ABSTRACT In her recent Opinion, Xu argues that visual cortex is non-essential for visual working memory (WM) storage. In our response, we highlight some inconsistencies that undermine Xu’s claims and strengthen the notion that visual regions play a critical role in visual WM. Moreover, we contend that this framing of the debate ignores the larger point that WM storage is unlikely to be the purview

ABSTRACT Eye gaze is a fundamental element of social interaction. We investigated the role of gaze direction during video conversations between friends, colleagues or strangers. Participants watched short video cuts of a target person engaging in direct gaze, averted gaze or a mixture of both (gaze direction) while listening to another, invisible, person recounting a neutral or negative autobiographical

ABSTRACT The own-group bias (OGB) in face recognition refers to the finding that in-group faces are recognized with greater accuracy than out-group faces. Current literature emphasizes the importance of in-group characteristics for the OGB. Across two experiments we explored the importance of both in-group and out-group characteristics. Using an old/new task, Experiment 1 categorized faces by university

ABSTRACT The article by Luck, Gaspelin, Folk, Remington and Theeuwes (2021 Luck, S. J., Gaspelin, N., Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., & Theeuwes, J. (2021). Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 29(1), 1–21.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], Visual Cognition, 29, 1–21) attempts to integrate the views currently defended by prominent

ABSTRACT Human unfamiliar face matching is error-prone, but some research suggests matching to multiple-image arrays instead of single images may yield improvements. Here, high or low variability arrays containing one, two, and three images, and a target image from the high and low variability image sets were displayed. Arrays were presented simultaneously or sequentially, and the target image was

ABSTRACT Research on facial attractiveness and face recognition has produced contradictory results that we believe are rooted in methodological limitations. Three experiments evaluated the hypothesis that facial attractiveness and face recognition are positively and linearly related. We also expected that social status would moderate the attractiveness effect. Attractive faces were recognized with

ABSTRACT Memory is facilitated by reflecting upon, or revisiting, the environment in which information was encoded. We investigated these “context reinstatement” (CR) techniques to improve the effectiveness of facial composites – visual likenesses of a perpetrator’s face constructed by eyewitnesses. Participant-constructors viewed a face and, after a one-day-delay, revisited (Physical CR) or recalled

ABSTRACT Spatial distractor processing is impacted by the availability of spatial attention. What is less clear is the extent to which temporal selection alters such spatial selection, when considering response selection. The attentional blink (AB) paradigm is well-suited for studying this question. In this study, we adapted the AB task to measure response times. In Experiment 1, participants identified

ABSTRACT Preview benefit refers to faster search for a target when a subset of distractors is seen prior to the search display. We investigated whether reward modulates this effect. Participants identified a target among non-targets on each trial. On “preview” trials, placeholders occupied half the search array positions prior to the onset of the full array. On “non-preview” trials, no placeholders

ABSTRACT Salient objects, such as abrupt-onsets, can capture attention even when nearly invisible. While the influence of explicit factors on such capture (e.g., task-goals) has been extensively investigated, the role of implicit control settings (e.g., probability cueing) is relatively unknown. We examined whether probability cueing affects attentional capture by masked onset cues. The target was

ABSTRACT In their recent review, Xu critically assesses the role of early visual areas in VWM storage in the light of new fMRI-decoding studies that seemingly support the sensory storage account. We would like to extend the discussion by highlighting recent findings which suggest that early visual areas can dynamically transform active VWM representations e.g., to activity silent or long-term memory

ABSTRACT In the target article, Luck et al. [2020. Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition. doi:10.1080/13506285.2020.1848949] argue for progress that has been made in the attentional capture debate, offering points of agreement in addition to highlighting specific outstanding issues that could contribute to further resolution. This commentary questions the most fundamental

ABSTRACT Reading acquisition has been suggested to drive the lateralization of the face processing system to the right cerebral hemisphere. To investigate whether this developmental co-dependency has a behavioural cost, at least in the short run, we tested whether learning to read reduced face recognition ability. In a longitudinal design, 82 children (5–7 years) were tested twice, at the beginning

ABSTRACT Previous research supports the categorical perception of faces on dimensions including emotion, identity, and gender. Two experiments using standard paradigms investigated whether facial disfigurement forms another perceptual category. In the Identification task, faces were presented in varying degrees of disfigurement for a simple disfigured / non-disfigured decision. As degree of disfigurement

ABSTRACT It is assumed that stimuli and responses to them are integrated in an event file and further when all or some of these features repeat the previous event-file will be retrieved. The Binding and Retrieval in Action Control framework (Frings, C., Hommel, B., Koch, I., Rothermund, K., Dignath, D., Giesen, C., Kiesel, A., Kunde, W., Mayr, S., Moeller, B., Möller, M., Pfister, R., & Philipp, A

ABSTRACT Attention can be oriented in both space and time in response to trial-variant cues when, say, their colour predicts the spatial location and their shape predicts cue-to-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), producing spatial and temporal cueing effects [faster response times (RTs) on validly- than invalidly-cued trials]. We investigated whether spatial and temporal cueing effects are found

ABSTRACT Studies suggest looming motion represents a special class of attentional capture stimulus due to behavioural urgency: the need to act upon objects moving toward us in an environment. In particular, one theory suggests that faster reaction times to targets cued by looming relative to receding motion are driven by post-attentional, motor-priming processes beyond the attentional capture effects

ABSTRACT Object substitution masking (OSM) involves reduced perceptibility by a briefly lingering mask despite no spatial target-mask overlap. Two primary accounts for this phenomenon posit differences in object representation in visual short-term memory (VSTM). In the object substitution account a single representation resides in VSTM: a lone mask when attention is not focused on the target, and a

ABSTRACT In her commentary, Xu [2020. Revisit once more the sensory storage account of visual working memory. Visual Cognition, 28(5–8), 433–446] admonishes the reader that “To have a full understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying VWM [visual working memory], both behavioral and neural evidence needs to be taken into account. This is a must, and not a choice, for any study that attempts

ABSTRACT Human unfamiliar face matching is error-prone, but some research suggests matching to multiple-image arrays instead of single images may yield improvements. Here, high or low variability arrays containing one, two, and three images, and a target image from the high and low variability image sets were displayed. Arrays were presented simultaneously or sequentially, and the target image was

ABSTRACT Debate centres on the difficulty to distinguish precisely whether cognitive or perceptual load determines performance in tasks such as the Halford Graphical Relational Complexity Task (HGRCT). In this task, visual information is presented, and participants are asked to perform a series of mental operations that require working memory (WM) to complete the task. This study compared performance

ABSTRACT For over 25 years, researchers have debated whether physically salient stimuli capture attention in an automatic manner, independent of the observer’s goals, or whether the capture of attention depends on the match between a stimulus and the observer’s task set. Recent evidence suggests an intermediate position in which salient stimuli automatically produce a priority signal, but the capture

ABSTRACT Adults are slower to judge the number of dots they can see when an avatar sees a different number of dots. This consistency effect is interpreted as evidence of implicit mentalising – adults track others’ visual perspective even when it is task-irrelevant. The submentalising account, however, argues the effect reflects domain-general attentional orienting. In Experiment 1, using a real human

ABSTRACT Inhibition of return (IOR), an inhibitory aftereffect of attentional orienting, usually reveals itself in slower responses to targets appearing at previously attended locations in spatial cueing tasks. Many of the neural substrates underlying visual working memory are also closely linked to attention. The present study examined whether the contents held in working memory interfere with IOR

ABSTRACT Humans remember the faces of members of their own race more accurately than the faces of members of other races, in an effect known as the own-race bias. Previous studies indicate that patterns of eye fixations play an important role in this bias, but the exact nature of their influence on face memory is not clear. The present study examined the role of eye fixations on memory for racially

ABSTRACT We explored colour connotations in blind and sighted observers using the semantic differential technique. Participants rated colour terms on 17 semantic scales. At the group level, blind participants were similar to sighted on some scales, but had weaker colour associations on others, with significant individual differences. Two, in particular, produced ratings that were very similar to the

ABSTRACT It is assumed that stimuli and responses to them are integrated in an event file and further when all or some of these features repeat the previous event-file will be retrieved. The Binding and Retrieval in Action Control framework (Frings, C., Hommel, B., Koch, I., Rothermund, K., Dignath, D., Giesen, C., Kiesel, A., Kunde, W., Mayr, S., Moeller, B., Möller, M., Pfister, R., & Philipp, A

ABSTRACT Previous research supports the categorical perception of faces on dimensions including emotion, identity, and gender. Two experiments using standard paradigms investigated whether facial disfigurement forms another perceptual category. In the Identification task, faces were presented in varying degrees of disfigurement for a simple disfigured / non-disfigured decision. As degree of disfigurement

ABSTRACT The extent to which syntactic co-activation occurs during natural reading is currently unknown. Here, we measured the eye movements of Welsh-English bilinguals and English monolinguals as they read English sentences. Target words were manipulated to create nonwords that were consistent or inconsistent with the rules of Welsh soft mutation (a morphosyntactic process that alters the initial

ABSTRACT Serial dependence refers to the assimilative pull on a judgement response to a current stimulus from that given to the preceding stimulus and has been demonstrated in low- and higher-level perceptual judgements. We tested whether serial dependence in attractiveness judgements is limited by perceptual categorization by measuring serial dependence in within-category attractiveness judgements

ABSTRACT Previewing distractors facilitates efficient detection of a target appearing subsequently with any remaining distractors. Visual marking, specifically, top-down inhibition of old items, is induced by the inhibitory template that forms while previewing old items, and continues to be maintained during the target search. Extant studies have examined inhibitory template characteristics using additional

ABSTRACT In this study, we hypothesized that the emotional cues of conveyer’s body posture play a role in eliminating ambiguity of facial expressions. The participants were presented with faces with emotionally congruent and incongruent body posture or without a posture (no-context) for a brief time (33 ms) in Experiment 1. The results showed that congruent pairs led to higher accuracy of facial emotion

ABSTRACT Visual search and working memory (WM) are tightly linked cognitive processes. Theories of attentional selection assume that WM plays an important role in top-down guided visual search. However, computational models of visual search do not model WM. Here we show that an existing model of WM can utilize its mechanisms of rapid plasticity and pattern completion to perform visual search. In this

ABSTRACT Working memory (WM) is important for guiding behaviour, but not always for the next possible action. Here we define a WM item that is currently relevant for guiding behaviour as the functionally “active” item; whereas items maintained in WM, but not immediately relevant to behaviour, are defined as functionally “latent”. Traditional neurophysiological theories of WM proposed that content is

ABSTRACT Recent work has highlighted the role of early visual areas in visual working memory (VWM) storage and put forward a sensory storage account of VWM. Using a distractor interference paradigm, however, we previoulsy showed that the contribution of early visual areas to VWM storage may not be essential. Instead, higher cortical regions such as the posterior parietal cortex may play a more significant

ABSTRACT The multi-dimensional face-space metaphor has been a powerful explanatory force in face processing. Here, its predictive powers are considered for ratings of attractiveness, distinctiveness and sexual dimorphism using two different actualizations of face-space. One face-space was based on similarity ratings between pairs of faces and the other on facial feature eccentricity, both based on

ABSTRACT When people recognize faces, they normally move their eyes so that their first fixation is in the optimal location for efficient perceptual processing. This location is found just below the centre-point between the eyes. This type of attentional bias could be partly innate, but also an inevitable developmental process that aids our ability to recognize faces. We investigated whether a group

ABSTRACT The functioning of spatial attention and its effects on visual processing are typically studied using chronometric and accuracy measures of behaviour. However, a growing body of literature has studied the attentional repulsion effect (ARE). Simply put, when attention is focused on one location in the visual field, stimuli appearing nearby the attended location are perceived as being located

ABSTRACT Images of moving objects presented on computer screens may be perceived as animate or inanimate. A simple hypothesis, consistent with much research evidence, is that objects are perceived as inanimate if there is a visible external contact from another object immediately prior to the onset of motion, and as animate if that is not the case. Evidence is reported that is not consistent with that

ABSTRACT Mental chronometry has often been used to provide a temporal comparison between executed and imagined movements, with smaller discrepancies indicating more accurate image production and better imagery performance. In this study, we examined the importance of retinal and extra-retinal information in the performance of simple, sequential movements. After physical practice of four activities

ABSTRACT Whether colour information contributes to the process of face recognition remains controversial. We examine this question here by evaluating the face recognition performance of individuals who are colour blind. Specifically, we compared the performance profile of colour blind and matched control individuals on a colour face recognition task where shape information was progressively degraded

ABSTRACT This paper is a study of visual metaphor processing in political cartoons, while secondary task reaction time was used to assess resource allocation when processing three types of visual metaphors, namely juxtapositions, fusions and replacements. Participants viewed a series of visual metaphors. At various intervals, they were invited to push a button whenever a probe appeared. Reaction times

ABSTRACT When two motions appear to be causally related, the spatiotemporal features of motions are sometimes distorted in order to increase the consistency with causal impressions. Here, in four experiments, we tested if varying the speed of an object A could affect the judged speed of an object B that appeared to be causally related to A. Participants were presented with classic launching stimuli

ABSTRACT Humans are quick to notice if an object is unstable. Does that assessment require attention or can instability serve as a preattentive feature that can guide the deployment of attention? This paper describes a series of visual search experiments, designed to address this question. Experiment 1 shows that less stable images among more stable images are found more efficiently than more stable

ABSTRACT Several recent studies have interpreted multivariate evidence for stimulus-specific patterns of activity in parietal and/or frontal cortex as evidence for a representational function in those regions that is qualitatively similar to the representational functions of the visual system. Here we argue that although evidence that a brain system takes on a different configuration for each stimulus

ABSTRACT Can individuals look for multiple objects at the same time? A simple question, but answering it has proven difficult. In this review, we describe possible cognitive architectures and their predictions about the capacity of visual search. We broadly distinguish three stages at which limitations may occur: (1) preparation (establishing and maintaining a mental representation of a search target)

ABSTRACT The ability to selectively encode relevant information (filtering ability) is crucial to make best use of the severely limited space that visual working memory (VWM) provides. This review considers why filtering ability is important, how it is measured, and it discusses how filtering might be implemented computationally at the cognitive and neuronal level. Based on theoretical considerations

ABSTRACT Studies examining visual abilities in individuals with early auditory deprivation have reached mixed conclusions, with some finding congenital auditory deprivation and/or lifelong use of a visuospatial language improves specific visual skills and others failing to find substantial differences. A more consistent finding is enhanced peripheral vision and an increased ability to efficiently distribute

ABSTRACT Perception is shaped by actions, which determine the allocation of selective attention across the visual field. Here, we review evidence that maintenance in visual working memory is similarly influenced by actions (eye or hand movements), planned and executed well after encoding: Representations that are relevant for an upcoming action – because they spatially correspond to the action goal

ABSTRACT Working memory bridges perception to action over extended delays, enabling flexible goal-directed behaviour. To date, studies of visual working memory – concerned with detailed visual representations such as shape and colour – have considered visual memory predominantly in the context of visual task demands, such as visual identification and search. Another key purpose of visual working memory

ABSTRACT Although previous work provides evidence that observers experience biases in visual processing when they view stimuli in perihand space, a few recent investigations have questioned the reliability of these near-hand effects. We addressed this controversy by running three pre-registered replication experiments. Experiment 1 was a replication of one of the initial studies on facilitated target

ABSTRACT Research has shown that observers often spontaneously extract a mean representation from multiple faces/objects in a scene even when this is not required by the task. This phenomenon, now known as ensemble coding, has so far mainly been based on data from Western populations. This study compared East Asian and Western participants in an implicit ensemble-coding task, where the explicit task

ABSTRACT This study examines the limits of image variability, commonly referred to as Ambient Images, in face learning. To measure face learning, the authors used the face sorting paradigm from Jenkins et al. [(2011). Variability in photos of the same face. Cognition, 121(3), 313–323]. Before completing the face sorting task, participants viewed either 5, 15, or 45 ambient images of an unfamiliar person’s

ABSTRACT Humans as social beings rely on information provided by conspecifics. One important signal in social communication is eye gaze. The current study (n = 93) sought to replicate and extend previous findings of attentional guidance by eye gaze in complex everyday scenes. In line with previous studies, longer, more and earlier fixations for objects cued by gaze compared to objects that were not

ABSTRACT In a novel integration of research designs, we tested for unconscious perception effects at an unattended stimulus location using a focused attention paradigm (Lachter, J., Forster, K. I., & Ruthruff, E. 2004. Forty-five years after Broadbent (1958): Still no identification without attention. Psychological Review, 111(4), 880–913. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.111.4.880). Target-masked

ABSTRACT Traditional models of visual memory rely solely on internal memory and ignore our reliance on the information that is physically present in the external visual world. Experiments on visual working memory generally use paradigms that are designed to maximally load internal memory storage, although these situations do not necessarily translate to the actual use of visual working memory in daily

ABSTRACT Recently, researchers have used evidence-accumulation models to analyse how performance in visual working memory (WM) tasks depends on both decision-making and non-decisional processes. One resulting claim is that selection of representations into the focus of attention and decision-making about those representations are separable processes, that this selection is facilitated by informative

ABSTRACT Previous research has demonstrated repeatedly that the mental rotation of human-like objects can be performed more quickly than the mental rotation of abstract objects (a body analogy effect). According to existing accounts, the body analogy effect is mediated by projections of one’s own body axes onto objects (spatial embodiment), and the mental emulation of the observed body posture (motoric

ABSTRACT The control of attention is influenced by current goals, physical salience, and selection history. Under certain conditions, physically salient stimuli can be strategically suppressed below baseline levels, facilitating visual search for a target. It is unclear whether such signal suppression is a broad mechanism of selective information processing that extends to other sources of attentional

ABSTRACT People spontaneously attend where others are looking. Recently, it has been debated whether such orienting behaviour is supported by domain-general attentional processes, that involve reading the cues’ directional properties, or by processes that involve attributing mental states to agents. In this Opinion, we summarize key evidence for each position and argue that instead of favouring one