Previous research has shown that people exhibit a sample size bias when judging the average of a set of stimuli on a single dimension. The more stimuli there are in the set, the greater people judge the average to be. This effect has been demonstrated reliably for judgments of the average likelihood that groups of people will experience negative,…

Six-month-old infants' ("N" = 168) memory for individual items in a categorized list (e.g., images of dogs or cats) was examined to investigate the interactions between visual recognition memory, working memory, and categorization. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants were familiarized with six different cats or dogs, presented one at a time…

Aesthetic preference for the vertical composition of single-object pictures was studied through a series of two-alternative forced-choice experiments. The results reveal the influence of several factors, including spatial asymmetries in the functional properties of the object and the typical position of the object relative to the observer. With…

One of the words that readers of English skip most often is the definite article "the". Most accounts of reading assume that in order for a reader to skip a word, it must have received some lexical processing. The definite article is skipped so regularly, however, that the oculomotor system might have learned to skip the letter string…

In three studies, eye movements of participants were recorded while they viewed a single-slide multimedia presentation about how car brakes work. Some of the participants saw an integrated presentation in which each segment of words was presented near its corresponding area of the diagram (integrated group, Experiments 1 and 3) or an integrated…

We frequently encounter groups of similar objects in our visual environment: a bed of flowers, a basket of oranges, a crowd of people. How does the visual system process such redundancy? Research shows that rather than code every element in a texture, the visual system favors a summary statistical representation of all the elements. The authors…

Two studies investigated the role of locomotor experience on visual proprioception in 8-month-old infants. "Visual proprioception" refers to the sense of self-motion induced in a static person by patterns of optic flow. A moving room apparatus permitted displacement of an entire enclosure (except for the floor) or the side walls and…