Preparation over time is a ubiquitous capacity which implies decreasing uncertainty about when critical events will occur. This capacity is usually studied with the variable foreperiod paradigm, which consists in the random variation of the time interval (foreperiod) between a warning stimulus and a target. With this paradigm, response time (RT)…

Jax and Buxbaum [Jax and Buxbaum (2010). Response interference between functional and structural actions linked to the same familiar object. "Cognition, 115", 350-355] demonstrated that grasp-to-transport actions (handing an object to someone, i.e., a receiver) are initiated more quickly than grasp-to-use actions. A possible interpretation of…

People are able to use temporal cues to anticipate the timing of an event, enabling them to process that event more efficiently. We conducted two experiments, using the fixed-foreperiod paradigm (Experiment 1) and the temporal-cueing paradigm (Experiment 2), to assess which components of information processing are speeded when subjects use such…

The present research examined whether lexical (whole word) or more rule-based (morphological constituent) processes can be locally biased by experimental list context in past tense verb inflection. In Experiment 1, younger and older adults completed a past tense inflection task in which list context was manipulated across blocks containing regular…

Unconscious visual stimuli can be processed by human observers and modulate their behavior. This has been shown for masked prime stimuli that influence motor responses to subsequent target stimuli. Beyond this, masked stimuli can also affect participants' behavior when they are free to choose one of two response alternatives. This finding…

The problem-size effect in simple additions, that is the increase in response times (RTs) and error rates with the size of the operands, is one of the most robust effects in cognitive arithmetic. Current accounts focus on factors that could affect speed of retrieval of the answers from long-term memory such as the occurrence of interference in a…

Event duration perception is fundamental to cognitive functioning. Recent research has shown that localized sensory adaptation compresses perceived duration of brief visual events in the adapted location; however, there is disagreement on whether the source of these temporal distortions is cortical or pre-cortical. The current study reveals that…

Time, an everyday yet fundamentally abstract domain, is conceptualized in terms of space throughout the world's cultures. Linguists and psychologists have presented evidence of a widespread pattern in which deictic time--past, present, and future--is construed along the front/back axis, a construal that is "linear" and…

The pattern of shading across an image can provide a rich sense of object shape. Our ability to use shading information is remarkable given the infinite possible combinations of illumination, shape and reflectance that could have produced any given image. Illumination can change dramatically across environments (e.g. indoor vs. outdoor) and times…

Accurately timing acoustic events in dynamic scenes is fundamental to scene analysis. To detect events in busy scenes, listeners must often identify a change in the "pattern" of ongoing fluctuation, resulting in many ubiquitous events being detected later than when they occurred. This raises the question of how delayed detection time affects the…

We assessed whether observational learning in perceptual-motor tasks is affected by the visibility of an action producing perceived environmental effects and by the observer's possibility to act during observation. To this end, we conducted three experiments in which participants were required to observe a spatial compatibility task in which only…

Do moral judgments hinge on the time available to render them? According to a recent dual-process model of moral judgment, moral dilemmas that engage emotional processes are likely to result in fast deontological gut reactions. In contrast, consequentialist responses that tot up lives saved and lost in response to such dilemmas would require…

The present research aimed to investigate whether, as previously observed with pictures, background auditory rhythm would also influence visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with bisyllabic visual words, segmented into two successive groups of letters, while an irrelevant strongly metric auditory…

Visual processing breaks the world into parts and objects, allowing us not only to examine the pieces individually, but also to perceive the relationships among them. There is work exploring how we perceive spatial relationships within structures with existing representations, such as faces, common objects, or prototypical scenes. But strikingly,…

Subitizing is traditionally described as the rapid, preattentive and automatic enumeration of up to four items. Counting, by contrast, describes the enumeration of larger sets of items and requires slower serial shifts of attention. Although recent research has called into question the preattentive nature of subitizing, whether or not numerosities…