It seems intuitive to think that previous exposure or interaction with an environment should make it easier to search through it and, no doubt, this is true in many real-world situations. However, in a recent study, we demonstrated that previous exposure to a scene does not necessarily speed search within that scene. For instance, when observers…

We examined whether illusory self-motion perception ("vection") induced by viewing upward and downward grating motion stimuli can alter the emotional valence of recollected autobiographical episodic memories. We found that participants recollected positive episodes more often while perceiving upward vection. However, when we tested a small moving…

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…

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 work on event perception suggests that perceptual processing increases when events change. An important question is how such changes influence the way other information is processed, particularly during dual-task performance. In this study, participants monitored a long series of distractor items for an occasional target as they…

Humans spend a considerable amount of time remembering other individuals' actions. Nevertheless, it is unclear how the visual system stores information about the identities of agents and their actions. To address this, I used a change detection method where observers were asked to remember agents and the actions they performed. Results show that…

Historically, it was believed the perceptual mechanisms involved in individuating faces developed only very slowly over the course of childhood, and that adult levels of expertise were not reached until well into adolescence. Over the last 10 years, there has been some erosion of this view by demonstrations that all adult-like behavioural…

People will often look to empty, uninformative locations in the world when trying to recall spoken information. This spatial indexing behaviour occurs when the information had previously been associated with those locations. It remains unclear, however, whether this behaviour is an example of a simple association across perceptual and cognitive…

Fundamental questions in cognitive science concern the origins and nature of the units that compose visual experience. Here, we investigate the capacity to individuate and store information about non-solid portions, asking in particular whether free-ranging rhesus monkeys ("Macaca mulatta") quantify portions of a non-solid substance presented in…

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…

Memory for feature binding comprises a key ingredient in coherent object representations. Previous studies have been equivocal about human capacity for objects in the visual working memory. To evaluate memory for feature binding, a type identification paradigm was devised and used with a multiple-object permanence tracking task. Using objects…

Here, we demonstrate that action video game play enhances subjects' ability in two tasks thought to indicate the number of items that can be apprehended. Using an enumeration task, in which participants have to determine the number of quickly flashed squares, accuracy measures showed a near ceiling performance for low numerosities and a sharp drop…

Infants' abilities to identify objects based on their perceptual features develop gradually during the first year and possibly beyond. Earlier we reported [Kaldy, Z., & Leslie, A. M. (2003). Identification of objects in 9-month-old infants: Integrating "what" and "where" information. Developmental Science, 6, 360-373] that infants at 9 months of…

A robust finding in the cross-cultural research is that people's memories for faces of their own race are superior to their memories for other-race faces. However, the mechanisms underlying the own-race effect have not been well defined. In this study, a holistic explanation was examined in which Caucasian and Asian participants were asked to…