Seven experiments with a total of 480 subjects indicated that subjects visually imaging classical ambiguous figures have difficulty reconstructing the images, and that their construal of the image strongly influences what is depicted within the image. Image content, rather than image inspection, appears to be selective. (SLD)

Three experiments with 29 college students and 8 members of a university community demonstrate that shape recognition processes influence perceived figure-ground relationships in 3-dimensional displays when the edge between 2 potential figural regions is both a luminance contrast edge and a disparity edge. Implications for shape recognition and…

Eight experiments involving 99 college students examined the role of edge-assignment in a contour matching task. Edge-matching performance was not based solely on a raw description of the edges themselves. Results suggest a pervasive tendency within the visual system to go beyond the edges toward figural shapes. (SLD)

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…

This paper presents a cognitive approach to on-line spatial perception within scenes. A theoretical framework is developed, based on the idea that experience with a scene can activate a complex representation of layout that facilitates subsequent processing of spatial relations within the scene. The representations integrate significant, relevant…

Two experiments involving 12 college students suggest that the visual system codes the temporal relationship between stimuli that occur in close temporal contiguity and that the temporal code determines performance in tasks requiring temporal integration. Potential extension to other visual phenomena is discussed. (SLD)

Subjects looked at two optically superimposed video screens. They were required to selectively look at two episodes and monitor significant action taking place. Results showed difficulty in monitoring two episodes at once and that selective viewing does not involve special mechanisms to reject unwanted information. (Author/DEP)

Seven experiments involving a total of 203 college students explored a form of object-specific priming and established a robust object-specific benefit that indicates that a new stimulus will be named faster if it physically matches a previous stimulus seen as part of the same perceptual object. (SLD)

Five experiments investigated the recognition of proper names and common nouns using the lexical decision paradigm. In Experiments 1-3 the case of the initial letter of written stimuli was systematically varied. An advantage was consistently found for proper names written with the first letter in capital. Crucially, response times to proper names…

The theory is developed and contrasted with other theories of pattern recognition in which concepts such as stimulus generalization, tuned detectors, and preprocessing play major roles. A relation of this theory to problems encountered among disabled readers ("dyslexics") is also brought out. (Author/BJG)

When a visual target is identified, there is a period of several hundred milliseconds when the processing of subsequent targets is impaired, a phenomenon labeled the attentional blink (AB). The emerging consensus is that the identification of a visual target temporarily occupies a limited attentional resource that is essential for all visual…

Skilled readers read passages while their eye movements were monitored. Certain critical words were changed by the computer as the eye was in motion. Subsequent data indicated how wide the area is from which a reader acquires information during a fixation in silent reading. (Author/BJG)

This paper examines the mental processes involved in inferring perspective changes resulting from the rotation of a spatial array or from the rotation of the viewer of that array. Under certain conditions, viewer-rotation problems become easy and array-rotation problems become difficult. Apparently, an array is fixed vis-a-vis the spatial context.…

When Chinese adults tried to name the color of characters which represented conflicting color words, they showed greater interference than did English speaking readers of the same task in English. This effect cannot be attributed to bilingualism. There may be fundamental differences in the perceptual demands of reading Chinese and English.…