Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eye movement parameters, but have not explored how MW affects the sequential pattern of eye movements involved in making sense of complex visual information. Eye movements naturally unfold over time and this process may reveal novel information about cognitive processing during MW. The current study used Recurrence Quantification

When evaluating items in a sequence, the current judgment is influenced by the previous item and decision. These sequential biases take the form of assimilation (shifting toward the previous item/decision) or contrast (shifting away). Previous research investigating facial attractiveness evaluations provides mixed results while using analytical techniques that fail to address the dependencies in the

In an extension of Gibson's (1979) concept of object affordance, it has been proposed that motor representations are automatically evoked by pictures of graspable objects. A variety of effects on left/right-handed keypress responses to the perceptual attributes of such images have been taken as evidence that features of actions, including the hand best suited to grasp an object, contribute to the effect

Performance is typically superior with modality-compatible stimulus-response sets (e.g., responding vocally to auditory stimuli and manually to visual stimuli) than with modality-incompatible sets (e.g., responding vocally to visual stimuli and manually to auditory stimuli). Here we studied the information-processing stage at which these modality compatibility effects arise. In three experiments using

How do we distribute attention to interactive biological motion (BM)? There are 2 main hypotheses: (a) distribution-by-individual hypothesis, suggesting that interactive BM will not be taken as one unit in attention distribution, and an individual BM is independently selected; and (b) distribution-by-group hypothesis, indicating that interactions between BM can integrate them as one attention unit

Deaf signers exhibit an enhanced ability to process information in their peripheral visual field, particularly the motion of dots or orientation of lines. Does their experience processing sign language, which involves identifying meaningful visual forms across the visual field, contribute to this enhancement? We tested whether deaf signers recruit language knowledge to facilitate peripheral identification

Contextual cueing refers to finding a target more efficiently in repeated displays than in novel displays. However, conflicting results have been reported regarding whether target absent judgments can also be efficient in repeated displays. To resolve this controversy, we first tested 3 factors that might influence the strength of distractor-distractor associations and then investigated how such associations

When a target and a distractor that share the same response dimension appear in rapid succession, participants often erroneously report the distractor instead of the target. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, we examined whether these intrusion errors occur because the target is often not encoded in working memory (WM) or are generated at later postencoding stages. In 4 experiments

Current models of attention propose that we can tune attention in a top-down controlled manner to a specific feature value (e.g., shape, color) to find specific items (e.g., a red car; feature-specific search). However, subsequent research has shown that attention is often tuned in a context-dependent manner to the relative features that distinguish a sought-after target from other surrounding nontarget

Adapting flexibly to recent events is essential in everyday life. A robust measure of such adaptive behavior is the congruency sequence effect (CSE) in the prime-probe task, which refers to a smaller congruency effect after incongruent trials than after congruent trials. Prior findings indicate that the CSE in the prime-probe task reflects control processes that modulate response activation after the

Performance on tasks tends to change with time-on-task, usually for the worse. Two seemingly contradictory patterns of behavior are reported for these "vigilance decrements." Over the past 70 years, the more common vigilance decrement involves a decrease in signal detection associated with an increase in response times. In contrast, search tasks such as industrial inspection or X-ray screening produce

Recently the signal-suppression account was proposed, positing that salient stimuli automatically produce a bottom-up salience signal that can be suppressed via top-down control processes. Evidence for this hybrid account came from a capture-probe paradigm that showed that while searching for a specific shape, observers suppressed the location of the irrelevant color singleton. Here we replicate these

In probabilistic cuing of visual search, participants search for a target object that appears more frequently in one region of the display. This task results in a search bias toward the rich quadrant compared with other quadrants. Previous research has suggested that this bias is inflexible (difficult to unlearn) and implicit (participants are unaware of the biased distribution of targets). We tested

Ensemble perception-the encoding of objects by their group properties-is known to be resistant to outlier noise. However, this resistance is somewhat paradoxical: how can the visual system determine which stimuli are outliers without already having derived statistical properties of the ensemble? A simple solution would be that ensemble perception is not a simple, one-step process; instead, outliers

Three masked priming paradigms, the conventional masked priming lexical-decision task (Forster & Davis, 1984), the sandwich priming task (Lupker & Davis, 2009), and the masked priming same-different task (Norris & Kinoshita, 2008), were used to investigate priming for a given target (e.g., JUDGE) from primes created by either adding a letter to the beginning of the target (e.g., zjudge) or replacing

When objects move, their motion is governed by the laws of physics. We investigated whether multiple objects that move while correctly obeying aspects of Newtonian physics are easier to track than those that do not accurately obey the laws of physics. Participants were asked to track multiple objects that either did or did not take on the correct angles and/or speeds after collisions with each other

Attentional templates are stored representations of target features that guide visual search. While transiently active templates are as efficient as templates held in a sustained fashion, their simultaneous activation generates costs for the sustained template. Here, we investigated whether the quality of the memory representation determines these costs. Two possible target colors were cued before

Women prefer male faces with feminine shape and masculine reflectance. Here, we investigated the conceptual correlates of this preference, showing that it might reflect women's preferences for feminine (vs. masculine) personality in a partner. Young heterosexual women reported their preferences for personality traits in a partner and rated male faces-manipulated on masculinity/femininity-on stereotypically

In tasks like Stroop, it is well documented that cognitive control is affected by experiences with past conflict on 2 timescales. The "immediate" timescale is evidenced by congruency sequence effects while the "long" timescale is evidenced by list-wide proportion congruence effects. What remains underspecified is whether relatively recent experiences with conflict (i.e. recent timescale of a few preceding

During mind wandering, visual processing of external information is attenuated. Accordingly, mind wandering is associated with changes in gaze behaviors, albeit findings are inconsistent in the literature. This heterogeneity obfuscates a complete view of the moment-to-moment processing priorities of the visual system during mind wandering. We hypothesize that this observed heterogeneity is an effect

Synchronizing movements with events in the surrounding environment is a ubiquitous aspect of behavior. Experiments studying multimodal integration and rhythmic synchronization tend to focus on how bimodal (e.g., audio-visual) stimuli enhances synchronization performance (i.e., reduced variability) compared with synchronization with its unimodal constituents. As such, it is unclear whether trimodal

The time a reader's eyes spend on a word is influenced by visual (e.g., contrast) as well as lexical (e.g., word frequency) and contextual (e.g., predictability) factors. Well-known visual word recognition models predict that visual and higher-level manipulations may have interactive effects on early eye movement measures, because of cascaded processing between levels. Previous eye movement studies

The current study used an eye tracker to examine how auditory input affects the latency of visual saccades, fixations, and response times while using variations of a Serial Response Time (SRT) task. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a repeating sequence of visual stimuli that appeared in different locations on a computer monitor and they had to quickly determine if each visual stimulus was red/blue

The brain's ability to integrate information from the different senses is essential for decreasing sensory uncertainty and ultimately limiting errors. Temporal correspondence is one of the key processes that determines whether information from different senses will be integrated and is influenced by both experience- and task-dependent mechanisms in adults. Here we investigated the development of both

What are the mechanisms responsible for spontaneous cospeech gesture production? Driven by the close connection between cospeech gestures and object-related actions, recent research suggests that cospeech gestures originate in perceptual and motoric simulations that occur while speakers process information for speaking (Hostetter & Alibali, 2008). Here, we test this claim by highlighting object affordances

Recent evidence demonstrates that the presentation of crossmodally corresponding auditory stimuli can modulate the taste and hedonic evaluation of various foods (an effect often called "sonic seasoning"). To further understand the mechanism underpinning such crossmodal effects, the time at which a soundtrack was presented relative to tasting was manipulated in a series of experiments. Participants

Despite extensive research demonstrating the effect of temporal context on time perception, its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. One influential proposal to explain the temporal context effect is McAuley and Jones' (2003) framework that incorporates 2 classic timing models, interval and entrainment models. They demonstrated that listeners' duration estimates were shifted from reality

Humans form associations between time intervals and subsequent events and thus develop time-based expectancies that enable time-based action preparation. For instance, when each of two foreperiods (short vs. long) is frequently paired with one specific task (e.g., number magnitude judgment vs. number parity judgment) and infrequently with the alternative task, participants are faster to respond to

To comprehend speech sounds, listeners tune in to speech rate information in the proximal (immediately adjacent), distal (nonadjacent), and global context (further removed preceding and following sentences). Effects of global contextual speech rate cues on speech perception have been shown to follow constraints not found for proximal and distal speech rate. Therefore, listeners may process such global

Statistical summary representations (SSRs) are thought to be computed by the visual system to provide a rapid summary of the properties of sets of similar objects. Recently, it has been suggested that a change in the statistical properties of a set can be identified even when changes to the individual items comprising the set cannot. Haberman and Whitney (2011) showed that subjects were correctly able

Research with adults suggests that we interpret the internal states of others from kinematic cues, using models calibrated to our own action experiences. Changes in action production that occur during adolescence may therefore have implications for adolescents' understanding of others. Here we examined whether, like adults, adolescents use velocity cues to determine others' emotions and whether any

Crump and Milliken (2009) reported a context-specific proportion congruence (CSPC) effect for inducer and diagnostic sets, the strongest evidence to date of context-specific control. Attempts to replicate/reproduce this evidence have failed, including Experiment 1. Using a picture-word Stroop task, we tackled the question of how to interpret such failures by testing the consistency hypothesis (Hutcheon

When presented with a target circle horizontally overlapped by a penalty circle, participants initially aim closer to the penalty circle than optimal and with experience and feedback shift their endpoint horizontally to the optimal endpoint. Our purpose was to determine whether solely reward feedback or reward feedback in combination with visual error feedback of the movement and final movement endpoint

Participants are faster to decide that two stimuli are identical than to decide that they are different. Opposing theories suggested that this fast-same effect is either due (a) to a response bias toward similarity or (b) to facilitation caused by the repetition of the stimuli attributes. Although both theories predict the fast-same effect in a conventional same-different task, they make distinct predictions

Ongoing discussions on perceptual averaging have the implicit assumption that individual representations are reduced into a single prototypical representation. However, some evidence suggests that the mean representation may be more complex. For example, studies that use a single item probe to estimate mean size often show biased estimations. To this end, we investigate whether the mean representation

An eye-movement-contingent probe detection task was used to determine the allocation of visual attention during Chinese reading. On a subset of trials, a to-be-detected visual probe replaced visual text when the eyes crossed and landed to the right of an invisible interword boundary. The probe was either near the fixated location or at a more distant location in the right or left visual field. Probe

Real-world scenes elicit anticipatory representation in long-term memory (LTM) and working memory (WM) resulting in boundary extension (BE). Would the same results hold for nonscene patterns of objects? In Experiment 1A (LTM-paradigm), 15 regular or 15 random object-patterns were sequentially presented (10 s each); a boundary-rating-task followed. Both pattern-types elicited BE. Surprisingly, regularity

Visual attention is guided toward behaviorally relevant objects by target "templates" stored in visual memory. Visual attention also is guided away from nontarget distractors by learned distractor rejection. In a series of 5 visual search experiments, we asked if learned distractor rejection operated while attention was simultaneously guided by a target template. Participants performed a visual search

It is generally assumed that there is a category of undoubted guiding attributes in visual search: color, motion, orientation. Any differences between these attributes are a matter of degree, rather than kind. This assumption has led to a preferential use of color in experiments that involve top-down guidance, because it provides the strongest effects. Yet, results observed for color are considered

At present, the process of switching attention between external stimuli and internal representations is not well understood. To address this, Verschooren, Liefooghe, Brass, and Pourtois (2019) recently designed a novel paradigm where participants were cued to switch attention between external and internal information on a trial-by-trial basis. The authors observed an asymmetrical switch cost, which

Predictive processing accounts of social perception argue that action observation is a predictive process, in which inferences about others' goals are tested against the perceptual input, inducing a subtle perceptual confirmation bias that distorts observed action kinematics toward the inferred goals. Here we test whether such biases are induced even when goals are not explicitly given but have to

Humans have a uniquely sophisticated ability to see past superficial features and to understand the relational structure of the world around us. This ability often requires that we compare structures, finding commonalities and differences across visual depictions that are arranged in space, such as maps, graphs, or diagrams. Although such visual comparison of relational structures is ubiquitous in

Causality poses explicit constraints to the timing of sensory signals produced by events, as sound travels slower than light, making auditory stimulation to lag visual stimulation. Previous studies show that implied causality between unrelated events can change the tolerance of simultaneity judgments for audiovisual asynchronies. Here, we tested whether apparent causality between audiovisual events

How bilinguals control their languages and switch between them may change across the life span. Furthermore, bilingual language control may depend on the demands imposed by the context. Across 2 experiments, we examined how Spanish-Basque children, teenagers, younger, and older adults switch between languages in voluntary and cued picture-naming tasks. In the voluntary task, bilinguals could freely

We conducted what is likely the first large-scale comprehensive eye tracking investigation of the cognitive processes involved in the psychometric mental rotation task with three experiments comparing the performance of men and women on tests of mental rotation with blocks and human figures as stimuli. In all 3 experiments, men achieved higher mean accuracy than women on both tests and all participants

Natural motor behavior is usually refined by ongoing sensory input in closed feedback loops. Research has suggested that humans make systematic errors when localizing touch on the skin, and that perceptual body representations underlying these behaviors are distorted. However, experimental procedures usually prevent participants from touching the target limb, interrupting the natural action-perception

Previous studies have shown that attentional selection can be biased toward locations that are likely to contain a target and away from locations that are likely to contain a distractor. It is assumed that through statistical learning, participants are able to extract the regularities in the display, which in turn biases attentional selection. The present study employed the additional singleton task

Spatial updating of self-to-object spatial relations may be performed online or offline. The set size effects in spatial updating are generally considered as a benchmark for indicating which updating strategy is used. Online updating is associated with transient egocentric representations and the presence of set size effects, whereas offline updating is associated with enduring allocentric representations

Long-term memory is often considered easily corruptible, imprecise, and inaccurate, especially in comparison to working memory. However, most research used to support these findings relies on weak long-term memories: those where people have had only one brief exposure to an item. Here we investigated the fidelity of visual long-term memory in more naturalistic setting, with repeated exposures, and

In recent years, the role of top-down expectations on perception has been extensively researched within the framework of predictive coding. However, less attention has been given to the different sources of expectations, how they differ, and how they interact. In this article, we examined the effects of informative hints on perceptual experience and how these interact with repetition-based expectations

Cognitive control processes that enable purposeful behavior are often context-specific. A teenager, for example, may inhibit the tendency to daydream at work but not in the classroom. However, the nature of contextual boundaries for cognitive control processes remains unclear. Therefore, we revisited an ongoing controversy over whether such boundaries reflect (a) an attentional reset that occurs whenever

Perceptual grouping leads to interference when target and distractors are integrated within the same percept. Cognitive control allows breaking this automatic tendency by focusing selectively on target information. Thus, interference can be modulated either by goal-directed mechanisms or by physical features of stimuli that help to segregate the target from distractors. In three experiments, participants

Previous studies have shown that people are faster to process objects that they own as compared with objects that other people own. Yet object ownership is embedded within a social environment that has distinct and sometimes competing rules for interaction. Here we ask whether ownership of space can act as a filter through which we process what belongs to us. Can a sense of territory modulate the well-established

Upon making a decision, we typically have a sense of the likelihood that the decision we reached was a good one; that is, a degree of confidence in our choice. In a series of five experiments, we tested the hypothesis that confidence acts as an intrinsic cost-benefit factor when choosing between tasks, biasing people toward situations in which they experience higher confidence. Participants performed

Attentional selection can be based on a particular location, feature, or object. In this study, we used a monocular cuing paradigm to investigate whether selective attention is based on the input's eye-of-origin. We found that unpredictive monocular flashing cues can trigger eye-based orienting when the cues are task-relevant. Specifically, the response to the target presented to the uncued location

When repeatedly selected features have predictive value, an observer can learn to prioritize them. However, relatively little is known about the mechanisms underlying this persistent statistical learning. In two experiments, we investigated the boundary conditions of statistical learning. Each task included a training phase where targets appeared more frequently in one of two target colors, followed

In search arrays where the target is presented with similar nontarget stimuli, it is advantageous to shift the internal representation of the target features away from the nontarget features. According to optimal tuning theory (Navalpakkam & Itti, 2007), the shift of the attentional template increases the signal-to-noise ratio because the overlap of neural populations representing the target and nontarget

The exponential race model embodied in the theory of visual attention (TVA) and the power law generalization of the sample size model (SSPL) provide competing accounts of the mechanisms that determine how exposure duration, set size, and attention influence how many items enter visual short-term memory (VSTM). In the exponential race model, items compete for entry into VSTM in a processing race with

The pairings of tasks' stimulus and response modalities affect the magnitude of dual-task costs. For example, dual-task costs are larger when a visual-vocal task is paired with an auditory-manual task compared with when a visual-manual task is paired with an auditory-vocal task. These results are often interpreted as reflecting increased crosstalk between central codes for each task. Here we examine

Cognitive control refers to the use of internal goals to guide how we process stimuli, and control can be applied proactively (in anticipation of a stimulus) or reactively (once that stimulus has been presented). The application of control can be guided by memory; for instance, people typically learn to adjust their level of attentional selectivity to changing task statistics, such as different frequencies