Facial features are important sources of information about perceived trustworthiness. Masks and protective clothing diminish the visibility of facial cues by either partially concealing the mouth and nose or covering the entire face. During the pandemic, the use of personal protective equipment affected and redefined who trusts whom in society.…

Population coding models provide a quantitative account of visual working memory (VWM) retrieval errors with a plausible link to the response characteristics of sensory neurons. Recent work has provided an important new perspective linking population coding to variables of signal detection, including d-prime, and put forward a new hypothesis: that…

The retro-cue effect (RCE) describes the finding that participants' working memory performance is enhanced when their attention is directed to the to-be-tested position by a spatial cue during the retention interval. Here, we explore the relationship between RCE and working memory consolidation. A sequential display retro-cue paradigm is used for…

One model of numeric perception is a density-area mechanism: a process that estimates both density and area of an array, then multiplies them to create an estimate of number. One line of evidence that supports this is the surprising numeric Ebbinghaus illusion: smaller context circles lead to greater perceived number than larger context circles,…

People vary in their performance on visual working memory tasks, and these individual differences covary with a wide range of higher-level cognitive processes including fluid intelligence. Performance also varies across study displays, purportedly driven by both low- and higher-level processes. Understanding what causes these sources of systematic…

Humans and others primates are highly attuned to temporal consistencies and regularities in their sensory environment and learn to predict such statistical structure. Moreover, in several instances, the presence of temporal structure has been found to facilitate procedural learning and to improve task performance. Here we extend these findings to…

It has been reported that visual statistical learning (VSL) is facilitated in skewed distributions. However, it remains unclear whether enhancement of VSL in Zipfian distributions is due to consciousness of the regularities presented at high frequency. This study addressed this issue. We measured participants' subjective confidence in regularities…

Research has consistently shown that concealing facial features can hinder subsequent identification. The widespread adoption of face masks due to the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the critical and urgent need to discover techniques to improve identification of people wearing face coverings. Despite years of research on face recognition and…

It has been argued that autistic individuals have difficulties with face memory but typical face perception. However, only one previous study has examined both face memory and face perception in the same individuals, and this study was conducted with a small group of autistic children. Here, face recognition was examined with a group of autistic…

The relation between perceptual and conceptual knowledge is a longstanding research question in developmental psychology. Here we tested children's dependence on figurative information with a reaction time/accuracy task. A sample of 151 children from 5 to 10 years were assessed from two multicultural and multiracial schools in the London (UK)…

While visual working memory has a short lifetime, residual representations can persist and disrupt currently maintained information. This phenomenon is known as proactive interference (PI), and the present study investigated whether the representations underpinning item-specific PI lose details over time. This would be expected if the memories…

Face masks became prevalent across the globe as an efficient tool to stop the spread of COVID-19. A host of studies already demonstrated that masks lead to changes in facial identification and emotional expression processing. These changes were documented across ages and were consistent even with the increased exposure to masked faces. Notably,…

Virtual reality (VR) applications are developing rapidly, becoming more and more affordable, and offer various advantages for learning contexts. Dynamic visualizations are generally suitable for depicting continuous processes (e.g., different movement patterns), and particularly dynamic virtual 3D-objects can provide different perspectives on the…

The COVID-19 pandemic and advances in technology have resulted in the emergence of online learning as a new trend in the educational sector. However, during online learning, if students cannot seek immediate assistance from teachers, the use of suitable teaching models and easy-to-understand teaching materials is crucial. To address problems…

Challenges to verbal encoding may affect the ability of autistic individuals to express their ideas. Therefore, visuospatial expression may represent a person's knowledge and skills more accurately than spoken language. To test this hypothesis, we asked seven autistic adults to linguistically retell and visuospatially reenact several animated…