Object-substitution masking (OSM) occurs when a mask, such as four dots that surround a brief target item, onsets simultaneously with the target and offsets a short time after the target, rather than simultaneously with it. OSM is a reduction in accuracy of reporting the target with the temporally trailing mask, compared with the simultaneously…

Affective evaluations of previously ignored visual stimuli are more negative than those of novel items or prior targets of attention or response. This has been taken as evidence that inhibition has negative affective consequences. But inhibition could act instead to attenuate or "neutralize" preexisting affective salience, predicting opposite…

There is an ongoing controversy regarding the relationship between covert attention and saccadic eye movements. While there is quite some evidence that the preparation of a saccade is obligatory preceded by a shift of covert attention, the reverse is not clear: Is allocation of attention always accompanied by saccade preparation? Recently, a…

The law of prior entry states that attended objects come to consciousness more quickly than unattended ones. This has been well established in spatial cueing paradigms, where two task-relevant stimuli are presented near-simultaneously at two different locations. Here, we suggest that prior entry also plays a pivotal role in temporal attention…

In four experiments, task-switching processes were investigated with variants of the alternating runs paradigm and the explicit cueing paradigm. The classical diffusion model for binary decisions (Ratcliff, 1978) was used to dissociate different components of task-switching costs. Findings can be reconciled with the view that task-switching…

Identification of the second of two targets (T2) is impaired when presented shortly after the first (T1). This "attentional blink" (AB) is thought to arise from a delay in T2 processing during which T2 is vulnerable to masking. Conventional studies have measured T2 accuracy which is constrained by the 100% ceiling. We avoided this problem by using…

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…

Multiple object tracking (MOT) is an attentional task wherein observers attempt to track multiple targets among moving distractors. Contour interpolation is a perceptual process that fills-in nonvisible edges on the basis of how surrounding edges (inducers) are spatiotemporally related. In five experiments, we explored the automaticity of…

The current experiments explored the parafoveal processing of transposed-letter (TL) neighbors by using an eye-movement-contingent boundary change paradigm. In Experiment 1 readers received a parafoveal preview of a target word (e.g., "calm") that was either (1) identical to the target word ("calm"), (2) a TL-neighbor ("clam"), or (3) a…

Variations in perceptual and cognitive demands (load) play a major role in determining the efficiency of selective attention. According to load theory (Lavie, Hirst, Fockert, & Viding, 2004) these factors (a) improve or hamper selectivity by altering the way resources (e.g., processing capacity) are allocated, and (b) tap resources rather than…

Load theory of attention proposes that distractor processing is reduced in tasks with high perceptual load that exhaust attentional capacity within task-relevant processing. In contrast, tasks of low perceptual load leave spare capacity that spills over, resulting in the perception of task-irrelevant, potentially distracting stimuli. Tsal and…

It is well established that visual search becomes harder when the similarity between target and distractors is increased and the similarity between distractors is decreased. However, in models of visual search, similarity is typically treated as a static, time-invariant property of the relation between objects. Data from other perceptual tasks…

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…

Do we perceive correctly whether a 2-D object is balanced or unbalanced? What would be the cause of biased equilibrium judgments? In two psychometric studies, we varied independently the characteristics of the objects and the equilibrium states. First, we observed that observers were excessively sensitive to the eccentricity of the object top.…

Difficult visual search is often attributed to time-limited serial attention operations, although neural computations in the early visual system are parallel. Using probabilistic search models (Dosher, Han, & Lu, 2004) and a full time-course analysis of the dynamics of covert visual search, we distinguish unlimited capacity parallel versus serial…