Voluntary shifts of attention are often motivated in experimental contexts by using well-known symbols that accurately predict the direction of targets. The authors report 3 experiments, which showed that the presentation of predictive spatial information does not provide sufficient incentive to elicit voluntary shifts of attention. For instance,…

The current study investigated attentional control through active inhibition of the identity of the distractor. Adapting a Stroop paradigm, the distractor word was presented in advance and made to disappear, followed by the presentation of a Stroop stimulus. Participants were instructed to inhibit the distractor in order to reduce its…

In a contextual cuing paradigm, we examined how memory for the spatial structure of a natural scene guides visual search. Participants searched through arrays of objects that were embedded within depictions of real-world scenes. If a repeated search array was associated with a single scene during study, then array repetition produced significant…

Three experiments examined memory-based guidance of visual search using a modified version of the contextual-cueing paradigm (Jiang & Chun, 2001). The target, if present, was a conjunction of color and orientation, with target (and distractor) features randomly varying across trials (multiconjunction search). Under these conditions, reaction times…

Goal-directed behavior requires cognitive control to effect online adjustments in response to ongoing processing demands. How signaling for these adjustments occurs has been a question of much interest. A basic question regarding the architecture of the cognitive control system is whether such signaling for control is specific to task context or…

Since M. M. Chun and Y. Jiang's (1998) original study, a large body of research based on the contextual cuing paradigm has shown that the visuocognitive system is capable of capturing certain regularities in the environment in an implicit way. The present study investigated whether regularities based on the semantic category membership of the…

Psychophysical studies are reported examining how the context of recent auditory stimulation may modulate the processing of new sounds. The question posed is how recent tone stimulation may affect ongoing performance in a discrimination task. In the task, two complex sounds occurred in successive intervals. A single target component of one complex…

The Wing-Kristofferson movement timing model (A. M. Wing & A. B. Kristofferson, 1973a, 1973b) distinguishes central timer and motor implementation processes. Previous studies have shown that increases in interresponse interval (IRI) variability with mean IRI are due to central timer processes, not motor implementation. The authors examine whether…

People are especially efficient in processing certain visual stimuli such as human faces or good configurations. It has been suggested that topology and geometry play important roles in configural perception. Visual search is one area in which configurality seems to matter. When either of 2 target features leads to a correct response and the…