Limits in visual working memory (VWM) strongly constrain human performance across many tasks. However, the nature of these limits is not well understood. In this article we develop an ideal observer analysis of human VWM by deriving the expected behavior of an optimally performing but limited-capacity memory system. This analysis is framed around…

Individual differences in inhibitory control have been shown to relate to general mathematics achievement, but whether this relation varies for specific areas within mathematics is a question that remains open. Here, we evaluate if inhibitory processes play a specific role in the particular case of fraction comparison, where learners must ignore…

Keeping aware of the locations of objects while one is moving requires the updating of spatial representations. As long as the objects are visible, attentional tracking is sufficient, but knowing where objects out of view went in relation to one's own body involves an updating of spatial working memory. Here, multiple object tracking was employed…

Autism is currently one of the most prominent and widely discussed human conditions. Its increased prevalence has intensified the demand for effective educational and therapeutic services, and intervention science is providing mounting evidence about practices that positively impact outcomes. The purpose of this report is to describe a set of…

The present study examined a visual field asymmetry in the contingent capture of attention that was previously observed by Du and Abrams (2010). In our first experiment, color singleton distractors that matched the color of a to-be-detected target produced a stronger capture of attention when they appeared in the left visual hemifield than in the…

Prior lesion and functional imaging studies have highlighted the importance of the left ventral occipito-temporal (LvOT) cortex for visual word recognition. Within this area, there is a posterior-anterior hierarchy of subregions that are specialized for different stages of orthographic processing. The aim of the present fMRI study was to…

Alzheimer's disease (AD) can impair metacognition in addition to more basic cognitive functions like memory. However, while global metacognitive inaccuracies are well documented (i.e., low deficit awareness, or anosognosia), the evidence is mixed regarding the effects of AD on local or task-based metacognitive judgments. Here we investigated local…

In the Stroop task, participants name the color of the ink that a color word is written in and ignore the meaning of the word. Naming the color of an incongruent color word (e.g., RED printed in blue) is slower than naming the color of a congruent color word (e.g., RED printed in red). This robust effect is known as the Stroop effect and it…

Perceptual asymmetries for tasks involving aesthetic preference or line bisection can be affected by asymmetrical neurological mechanisms or left/right reading habits. This study investigated the relative contribution of these mechanisms in 100 readers of Japanese and English. Participants made aesthetic judgments between pairs of mirror-reversed…

Although visual functions have been proposed to be enhanced in deaf individuals, empirical studies have not yet established clear evidence on this issue. The present study aimed to determine whether deaf children with diverse communication modes had superior visual memory and whether their performance was improved by the use of differential…

Visual peripersonal space (i.e., the space immediately surrounding the body) is represented by multimodal neurons integrating tactile stimuli applied on a body part with visual stimuli delivered near the same body part, e.g., the hand. Tool use may modify the boundaries of the peri-hand area, where vision and touch are integrated. The neural…

The time-course of representing others' perspectives is inconclusive across the currently available models of ToM processing. We report two visual-world studies investigating how knowledge about a character's basic preferences (e.g. "Tom's favourite colour is pink") and higher-order desires (his wish to keep this preference secret) compete to…

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…

Several groups have recently reported that people with autism may suffer from a deficit in visual motion processing and proposed that these deficits may be related to a general dorsal stream dysfunction. In order to test the dorsal stream deficit hypothesis, we investigated coherent and biological motion perception as well as coherent form…

A recent study by Apperly et al. (2006) found evidence that adults do not automatically infer false beliefs while watching videos that afford such inferences. This method was extended to examine true beliefs, which are sometimes thought to be ascribed by "default" (e.g., Leslie & Thaiss, 1992). Sequences of pictures were presented in which the…