It is known that visual working memory capacity is limited, but the nature of this limit remains a subject of controversy. Increasingly, two factors are thought to limit visual memory: an object-based limit associated with so-called "slots" models, and an information-based limit associated with resource models. Recently, Barton, Ester, and Awh…

Figure-ground perception is typically described as seeing one surface occluding another. Figure properties, not ground properties, are considered the significant factors. In scenes, however, a near surface will often occlude multiple contours and surfaces, often at different depths, producing alignments that are improbable except under conditions…

In serial memory for spatial information, performance is impaired when distractors are interpolated between to-be-remembered (TBR) stimuli (Tremblay, Nicholls, Parmentier, & Jones, 2005). The so-called sandwich effect, combined with the use of eye tracking, served as a tool for examining the role of the oculomotor system in serial memory for…

A version of the line motion illusion (LMI) occurs when one of two adjacent surfaces changes in luminance; a new surface is perceived sliding in front of the initially presented surface. Previous research has implicated high-level mechanisms that can create or modulate LMI motion via feedback to lower-level motion detectors. It is shown here that…

The contrast gain control model of adaptation predicts that the effects of contrast adaptation correlate with contrast sensitivity. This article reports that the effects of high contrast spatiotemporal adaptors are maximum when adapting around 19 Hz, which is a factor of two or more greater than the peak in contrast sensitivity. To explain the…

Observers given brief exposures of pairs of colored bars and asked to report both the color and the orientation of each bar showed evidence of stochastic independence between reports of the 4 features (2 colors and 2 orientations). The authors also found virtually perfect stochastic independence between reports of colors and directions of motion…

The authors devised a prestimulus-probe method to assess the allocation of attention as a function of participants' top-down expectancies concerning distractor and target locations. Participants performed the flanker task, and distractor locations remained fixed. On some trials, instead of the flanker display, either 2 simultaneous dots or a…

A sound presented in temporal proximity to a light can alter the perceived temporal occurrence of that light (temporal ventriloquism). The authors explored whether spatial discordance between the sound and light affects this phenomenon. Participants made temporal order judgments about which of 2 lights appeared first, while they heard sounds…

A simple instance of coupling behavior to the environment is oscillating the hands in pace with metronome beats. This environmental coupling can be weaker (1 beat per cycle) or stronger (2 beats per cycle). The authors examined whether strength of environmental coupling enhanced the stability of in-phase bimanual coordination. Detuning by…

In the cutaneous rabbit effect (CRE), a tactile event (so-called attractee tap) is mislocalized toward an adjacent attractor tap. The effect depends on the time interval between the taps. The authors delivered sequences of taps to the forearm and asked participants to report the location of one of the taps. The authors replicated the original CRE…

Target location probability was manipulated in a visual search task. When the target was twice as likely to appear on 1 side of the display as the other, manual button-press response times were faster (Experiment 1A) and first saccades were more frequently directed (Experiment 1B) to the more probable locations. When the target appeared with equal…

Observers made speeded old-new recognition judgments of color stimuli embedded in a multidimensional similarity space. The paradigm used multiple lists but with the underlying similarity structures repeated across lists, to allow for quantitative modeling of the data at the individual-participant and individual-item levels. Correct rejection…

It only makes sense to talk about the position of a moving object if one specifies the time at which its position is of interest. The authors here show that when a flash or tone specifies the moment of interest, subjects estimate the moving object to be closer to where it passes the fixation point and further in its direction of motion than it…

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…

In 3 experiments, the authors tested performance in simple tone matching and classification tasks. Each tone was defined on location and frequency dimensions. In the first 2 experiments, participants completed a same-different matching task on the basis of one of these dimensions while attempting to ignore irrelevant variation in the other…