Affective evaluations of previously ignored visual stimuli are more negative than those of novel items or prior targets of attention or response. This has been taken as evidence that inhibition has negative affective consequences. But inhibition could act instead to attenuate or "neutralize" preexisting affective salience, predicting opposite…

Effective motor control involves both the execution of appropriate responses and the inhibition of inappropriate responses that are evoked by response-associated stimuli. The inhibition of a motor response has traditionally been characterized as either a voluntary act of cognitive control or a low-level perceptual bias arising from processes such…

Evidence is presented for the immediate apprehension of exact small quantities. Participants performed a quantification task (are the number of items greater or smaller than?), and carry-over effects were examined between numbers requiring the same response. Carry-over effects between small numbers were strongly affected by repeats of pattern and…

In four experiments, task-switching processes were investigated with variants of the alternating runs paradigm and the explicit cueing paradigm. The classical diffusion model for binary decisions (Ratcliff, 1978) was used to dissociate different components of task-switching costs. Findings can be reconciled with the view that task-switching…

Pitch, the perceptual correlate of fundamental frequency (F0), plays an important role in speech, music, and animal vocalizations. Changes in F0 over time help define musical melodies and speech prosody, while comparisons of simultaneous F0 are important for musical harmony, and for segregating competing sound sources. This study compared…

There is growing evidence that individuation experience is necessary for development of expert object discrimination that transfers to new exemplars. Individuation training in human studies has primarily used label association tasks where labels are learned at both the individual and more abstract (basic) level, and expertise criterion requires…

Object substitution masking (OSM) is typically studied using a brief search display. The target item may be indicated by a cue/mask surrounding but not overlapping it. Report of the target is reduced when mask offset trails target offset rather than being simultaneous with it. We report 5 experiments investigating whether OSM can be obtained if…

We examined the sequential modulation of congruency effects using a task in which the irrelevant information shares the same stimulus dimensions as the relevant information but is presented at an earlier time. In Experiment 1, sequential modulations were observed within a stimulus modality but not between stimulus modalities. In Experiment 2,…

Recent evidence suggests that the recognition of an object's presence and its explicit recognition are temporally closely related. Here we re-examined the time course (using a fine and a coarse temporal resolution) and the sensitivity of three possible component processes of visual object recognition. In particular, participants saw briefly…

Saccadic reaction time (SRT) is more strongly slowed by target-similar than dissimilar distractors (similarity effect). The time course of this similarity effect was investigated by varying target contrast and analyzing SRT distributions. With foveal distractors, the similarity effect increased with increasing SRT, suggesting that top-down…

To study the temporal dynamics and capacity-limits of attentional selection and encoding, researchers often employ the attentional blink (AB) phenomenon: subjects' impaired ability to report the second of two targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream that appear within 200-500 ms of one another. The AB has now been the subject of…

Although dual-task interference is ubiquitous in a variety of task domains, stop-signal studies suggest that response inhibition is not subject to such interference. Nevertheless, no study has directly examined stop-signal performance in a dual-task setting. In two experiments, stop-signal performance was examined in a psychological refractory…

Locating a target in a visual search task is facilitated when the target location is repeated on successive trials. Global statistical properties also influence visual search, but have often been confounded with local regularities (i.e., target location repetition). In two experiments, target locations were not repeated for four successive trials,…

How information is exchanged between the cognitive mechanisms responsible for gaze perception and social attention is unclear. These systems could be independent; the "gaze cueing" effect could emerge from the activation of a general-purpose attentional mechanism that is ignorant of the social nature of the gaze cue. Alternatively, orienting to…

The backward-compatibility effect (BCE) is a major index of parallel processing in dual tasks and is related to the dependency of Task 1 performance on Task 2 response codes (Hommel, 1998). The results of four dual-task experiments showed that a BCE occurs when the stimuli of both tasks are included in the same visual object (Experiments 1 and 2)…