Visual expertise covers a broad range of types of studies and methodologies. Many studies incorporate some measure(s) of observer performance or how well participants perform on a given task. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis is a method commonly used in signal detection tasks (i.e., those in which the observer must decide whether…

Experimental evidence suggests that the content of a memory for even a simple display encoded in visual short-term memory (VSTM) can be very complex. VSTM uses organizational processes that make the representation of an item dependent on the feature values of all displayed items as well as on these items' representations. Here, we develop a…

Pseudoneglect is a slight but consistent leftward attentional bias commonly observed in healthy young populations, purportedly explained by right hemispheric dominance. It has been suggested that normal aging might be associated with a decline of the right hemisphere. According to this hypothesis, a few studies have shown that elderly tend to…

While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages…

Spiders are among the most common targets of fears and phobias in the world. In visual search tasks, adults detect their presence more rapidly than other kinds of stimuli. Reported here is an investigation of whether young children share this attentional bias for the detection of spiders. In a series of experiments, preschoolers and adults were…

This study was designed to differentiate between structural description and bias accounts of performance in the possible/impossible object-decision test. Two event-related potential (ERP) studies examined how the visual system processes structurally possible and impossible objects. Specifically, the authors investigated the effects of object…

Several studies have reported that individuals with autism and Asperger's syndrome show a local processing bias on tasks involving features and configurations. This study assessed whether this bias results from differences in the perception of features or a cognitive bias to attend to features in autism as a consequence of a deficit in attending…

The camera perspective from which a criminal confession is videotaped influences later assessments of its voluntariness and the suspect's guilt. Previous research has suggested that this camera perspective bias is rooted in perceptual rather than conceptual processes, but these data are strictly correlational. In 3 experiments, the authors…