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…

From infrared body temperature surveillance to lifeguarding, real-life visual search is usually continuous and comes with rare targets. Previous research has examined realistic search tasks involving separate slides (such as baggage screening and radiography), but search tasks that require continuous monitoring have generally received less…

Camouflage-breaking is a special case of visual search where an object of interest, or target, can be hard to distinguish from the background even when in plain view. We have previously shown that naive, non-professional subjects can be trained using a deep learning paradigm to accurately perform a camouflage-breaking task in which they report…

Witnesses to crime often experience stress during the witnessed event. However, most laboratory studies examining eyewitness memory do not include a stressful encoding event. Participants (N = 129) completed an experimental stress induction procedure--a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test. We designed three conditions to manipulate…

The purpose of this review is to identify the application of eye-gaze stimulus preference assessment as well as the various characteristics of those assessments in the research literature. We conducted a systematic review that identified 18 articles using eye gaze to identify preferred stimuli. Of those studies, seven were used to determine a…

The "prevalence effect" is a phenomenon whereby target prevalence impacts performance in visual search (e.g., baggage screening) and visual comparison (e.g., face-matching) tasks -- people more often 'miss' infrequent target stimuli. The current study investigated prevalence effects in fingerprint identification -- an important visual…

We present a neural network model of referent identification in a visual world task. Inputs are visual representations of item pairs unfolding with sequences of phonemes identifying the target item. The model is trained to output the semantic representation of the target and to suppress the distractor. The training set uses a 200-word lexicon…

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…

Faces judged as stereotypically Black are perceived negatively relative to less stereotypical faces. In this experiment, artificial faces were constructed to examine the effects of nose width, lip fullness, and skin reflectance, as well as to study the relations among perceived dominance, threat, and Black stereotypicality. Using a multilevel…

In the field of numerical cognition, researchers conventionally assess nonsymbolic numerical abilities with the help of number comparison tasks, in which participants need to compare two arrays. Many studies emphasized that visual (non-numerical) dimensions can serve as strategic cues and influence the decision on numerosity in these tasks. In…

Visual search--looking for targets among distractors--underlies many critical professions (e.g., radiology, aviation security) that demand optimal performance. As such, it is important to identify, understand, and ameliorate negative factors such as fatigue--mental and/or physical tiredness that leads to diminished function. One way to reduce the…

Prior research has evaluated the reliability and validity of structured visual inspection (SVI) criteria for interpreting functional analysis (FA) outcomes (Hagopian et al., 1997; Roane et al., 2013). We adapted these criteria to meet the unique needs of interpreting latency-based FA outcomes and examined the reliability and validity of applying…

Previous research has mostly approached face recognition and target identification by focusing on face perception mechanisms, but memory mechanisms also appear to play a role. Here, we examined how the presence of a mask interferes with the memory mechanisms involved in face recognition, focusing on the dynamic interplay between encoding and…

Matching the identity of unfamiliar faces is important in applied identity verification tasks, for example when verifying photo ID at border crossings, in secure access areas, or when issuing identity credentials. In these settings, other biographical details--such as name or date of birth on an identity document--are also often compared to…

Previous research suggests people struggle to detect a series of movements that might imply hostile intentions of a vessel, yet this ability is crucial in many real world Naval scenarios. To investigate possible mechanisms for improving performance, participants engaged in a simple, simulated ship movement task. One of two hostile behaviors were…