We have a remarkable ability to accurately estimate average featural information across groups of objects, such as their average size or orientation. It has been suggested that, unlike individual object processing, this process of "feature averaging" occurs automatically and relatively early in the course of perceptual processing,…

The ability to ignore task-irrelevant information and overcome distraction is central to our ability to efficiently carry out a number of tasks. One factor shown to strongly influence distraction is the perceptual load of the task being performed; as the perceptual load of task-relevant information processing increases, the likelihood that…

Mind wandering is a pervasive feature of human cognition often associated with the withdrawal of task-related executive control processes. Here, we explore the possibility that, in tasks requiring executive control to sustain consistent responding, moments of mind wandering could be associated with moments of increased behavioral variability. To…

Many studies have examined the processes involved in recognizing types of human action through sound, but little is known about whether the physical characteristics of an action (such as kinetic and kinematic parameters) can be perceived and imitated from sound. Twelve young healthy adults listened to recordings of footsteps on a gravel path taken…

Transformations of hand movements by tools such as levers or electronic input devices can invoke performance costs compared to untransformed movements. This study investigated by means of the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) paradigm at which stage of information processing such tool-transformation costs arise. We used an inversion…

Active head turns to the left and right have recently been shown to influence numerical cognition by shifting attention along the mental number line. In the present study, we found that passive whole-body motion influences numerical cognition. In a random-number generation task (Experiment 1), leftward and downward displacement of participants…

Research on the topic of distractor inhibition has used different empirical approaches to study how the human mind selects relevant information from the environment, and the results are controversially discussed. One key question that typically arises is how selection deals with the irrelevant information. We used a new selection task, in which…

Properties of auditory working memory for sounds that lack strong semantic associations and are not readily verbalized or sung are poorly understood. We investigated auditory working memory capacity for lists containing 2-6 easily discriminable abstract sounds synthesized within a constrained timbral space, at delays of 1-6 s (Experiment 1), and…

Lavie and Tsal (1994) proposed that spare attentional capacity is allocated involuntarily to the processing of irrelevant stimuli, thereby enabling interference. Under this view, when task demands increase, spare capacity should decrease and distractor interference should decrease. In support, Lavie and Cox (1997) found that increasing perceptual…

The present study tested whether coding of tone pitch relative to a referent contributes to the correspondence effect between the pitch height of an auditory stimulus and the location of a lateralized response. When left-right responses are mapped to high or low pitch tones, performance is better with the high-right/low-left mapping than with the…

With English-language readers in an experiment requiring pairwise comparative judgments of the sizes of animals, the nature of the association between the magnitudes of the animal pairs and the left or right sides of response (i.e., the SNARC effect) was reversed depending on whether the participants had to choose either the smaller or the larger…

Interference effects are reduced after trials including response conflict. This sequential modulation has often been attributed to a top-down mediated adaptive control mechanism and/or to feature repetition mechanisms. In the present study we tested whether mechanisms responsible for such sequential modulations are subject to attentional…

We report a series of investigations into the effects of common names, physical identity, and physical similarity on visual detection time. The effect of these factors on the capacity of the system processing the signals was also examined. We used a redundant targets design with separate testing of the target-distractor (single target),…

A briefly presented target can be rendered invisible by a lingering sparse mask that does not even touch it. This form of visual backward masking, called object substitution masking, is thought to occur at the object level of processing. However, it remains unclear whether object-level interference alone produces substitution masking because…

Two experiments used Muller-Lyer stimuli to test the predictions of the planning-control model (S. Glover, 2002) for aiming movements. In Experiment 1, participants aimed to stimuli that either remained the same or changed upon movement initiation. Experiment 2 was identical except that the duration of visual feedback for online control was…