More than 50 years since the introduction of the concept of divergent production, little progress has been made in the development of parsimonious theoretical models that sufficiently explain creativity. Recently, the optimal foraging theory has been used to explain the search for items in memory tasks, suggesting the correspondence between the…

The presentation of a hand grasp facilitates the recognition of subsequent objects when the grasp is coherent with the object to be identified. This outcome is usually explained as the integration of two different processes: descriptive visual processes in ventral visual areas and processes in charge of the computations of action metrics in dorsal…

Inhibition of return (IOR) is modulated by task set and appears later in discrimination tasks than in detection tasks. Several hypotheses have been suggested to account for this difference. We tested three of these hypotheses in two experiments by examining the influence of cue and target level of processing on the onset of IOR. In the first…

We compared the primacy of affective versus semantic categorization by using forced-choice saccadic and manual response tasks. Participants viewed paired emotional and neutral scenes involving humans or animals flashed rapidly in extrafoveal vision. Participants were instructed to categorize the targets by saccading toward the location occupied by…

Lexical access is concerned with how the spoken or visual input of language is projected onto the mental representations of lexical forms. To date, most theories of lexical access have been based almost exclusively on studies of spoken languages and/or orthographic representations of spoken languages. Relatively few studies have examined how…

We addressed the hypothesis that word segmentation based on statistical regularities occurs without the need of attention. Participants were presented with a stream of artificial speech in which the only cue to extract the words was the presence of statistical regularities between syllables. Half of the participants were asked to passively listen…