Psychologists have long been captivated by the perception of animacy--the fact that even simple moving shapes may appear to engage in animate, intentional, and goal-directed movements. Here we report several new types of studies of a particularly salient form of perceived animacy: "chasing", in which one shape (the "wolf") pursues another shape…

This paper is concerned with how we prioritize the selection of new objects in visual scenes. We present four experiments investigating the effects of distractor previews on visual search through new objects. Participants viewed a set of to-be-ignored nontargets, with the task being to search for a target in a second set, added to the first after…

How the dual-task interference effects, observed when subjects attempted to simultaneously perform two simple tasks, are related to capacity limitations in perceptual processing of complex visual displays was studied. Results for a total of 110 undergraduates in 6 experiments support a 2-component theory of divided attention. (SLD)