Substantial research has focused on the allocation of spatial attention based on goals or perceptual salience. In everyday life, however, people also direct attention using their previous experience. Here we investigate the pace at which people incidentally learn to prioritize specific locations. Participants searched for a T among Ls in a visual…

Five experiments examined how practice early in skill acquisition affected variability and accuracy during skill retention (Experiments 1-5) and skill transfer (Experiments 3, 4, 5). Lag constraints required that each path from apex to base of a computer-generated pyramid display differ from some number (the lag) of immediately prior paths.…

We test 3 theories of global and local scene information acquisition, defining global and local in terms of spatial frequencies. By independence theories, high- and low-spatial-frequency information are acquired over the same time course and combine additively. By global-precedence theories, global information acquisition precedes local…