Stimuli that have previously been associated with the delivery of reward involuntarily capture attention when presented as unrewarded and task-irrelevant distractors in a subsequent visual search task. It is unknown how long such effects of reward learning on attention persist. One possibility is that value-driven attentional biases are plastic…

Grapheme-color synesthesia is an atypical condition in which individuals experience sensations of color when reading printed graphemes such as letters and digits. For some grapheme-color synesthetes, seeing a printed grapheme triggers a sensation of color, but "hearing" the name of a grapheme does not. This dissociation allowed us to…

According to the hypothesis of a scalar property for time, the variability to time ratio should be constant. Three experiments tested the validity of this hypothesis in a restricted range of durations (standard values = 1, 1.3, 1.6, and 1.9 s). In each experiment, time intervals to be discriminated, reproduced, or categorized were presented with…

Recent research on eye movements during scene viewing has primarily focused on where the eyes fixate. But eye fixations also differ in their durations. Here we investigated whether fixation durations in scene viewing are under the direct and immediate control of the current visual input. Subjects freely viewed photographs of scenes in preparation…

The memory system that supports implicit perceptual-motor sequence learning relies on brain regions that operate separately from the explicit, medial temporal lobe memory system. The implicit learning system therefore likely has distinct operating characteristics and information processing constraints. To attempt to identify the limits of the…

Reaching for an object with a tool has been shown to cause a compressed perception of space just beyond arm's reach. It is not known, however, whether tools that have distal, detached effects at far distances can cause this same perceptual distortion. We examined this issue in the current study with targets placed up to 30m away. Participants who…

Previous research using the contextual cuing paradigm has revealed both quantitative and qualitative differences in learning depending on whether repeated contexts are defined by letter arrays or real-world scenes. To clarify the relative contributions of visual features and semantic information likely to account for such differences, the typical…

In serial memory for spatial information, performance is impaired when distractors are interpolated between to-be-remembered (TBR) stimuli (Tremblay, Nicholls, Parmentier, & Jones, 2005). The so-called sandwich effect, combined with the use of eye tracking, served as a tool for examining the role of the oculomotor system in serial memory for…

Listeners had to compare, with respect to pitch (frequency), a pure tone (T) to a combination of pure tones presented subsequently (C). The elements of C were either synchronous, and therefore difficult to hear out individually, or asynchronous and therefore easier to hear out individually. In the "present/absent" condition, listeners had to judge…

Classical cognitive accounts of verbal short-term memory (STM) invoke an abstract, phonological level of representation which, although it may be derived differently via different modalities, is itself amodal. Key evidence for this view is that serial recall of phonologically similar verbal items (e.g., the letter sounds "b",…

RESix experiments studied relative frequency judgment and recall of sequentially presented items drawn from 2 distinct categories (i.e., city and animal). The experiments show that judged frequencies of categories of sequentially encountered stimuli are affected by certain properties of the sequence configuration. We found (a) a "first-run…

Current debate in mental imagery research revolves around the perceptual and cognitive role of eye movements to "nothing" (Ferreira, Apel, & Henderson, 2008; Richardson, Altmann, Spivey, & Hoover, 2009). While it is established that eye movements are comparable when inspecting a scene (or hearing a scene description) as when…

Report of a second target (T2) is impaired when presented within 500 ms of the first (T1). This attentional blink (AB) is known to cause a delay in T2 processing during which T2 must be stored in a labile memory buffer. We explored the buffer's characteristics using different types of masks after T2. These characteristics were inferred by…

Figural aftereffects are commonly believed to be transient and to fade away in the course of milliseconds. We tested face aftereffects using familiar faces and found sustained effects lasting up to 1 week. In 3 experiments, participants were first exposed to distorted pictures of famous persons and then had to select the veridical face in a…

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…