In this article, we assess an alternative account of a key experimental pattern thought to index top-down control. The list-wide proportion congruence effect is the well-documented pattern whereby the congruency effect (i.e., Stroop effect) is attenuated in lists containing mostly incongruent trials relative to lists containing mostly congruent…

We explore the following two cognitive questions regarding crosslinguistic variation in lexical semantic systems: Why are some linguistic categories--that is, the associations between a term and a portion of the semantic space--harder to learn than others? How does learning a language-specific set of lexical categories affect processing in that…

Color and intensity coding provide perceptual cues to segregate categories of objects within a visual display, allowing operators to search more efficiently for needed information. Even within a perceptually distinct subset of display elements, however, it may often be useful to prioritize items representing urgent or task-critical information.…

Mathematicians have proven that four colors are sufficient to color 2-D maps so that no neighboring regions share the same color. Here we consider the psychological 4-color problem: Identifying which 4 colors should be used to make a map easy to use. We build a model of visual search for this design task and demonstrate how to apply it to the task…

Current models in social neuroscience advance that eye contact may automatically recruit cognitive resources. Here, we directly tested this hypothesis by evaluating the distracting strength of eye contact on concurrent visual processing in the well-known Stroop's paradigm. As expected, participants showed stronger Stroop interference under…

We combine the Dimension-Action (DA) model with translational models to account for both the Stroop and the flanker effects. The basic assumption of the model is that there are distinct visual modules, each of which is endowed with both perception and response selection processes. We contrast this model with an alternative widespread view, the…