Vision of the body modulates somatosensation, even when entirely non-informative about stimulation. For example, seeing the body increases tactile spatial acuity, but reduces acute pain. While previous results demonstrate that vision of the body modulates somatosensory sensitivity, it is unknown whether vision also affects metric properties of…

When we look at a scene, we are conscious of only a small fraction of the available visual information at any given point in time. This raises profound questions regarding how information is selected, when awareness occurs, and the nature of the mechanisms underlying these processes. One tool that may be used to probe these issues is…

An increasing number of studies use subjective reports of visibility, so as to delineate the domain of perceptual awareness. It is generally assumed that degrees of visibility can be ordered on a single unidimensional scale. Here, I put this assumption to test with metacontrast, one of the most studied visual masking paradigms. By means of…

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…

We have investigated the relation between visuo-tactile interactions and the self-other distinction. In the Visual Enhancement of Touch (VET) effect, non-informative vision of one's own hand improves tactile spatial perception. Previous studies suggested that looking at "another"person's hand could also enhance tactile perception, but did not…

We examined categorical effects in color appearance in two tasks, which in part differed in the extent to which color naming was explicitly required for the response. In one, we measured the effects of color differences on perceptual grouping for hues that spanned the blue-green boundary, to test whether chromatic differences across the boundary…

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…

We examined whether view combination mechanisms shown to underlie object and scene recognition can integrate visual information across views that have little or no three-dimensional information at either the object or scene level. In three experiments, people learned four "views" of a two dimensional visual array derived from a three-dimensional…

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…

Contour interpolation is a perceptual process that fills-in missing edges on the basis of how surrounding edges (inducers) are spatiotemporally related. Cognitive encapsulation refers to the degree to which perceptual mechanisms act in isolation from beliefs, expectations, and utilities (Pylyshyn, 1999). Is interpolation encapsulated from belief?…

The labial-coronal effect has originally been described as a bias to initiate a word with a labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant (LC) sequence. This bias has been explained with constraints on the human speech production system, and its perceptual correlates have motivated the suggestion of a perception-production link. However, previous…

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 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…

Phonetic variation has been considered a barrier that listeners must overcome in speech perception, but has been proved beneficial in category learning. In this paper, I show that listeners use within-speaker variation to accommodate gross categorical variation. Within the perceptual learning paradigm, listeners are exposed to p-initial words in…

What are the effects of experience on subsequent learning? We explored the effects of language-specific word order knowledge on the acquisition of sequential conditional information. Korean and English adults were engaged in a sequence learning task involving three different sets of stimuli: auditory linguistic (nonsense syllables), visual…