Norm-based coding, in which faces are coded as deviations from an average face, is an efficient way of coding visual patterns that share a common structure and must be distinguished by subtle variations that define individuals. Adults and school-aged children use norm-based coding for face identity but it is not yet known if pre-school aged…

Two significant questions in cognitive and developmental science are first, whether objects and events are selected for attention based on their features (featural processing) or the configuration of their features (configural processing), and second, how these modes of processing develop. These questions have been addressed in part with…

To avoid sensory overload, people are able to selectively attend to a particular color or direction of motion while ignoring irrelevant stimuli that differ from the desired one. We show here for the first time that it is also possible to selectively attend to a specific line orientation--but with an important caveat: orientations that are…

Light is the origin of vision. The pattern of shading reflected from object surfaces is one of several optical features that provide fundamental information about shape and surface orientation. To understand how surface and object shading is processed by birds, six pigeons were tested with differentially illuminated convex and concave curved…

While perceiving speech, people see mouth shapes that are systematically associated with sounds. In particular, a vertically stretched mouth produces a /woo/ sound, whereas a horizontally stretched mouth produces a /wee/ sound. We demonstrate that hearing these speech sounds alters how we see aspect ratio, a basic visual feature that contributes…

Although holistic processing is thought to underlie normal face recognition ability, widely discrepant reports have recently emerged about this link in an individual differences context. Progress in this domain may have been impeded by the widespread use of subtraction scores, which lack validity due to their contamination with control condition…

Decades of research on visual perception has uncovered many phenomena, such as binocular rivalry, backward masking, and the attentional blink, that reflect "failures of consciousness". Although stimuli do not reach awareness in these paradigms, there is evidence that they nevertheless undergo semantic processing. Object substitution masking (OSM),…

The present study investigated the mechanisms responsible for the difference between visual processing of stimuli near and far from the observer's hands. The idea that objects near the hands are immediate candidates for action led us to hypothesize that vision near the hands would be biased toward the action-oriented magnocellular visual pathway…

Three studies investigated developmental changes in facial expression processing, between 3 years-of-age and adulthood. For adults and older children, the addition of sunglasses to upright faces caused an equivalent decrement in performance to face inversion. However, younger children showed "better" classification of expressions of faces wearing…

An unexpected stimulus often remains unnoticed if attention is focused elsewhere. This inattentional blindness has been shown to be increased under conditions of high memory load. Here we show that increasing working memory load can also have the opposite effect of reducing inattentional blindness (i.e., improving stimulus detection) if stimulus…

In quantity discrimination tasks, adults, infants and animals have been sometimes observed to process number only after all continuous variables, such as area or density, have been controlled for. This has been taken as evidence that processing number may be more cognitively demanding than processing continuous variables. We tested this hypothesis…

The rapid visual detection of other people in our environment is an important first step in social cognition. Here we provide evidence for selective sensitivity of the human visual system to upright depictions of conspecifics. In a series of seven experiments, we assessed the impact of stimulus inversion on the detection of person silhouettes,…

We ask whether bilingualism aids cognitive control over the inadvertent guidance of visual attention from working memory and from bottom-up cueing. We compare highly-proficient Catalan-Spanish bilinguals with Spanish monolinguals in three visual search conditions. In the working memory (WM) condition, attention was driven in a top-down fashion by…

Recent studies indicate that expertise with objects can interfere with face processing. Although competition occurs between faces and objects of expertise, it remains unclear whether this reflects an expertise-specific bottleneck or the fact that objects of expertise grab attention and thereby consume more central resources. We investigated the…

A highly familiar type of movement occurs whenever a person walks towards you. In the present study, we investigated whether this type of motion has an effect on face processing. We took a range of different 3D head models and placed them on a single, identical 3D body model. The resulting figures were animated to approach the observer. In a first…