Technological advances mean that it is now possible to represent the entire 360° view of the horizon to a submarine periscope operator simultaneously, in strips on a single display, as opposed to the restricted view offered through a conventional periscope aperture. Initial research showing performance improvements for such panoramic displays is…

The use of face coverings can make communication more difficult by removing access to visual cues as well as affecting the physical transmission of speech sounds. This study aimed to assess the independent and combined contributions of visual and auditory cues to impaired communication when using face coverings. In an online task, 150 participants…

With the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in our lives, attention is increasingly turning to the way that humans and AI work together. A key aspect of human-AI collaboration is how people integrate judgements or recommendations from machine agents, when they differ from their own judgements. We investigated trust in human-machine…

Irrelevant salient distractors can trigger early quitting in visual search, causing observers to miss targets they might otherwise find. Here, we asked whether task-relevant salient cues can produce a similar early quitting effect on the subset of trials where those cues fail to highlight the target. We presented participants with a difficult…

In any visual search task in the lab or in the world, observers will make errors. Those errors can be categorized as "deterministic": If you miss this target in this display once, you will definitely miss it again. Alternatively, errors can be "stochastic", occurring randomly with some probability from trial to trial.…

People often fail to notice unexpected stimuli when their attention is directed elsewhere. Most studies of this "inattentional blindness" have been conducted using laboratory tasks with little connection to real-world performance. Medical case reports document examples of missed findings in radiographs and CT images, unintentionally…

While decades of research have deepened our understanding of time perception, the perception of (manipulated) video speed has been relatively underexplored but is gaining interest with recent technological advances. This study systematically investigated human perception of "video speed," "clip duration" and "original…

Auditory alarm deafness is a failure to notice a salient auditory signal in a high-load context, which is one of the major causes of flight accidents. Therefore, it is of great practical significance for aviation safety to explore ways to avoid auditory alarm deafness under a high-load scenario. One potential reason for its occurrence could be the…

Visual inference involves using prior knowledge and contextual cues to make educated guesses about incomplete or ambiguous information. This study explores the role of visual inference as a function of expertise in the context of fingerprint examination, where professional examiners need to determine whether two fingerprints were left by the same…

Perceptual expertise is typically domain-specific and rarely generalises beyond an expert's domain of experience. Forensic feature-comparison examiners outperform the norm in domain-specific visual comparison, but emerging research suggests that they show advantages on other similar tasks outside their domain of expertise. For example, fingerprint…

Drivers must respond promptly to a wide range of possible road hazards, from trucks veering into their lane to pedestrians stepping onto the road. While drivers' vision is tested at the point of licensure, visual function can degrade, and drivers may not notice how these changes impact their ability to notice and respond to events in the world in…

Word identification accuracy is modulated by many factors including linguistic characteristics of words (frequent vs. infrequent), listening environment (noisy vs. quiet), and listener-related differences (older vs. younger). Nearly, all studies investigating these factors use high-familiarity words and noise signals that are either energetic…

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.…

The Useful Field of View task (UFOV) is a strong and reliable predictor of crash risk in older drivers. However, while the functional domain of attention is clearly implicated in UFOV performance, the potential role of one specific attentional process remains unclear: attentional breadth (the spatial extent of the attended region around the point…