In situations where an agent unintentionally causes harm to a victim, the agent's (harmless) intention typically carries "more" weight than his/her (harmful) causal role. Therefore, healthy adults typically judge leniently agents responsible for an accident. Using animated cartoons, we show, however, that in the presence of a difficult concurrent…

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…

When a visual search task is very difficult (as when a small feature difference defines the target), even detection of a unique element may be substantially slowed by increases in display set size. This has been attributed to the influence of attentional capacity limits. We examined the influence of attentional capacity limits on three kinds of…

An eye-movement monitoring experiment was carried out to examine the effects of the difficulty of the problem (simple versus complex problems) and the type of figure (figure 1 or figure 4) on the time course of processing categorical syllogisms. The results showed that the course of influence for these two factors is different. We found early…

Two experiments used Headed Records memory model to examine preschoolers' performance on a variation of Perner's Smarties task, a false-beliefs test. Data indicated that when the computational demands imposed by the original task are reduced, young children can and do remember what they had thought about the contents of a tube even after its true…