Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined…

Three experiments utilizing a 14-element arm movement sequence were designed to determine if reinstating the visual-spatial coordinates, which require movements to the same spatial locations utilized during acquisition, results in better effector transfer than reinstating the motor coordinates, which require the same pattern of homologous muscle…

Hari and Jousmaki (1996) found that motor activity is initiated more efficiently in response to stimuli located on the responding limb as opposed to near the limb. Our research investigated the basis for this difference in spatial coding. We conducted 8 experiments using virtual reality to manipulate the visual feedback resulting from limb…

The relationship between object files and visual working memory (VWM) was investigated in a new paradigm combining features of traditional VWM experiments (color change detection) and object-file experiments (memory for the properties of moving objects). Object-file theory was found to account for a key component of object-position binding in VWM:…

Four experiments investigated influences of irrelevant action effects on response selection in Simon tasks for which tone pitch was relevant and location irrelevant, and responses were clockwise-counterclockwise wheel rotations. When the wheel controlled left-right movement of a cursor in a direction opposite an instructed left-right hand-movement…