Primary somatosensory maps in the brain represent the body as a discontinuous, fragmented set of two-dimensional (2-D) skin regions. We nevertheless experience our body as a coherent three-dimensional (3-D) volumetric object. The links between these different aspects of body representation, however, remain poorly understood. Perceiving the body's…

Object substitution masking (OSM) is typically studied using a brief search display. The target item may be indicated by a cue/mask surrounding but not overlapping it. Report of the target is reduced when mask offset trails target offset rather than being simultaneous with it. We report 5 experiments investigating whether OSM can be obtained if…

In tool use, a transformation rule defines the relation between an operating movement and its distal effect. This rule is determined by the tool structure and requires no explicit definition. The present study investigates how humans represent and apply compatible and incompatible transformation rules in tool use. In Experiment 1, participants had…

Six experiments investigated how changes in stimulus speed influence subjective duration. Participants saw rotating or translating shapes in three conditions: constant speed, accelerating motion, and decelerating motion. The distance moved and average speed were the same in all three conditions. In temporal judgment tasks, the constant-speed…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of expertise on motion anticipation. We conducted 2 experiments in which novices and expert pilots viewed simulated aircraft landing scenes. The scenes were interrupted by the display of a black screen and then started again after a forward or backward shift. The participant's task was to…

Sound sources are perceived by integrating information from multiple acoustical features. The factors influencing the integration of information are largely unknown. We measured how the perceptual weighting of different features varies with the accuracy of information and with a listener's ability to exploit it. Participants judged the hardness of…

Many studies invoke moment of inertia (I[subscript ii]) as necessary and sufficient information to perceive cylinder length via wielding, yet some assert that I[subscript ii] is neither necessary (weight, "m", or static moment, M, are sufficient) nor sufficient for length judgments ("m" or M is necessary). Mathematical expressions for I[subscript…

This research was designed to test the predictions of 2 approaches to perception. By most traditional accounts, people are thought to derive general-purpose spatial perceptions that are scaled in arbitrary, unspecified units. In contrast, action-specific approaches propose that the angular information inherent in optic flow and ocular-motor…

One might assume that familiarity with a scene or previous encounters with objects embedded in a scene would benefit subsequent search for those items. However, in a series of experiments we show that this is not the case: When participants were asked to subsequently search for multiple objects in the same scene, search performance remained…

In whole report, a sentence presented sequentially at the rate of about 10 words/s can be recalled accurately, whereas if the task is to report only two target words (e.g., red words), the second target suffers an attentional blink if it appears shortly after the first target. If these two tasks are carried out simultaneously, is there an…

This study explored the extent to which sequential auditory grouping affects the perception of temporal synchrony. In Experiment 1, listeners discriminated between 2 pairs of asynchronous "target" tones at different frequencies, A and B, in which the B tone either led or lagged. Thresholds were markedly higher when the target tones were temporally…

Previous psychophysical work provided evidence for the existence of automatic frequency-shift detectors (FSDs) that establish perceptual links between successive sounds. In this study, we investigated the characteristics of the FSDs with respect to the binaural system. Listeners were presented with sound sequences consisting of a chord of pure…

We report two experiments in which errors and interaction latencies were recorded during routinization of hierarchically structured computer-based tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrates that action selection is slowed at subtask transitions, especially when selecting lower frequency actions. This frequency effect is compounded by concurrent performance…

The role of anticipatory auditory imagery in music-like sequential action was investigated by examining timing accuracy and kinematics using a motion capture system. Musicians responded to metronomic pacing signals by producing three unpaced taps on three vertically aligned keys at the given tempo. Taps triggered tones in two out of three blocked…

Sensory saltation is a spatiotemporal illusion in which the judged positions of stimuli are shifted toward subsequent stimuli that follow closely in time. So far, studies on saltation in the auditory domain have usually employed subjective rating techniques, making it difficult to exactly quantify the extent of saltation. In this study, temporal…