perceptual organization and would therefore be predicted to be more salient than the other

Wang (2004) showed that people do not always simultaneously update their relationships to real and imagined environments in a dual-environment situation. Employing the same paradigm, we examined whether spatial updating operates on virtual reality as it does on a real or fictitious environment. Participants learned target locations in a real room and a virtual kitchen. Then they turned to face targets