Our previous work interpreted single-lognormal fits to inter-gaze distance (i.e., "gaze steps") histograms as evidence of multiplicativity and hence interactions across scales in visual cognition. Bogartz and Staub (2012) proposed that gaze steps are additively decomposable into fixations and saccades, matching the histograms better and…

Inferences of others' social traits from their faces can influence how we think and behave towards them, but little is known about how perceptions of people's traits may affect downstream cognitions, such as memory. Here we explored the relationship between targets' perceived social traits and how well they were remembered following a single brief…

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…

A central feature of human psychology is our pervasive tendency to divide the social world into "us" and "them". We prefer to associate with those who are similar to us over those who are different, preferentially allocate resources to similar others, and hold more positive beliefs about similar others. Here we investigate the developmental…

We set up a tasting venue at a local supermarket and invited passerby shoppers to sample two different varieties of jam and tea, and to decide which alternative in each pair they preferred the most. Immediately after the participants had made their choice, we asked them to again sample the chosen alternative, and to verbally explain why they chose…

The immediate experience of self-agency, that is, the experience of generating and controlling our actions, is thought to be a key aspect of selfhood. It has been suggested that this experience is intimately linked to internal motor signals associated with the ongoing actions. These signals should lead to an attenuation of the sensory consequences…

Abstract concepts are traditionally thought to differ from concrete concepts by their lack of perceptual information, which causes them to be processed more slowly and less accurately than perceptually-based concrete concepts. In two studies, we examined this assumption by comparing concreteness and imageability ratings to a set of perceptual…

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…

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…

A number of recent studies suggested that visuo-spatial perspective taking (VSPT) occurs spontaneously when viewing either a human body or an action by an agent. However, it remains unclear whether VSPT is caused by the observation of an (potential) action or occurs because the observer infers from certain cues that another mind is present…

Adults, preschool children, and nonhuman primates detect and categorize food objects according to substance information, conveyed primarily by color and texture. In contrast, they perceive and categorize artifacts primarily by shape and rigidity. The present experiments investigated the origins of this distinction. Using a looking time procedure,…

Evidence from typical development and neuroimaging studies suggests that level 2 visual perspective taking--the knowledge that different people may see the same thing differently at the same time--is a mentalising task. Thus, we would expect children with autism, who fail typical mentalising tasks like false belief, to perform poorly on level 2…

Nearly all studies on perception and cognition have used discrete responses to infer internal cognitive processes. In the current study, we demonstrate that visually-guided manual reaching can provide new opportunities to access internal processes over time. In each trial, participants were required to compare a single digit Arabic number…

Listeners are faced with enormous variation in pronunciation, yet they rarely have difficulty understanding speech. Although much research has been devoted to figuring out how listeners deal with variability, virtually none (outside of sociolinguistics) has focused on the source of the variation itself. The current experiments explore whether…

Languages differ in how they encode motion. When describing bounded motion, English speakers typically use verbs that convey information about manner (e.g., "slide", "skip", "walk") rather than path (e.g., "approach", "ascend"), whereas Greek speakers do the opposite. We investigated whether this strong cross-language difference influences how…