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…

A harmonic that begins before the other harmonics contributes less than they do to vowel quality. This reduction can be partly reversed by accompanying the leading portion with a captor tone. This effect is usually interpreted as reflecting perceptual grouping of the captor with the leading portion. Instead, it has recently been proposed that the…

Some potential contributions of invariants, heuristics, and exemplars to the perception of dynamic properties in the colliding balls task were explored. On each trial, an observer is asked to determine the heavier of 2 colliding balls. The invariant approach assumes that people can learn to detect complex visual patterns that reliably specify…

In 5 experiments, the authors tested whether the processing of nonconscious spatial stimulus information depends on a prior intention. This test was conducted with the metacontrast dissociation paradigm. Experiment 1 demonstrated that masked primes that could not be discriminated above chance level affected responses to the visible stimuli that…

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a mechanism that results in a performance disadvantage typically observed when targets are presented at a location once occupied by a cue. Although the time course of the phenomenon--from the cue to the target--has been well studied, the time course of the effect--from target to response--is unknown. In 2…