There is a growing interest in the characterization of the internal body model: a stored representation of the metric properties of the body. Tactile Distance Task (TDT) is an experimental procedure for assessing the body metric, based on the perception of distances between tactile stimuli. We aimed at ruling out potential cognitive confounds: the body part being touched, the response estimation method

Faces and voices each convey multiple cues enabling us to tell people apart. Research on face and voice distinctiveness commonly utilizes multidimensional space to represent these complex, perceptual abilities. We extend this framework to examine how a combined face-voice space would relate to its constituent face and voice spaces. Participants rated videos of speakers for their dissimilarity in face

We have compared two explanations for poor peripheral binding. Binding is the ability to assign the correct features (e.g., color, direction of motion, orientation) to objects. Wu, Kanai, and Shimojo (Nature, 429(6989), 262, 2004) showed that subjects performed poorly on binding dot color with direction of motion in the periphery. Suzuki, Wolfe, Horowitz, and Noguchi (Vision Research, 82, 58–65, 2013)

In studies investigating haptic softness perception, participants are typically instructed to explore soft objects by indenting them with their index finger. In contrast, performance with other fingers has rarely been investigated. We wondered which fingers are used in spontaneous exploration and if performance differences between fingers can explain spontaneous usage. In Experiment 1 participants

Intersensory interactions predicted by the sensory precision hypothesis have been infrequently examined by distorting the reliability of size perception by touch. Consequently, participants were asked to see one size and manually feel another unseen size either with bare fingers or with fingers sleeved in rigid tubes to decrease the precision of touch. Their subsequent visual estimates of the perceived

Perceptual fading of an artificial scotoma can be viewed as a failure of figure–ground segregation, providing a useful tool for investigating possible mechanisms and processes involved in figure–ground perception. Weisstein’s antagonistic magnocellular/parvocellular stream figure–ground model proposes P stream activity encodes figure, and M stream activity encodes background. Where a boundary separates

Modulation patterns are known to carry critical predictive cues to signal detection in complex acoustic environments. The current study investigated the persistence of masker modulation effects on postmodulation detection of probe signals. Hickok, Farahbod, and Saberi (Psychological Science, 26, 1006–1013, 2015) demonstrated that thresholds for a tone pulse in stationary noise follow a predictable

Esthetic experience is the result of the coordination of different cognitive processes. It has been widely reported that top-down processes of orienting of attention interact with bottom-up perceptual facilitation occurring during esthetic experience of artworks. Here we use whole-part ambiguity as a tool to test the effect of global and local prime on esthetic appreciation of complex visual artworks

The current study examined how the deployment of spatial attention at the onset of a pointing movement influenced audiovisual crossmodal interactions at the target of the pointing action and at nontarget locations. These interactions were quantified by measuring the susceptibility to the fission (i.e., reporting two visual flashes under one flash and two auditory beep pairings) and fusion (i.e., reporting

Managing attention in multispeaker environments is a challenging feat that is critical for human performance. However, why some people are better than others in allocating attention appropriately remains highly unknown. Here, we investigated the contribution of two factors—working memory capacity (WMC) and professional experience—to performance on two different types of attention task: selective attention

Previously it has been theorized that differential functioning of the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine (LC–NE) system affects people’s ability to regulate arousal, which has impacts on cognitive abilities. In the present study, we investigated three potential mechanisms by which the LC–NE system can fail to regulate arousal appropriately: hypoarousal, hyperarousal, and dysregulation of arousal. Each

The Publisher regrets the following production error. The labels for Figures 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 describe an older version of the figures. The correct figure labels are as follows:

A long-standing debate revolves around which mental codes allow humans to control behavior. The internal stimulus model (going back to Rudolf Hermann Lotze) proposes that behavior is controlled by codes of stimuli that had previously preceded corresponding motor activities. The internal effect model (going back to Emil Harleß) proposes that behavior is controlled by codes of perceptual effects that

Two-person teams outperform individuals in search tasks, and even exceed expectations based on statistical limitations. Here, we aimed to replicate and extend this result. We used Bayesian hierarchical modelling of receiver operating characteristics to examine collaborative performance in a visual search task wherein top-down target information was constrained. Participants (N = 16 teams per experiment

Research in radiology and visual cognition suggest that finding one target during visual search may result in increased misses for a second target, an effect known as subsequent search misses (SSM). Here, we demonstrate that the common method of calculating second-target detection performance is biased and could produce spurious SSM effects. We describe the source of that bias and document factors

Motivated attention can be driven by the desire to maximize gains or escape punishment. In the Stroop task, when rewards can be obtained by responding quickly to certain colors, corresponding color words are prioritized and produce enhanced interference, suggesting transfer of an attentional bias from color hues to color words. In the present study, we replicated this transfer effect using reward and

According to the Bayesian framework of multisensory integration, audiovisual stimuli associated with a stronger prior belief that they share a common cause (i.e., causal prior) are predicted to result in a greater degree of perceptual binding and therefore greater audiovisual integration. In the present psychophysical study, we systematically manipulated the causal prior while keeping sensory evidence

The distances between pairs of tactile stimuli oriented across the width of the hand dorsum are perceived as about 40% larger than equivalent distances oriented along the hand length. Clear anisotropies of varying magnitudes have been found on different sites on the limbs and less consistently on other parts of the body, with anisotropies on the center of the forehead, but not on the belly. Reported

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that when performing a visual search task, items can pop out of a display such that they are identified rapidly, independent of the number of distractors present. It has been less clear whether this type of pop-out is limited to static displays (e.g., images) or whether it can also occur in scenes containing movement, more akin to how we experience the real world

We presented participants with videos of Duchenne smiles that differed in the duration of their onset, offset, or both to determine if this would affect perceived expression authenticity. The duration of onset and offset varied between 0.2 and 1.0 s. Participants were shown one smile at a time and were asked to judge its genuineness on a rating scale. Results indicated the duration of offset had an

Several factors guide our attention and the way we process our surroundings. In that regard, there is an ongoing debate about the way we are influenced by stimuli that have a particular self-relevance for us. Recent findings suggest that self-relevance does not always capture our attention automatically. Instead, an interpretation of the literature might be that self-relevance serves as an associative

Working memory is thought to be divided into distinct visual and verbal subsystems. Studies of visual working memory frequently use verbal working memory tasks as control conditions and/or use articulatory suppression to ensure that visual load is not transferred to verbal working memory. Using these verbal tasks relies on the assumption that the verbal working memory load will not interfere with the

Despite the increasing focus on target prevalence in visual search research, few papers have thoroughly examined the effect of how target prevalence is communicated. Findings in the judgment and decision-making literature have demonstrated that people behave differently depending on whether probabilistic information is made explicit or learned through experience, hence there is potential for a similar

In line with the theory of event coding, many studies on tool use show that perceived visual and haptic information interacts with action execution. In two experiments, we investigated the temporal persistence of after-effects within an event file, and after-effects in temporally overlapping event files with the n-1 replication task. Each trial consisted of two phases: In phase 1, participants moved

Seeing a talker’s face can aid audiovisual (AV) integration when speech is presented in noise. However, few studies have simultaneously manipulated auditory and visual degradation. We aimed to establish how degrading the auditory and visual signal affected AV integration. Where people look on the face in this context is also of interest; Buchan, Paré and Munhall (Brain Research, 1242, 162–171, 2008)

When processing of two tasks overlaps, performance is known to suffer. In the well-established psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, tasks are triggered by two stimuli with a short temporal delay (stimulus onset asynchrony; SOA), thereby allowing control of the degree of task overlap. A decrease of the SOA reliably yields longer RTs of the task associated with the second stimulus (Task 2)

When responding to two events in a sequence, the repetition or change of stimuli and the accompanying response can benefit or interfere with response execution: Full repetition leads to benefits in performance while partial repetition leads to costs. Additionally, even distractor stimuli can be integrated with a response, and can, upon repetition, lead to benefits or interference. Recently it has been

There has been a recent increase in individual differences research within the field of audiovisual perception (Spence & Squire, 2003, Current Biology, 13(13), R519–R521), and furthering the understanding of audiovisual integration capacity with an individual differences approach is an important facet within this line of research. Across four experiments, participants were asked to complete an audiovisual

In two experiments (N= 60 each), we investigated the locus of backward crosstalk effects in dual tasking. Specifically, we embedded the typical flanker task within a dual-task paradigm by assigning stimulus-response (S-R) rules to the flankers. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to first respond to the center letter and only respond to the flanker if the center was a no-go stimulus (i.e

To date, tests that measure individual differences in the ability to perceive musical timbre are scarce in the published literature. The lack of such tool limits research on how timbre, a primary attribute of sound, is perceived and processed among individuals. The current paper describes the development of the Timbre Perception Test (TPT), in which participants use a slider to reproduce heard auditory

Over the last decade, researchers have explored the influence of visual working-memory (WM) load on selective attention in general, by focusing on the modulation of visual WM load on distractor processing in perception. However, there were three distinct hypotheses (perceptual-load hypothesis, resolution hypothesis, and domain-specific hypothesis) with different predictions. While the perceptual-load

Disgust might be elicited by various sensory channels, including the sense of smell. It has been previously demonstrated that unpleasant odors emitted by an external source are more disgusting than those emitted by oneself (the source effect). As disgust’s main purpose is to help organisms avoid potentially dangerous, contaminating objects, individuals with visual or hearing sensory impairment (thus

Intelligence is correlated with the ability to make fine sensory discriminations. Although this relationship has been known since the beginning of intelligence testing, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are still unknown. In two large-scale structural equation-modelling studies, we investigated whether individual differences in attention control abilities can explain the relationship between

Charles W. Eriksen dedicated much of his research career to the field of cognitive psychology, investigating human information processing in those situations that required selection between competing stimuli. Together with his wife Barbara, he introduced the flanker task, which became one of the standard experimental tasks used by researchers to investigate the mechanisms underpinning selection. Although

When we engage in internally directed cognition (e.g., planning or imagination), our eye behavior decouples from external stimuli and couples to internal representations (e.g., internal visualizations of ideas). Here, we investigated whether eye behavior predicts the susceptibility to visual distraction during internally directed cognition. To this end, participants performed a divergent thinking task

We examined susceptibility to auditory distraction and its association to working-memory capacity (WMC) in children (N=125) using a dichotic listening task. Performance in a dichotic listening task was measured with and without distracting multi-talker babble (MTB). Intrusion errors from the to-be-ignored ear and the overall errors of any type between the two conditions were modeled to explain the

Hearing is the most accurate sense for perceiving duration. However, rarely it produces inaccurate estimates of duration, for example when it compares the subjective duration of tones that are increasing in intensity over time (i.e., ramped) with that of tones that are decreasing in intensity over time (i.e., damped). The literature reports that the damped tones are perceived as much being shorter

Does phonology contribute to effects of orthographically related flankers in the flankers task? In order to answer this question, we implemented the flanker equivalent of a pseudohomophone priming manipulation that has been widely used to demonstrate automatic phonological processing during visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, central target words were flanked on each side by either a pseudohomophone

The maintenance of information in visual working memory has been shown to bias the concurrent processing in favor of matching visual input. The present study aimed to examine whether this bias can act at an early stage of processing to enhance target feature perception in single-item displays. Participants were sequentially presented with two distinct colored stimuli as memory samples and a retro-cue

When motivated, people can keep nonrecent items in a list active during the presentation of new items, facilitating fast and accurate recall of the earlier items. It has been proposed that this occurs by flexibly orienting attention to a single prioritized list item, thus increasing the amount of attention-based maintenance directed toward this item at the expense of other items. This is manipulated

Can salient stimuli—such as color singletons and abrupt onsets—involuntarily capture spatial attention? We previously reported evidence that abrupt onsets can capture attention, but the effects of this capture can become latent under easy visual search. The present experiments examined whether a similar pattern of latent capture occurs for task-irrelevant color singletons. Participants searched for

Frequently finding a target in the same location within a familiar context reduces search time, relative to search for objects appearing in novel contexts. This learned association between a context and a target location requires several blocks of training and has long-term effects. Short-term selection history also influences search, where previewing a subset of a search context shortly before the

People are able to rapidly extract summary statistical information about common patterns, or ensembles, that may exist in a scene, such as repeated textures or colors. Here we examined the extent to which such an ensemble perception can occur in the absence of focal visual attention using a method that has some advantages over methods previously used to study the issue. In particular, we assessed the

Due to a printing error, the factor “2” was missing in the last line of Equation 9. It has now been reinstated. The original article has been corrected.

Three experiments investigated listeners’ ability to use speech rhythm to attend selectively to a single target talker presented in multi-talker babble (Experiments 1 and 2) and in speech-shaped noise (Experiment 3). Participants listened to spoken sentences of the form “Ready [Call sign] go to [Color] [Number] now” and reported the Color and Number spoken by a target talker (cued by the Call sign

Contexts that predict characteristics of search targets can guide attention by triggering attentional control settings for the characteristics. However, this context-driven search has most commonly been found in the spatial dimension. The present study explored the context-driven search when shape contexts predict the color of targets: non-spatial context-driven search. It has been demonstrated that

In daily life, humans frequently perform visuospatial tasks together (e.g., visual search) and distribute the labor in such tasks. Previous research has shown that humans prefer a left and right labor division in a joint multiple object tracking (MOT) task. Yet, findings from studies investigating individuals' tracking ability suggest attentional capacities may be more maximally used with a top and

Speech input like [byt] has been shown to facilitate not only the subsequent processing of an identical target word /byt/ but also that of a target word /tyb/ that contains the same phonemes in a different order. Using the short-term phonological priming paradigm, we examined the role of lexical representations in driving the transposed-phoneme priming effect by manipulating lexical frequency. Results

Charles W. Eriksen (1923-2018), long-time editor of Perception & Psychophysics (1971-1993) - the precursor to the present journal - undoubtedly made a profound contribution to the study of selective attention in the visual modality. Working primarily with neurologically normal adults, his early research provided both theoretical accounts for behavioral phenomena as well as robust experimental tasks

The authors would like to correct the following.

Ensemble representations are often described as efficient tools when summarizing features of multiple similar objects as a group. However, it can sometimes be more useful not to compute a single summary description for all of the objects if they are substantially different, for example when they belong to entirely different categories. It was proposed that the visual system can efficiently use the

Since Kepler (1604) and Descartes (1637), 'vergence' (the angular rotation of the eyes) has been thought of as one of our most important absolute distance cues. But vergence has never been tested as an absolute distance cue divorced from obvious confounding cues such as binocular disparity. In this article, we control for these confounding cues for the first time by gradually manipulating vergence

It is commonly thought that the mind constructs predictive models of the environment to plan an appropriate behavioral response. Therefore a more predictable environment should entail better performance, and prey should move in an unpredictable (random) manner to evade capture, known as protean motion. To test this, we created a novel experimental design and analysis in which human participants took

It is well known that human information processing comprises several distinct subprocesses-namely, the perceptual, central, and motor stage. In each stage, attention plays an important role. Specifically, a type of attention-perceptual attention-operates to detect and identify a sensory input. Following this, another class of attention-central attention-is involved in working memory encoding and response

Several eye-movement studies have revealed flexibility in the parafoveal processing of character-order information in Chinese reading. In particular, studies show that processing a two-character word in a sentence benefits more from parafoveal preview of a nonword created by transposing rather than replacing its two characters. One issue that has not been investigated is whether the contextual predictability

Biederman and Cooper (Cognitive Psychology, 23, 393-419, 1991), using parts-deleted and features-deleted stimuli, presented evidence that object priming occurs at the level of the objects' parts, but not features. A control condition confirmed that some priming was accrued by the (non-visual) object concept that the stimulus represented, but all visual-level priming appeared to be at the more global

During visual search, task-relevant representations in visual working memory (VWM), known as attentional templates, are assumed to guide attention. A current debate concerns whether only one (Single-Item-Template hypothesis; SIT) or multiple (Multiple-Item-Template hypothesis; MIT) items can serve as attentional templates simultaneously. The current study was designed to test these two hypotheses.

Attention is limited in terms of both capacity (i.e., amount of information attended) and selectivity (i.e., the degree to which non-attended information is nonetheless processed). One of the seminal theories in the field, load theory, predicts that these two aspects of attention interact in systematic ways. Specifically, load theory predicts that when the amount of information to attend is less than

This paper describes a method to measure the sensitivity of an individual to different facial expressions. It shows that individual participants are more sensitive to happy than to fearful expressions and that the differences are statistically significant using the model-comparison approach. Sensitivity is measured by asking participants to discriminate between an emotional facial expression and a

Priors and payoffs are known to affect perceptual decision-making, but little is understood about how they influence confidence judgments. For optimal perceptual decision-making, both priors and payoffs should be considered when selecting a response. However, for confidence to reflect the probability of being correct in a perceptual decision, priors should affect confidence but payoffs should not.