We conducted a haptic search experiment to investigate the influence of the Gestalt principles of proximity, similarity, and good continuation. We expected faster search when the distractors could be grouped. We chose edges at different orientations as stimuli because they are processed similarly in the haptic and visual modality. We therefore…

There is broad consensus that printed complex words are identified on the basis of their constituent morphemes. This fact raises the issue of how the word identification system codes for morpheme position, hence allowing it to distinguish between words like "overhang" and "hangover", and to recognize that "preheat" is…

Two experiments examined whether word recognition progressed from one word to the next during reading, as maintained by sequential attention shift models such as the E-Z Reader model. The boundary technique was used to control the visibility of to-be-identified short target words, so that they were either previewed in the parafovea or masked. The…

A salient stimulus may interrupt visual search because of attentional capture. It has been shown that attentional capture occurs with a wide, but not with a small attentional window. We tested the hypothesis that capture depends more strongly on the shape of the attentional window than on its size. Search elements were arranged in two nested…

In simple mechanical events, we can directly perceive causal interactions of the physical objects. Physical cues (especially spatiotemporal features of the display) are found to associate with causal perception. Here, we demonstrate that cues of a completely different domain--"social cues"--also impact the causal perception of…

There is considerable evidence that overlearned symbols, especially arrows, can orient attention to peripheral locations. In 2003, Pratt and Hommel showed that when 1 arrow is selected from a set of arrows, based on an attentional control setting for a specific target color, the selected arrow determines the orientation of attention. Recently,…