Two experiments investigated infants' ability to localize tactile sensations in peripersonal space. Infants aged 10 months (Experiment 1) and 6.5 months (Experiment 2) were presented with vibrotactile stimuli unpredictably to either hand while they adopted either a crossed- or uncrossed-hands posture. At 6.5 months, infants' responses were…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) plays an important role in visual cognition. Although objects are located on different 3-dimensional (3-D) surfaces in the real world, how VSTM capacity may be influenced by the presence of multiple 3-D surfaces has never been examined. By manipulating binocular disparities of visual displays, the authors found that…

A central problem for psychology is vision's reaction to perspective. In the present studies, observers looked at perspective pictures projected by square tiles on a ground plane. They judged the tile dimensions while positioned at the correct distance, farther or nearer. In some pictures, many tiles appeared too short to be squares, many too…

The cognitive advantage of imagined spatial transformations of the human body over that of more unfamiliar objects (e.g., Shepard-Metzler [S-M] cubes) is an issue for validating motor theories of visual perception. In 6 experiments, the authors show that providing S-M cubes with body characteristics (e.g., by adding a head to S-M cubes to evoke a…

Real-world situations involve attending to spatially extended objects, often under conditions of motion and high processing load. The present experiments investigated such processing by requiring observers to attentionally track a number of long, moving lines. Concurrently, observers responded to sporadic probes as a measure of the distribution of…

Humans see whole objects from input fragmented in space and time, yet spatiotemporal object perception is poorly understood. The authors propose the theory of spatiotemporal relatability (STR), which describes the visual information and processes that allow visible fragments revealed at different times and places, due to motion and occlusion, to…

The authors propose that there are 2 different mechanisms whereby spatial cues capture attention. The voluntary mechanism is the strategic allocation of perceptual resources to the location most likely to contain the target. The involuntary mechanism is a reflexive orienting response that occurs even when the spatial cue does not indicate the…

Models of attentional control usually describe online shifts in control settings that accommodate changing task demands. The current studies suggest that online control over distractor exclusion--a core component of visual selection--can be accomplished without online shifts in top-down settings. Measurements of target discrimination accuracy…

A visual short-term memory task was more strongly disrupted by visual than spatial interference, and a spatial memory task was simultaneously more strongly disrupted by spatial than visual interference. This double dissociation supports a fractionation of visuospatial short-term memory into separate visual and spatial components. In 6 experiments,…