It is harder to find the letter "N" among its mirror reversals than vice versa, an inconvenient finding for bottom-up saliency accounts based on primary visual cortex (V1) mechanisms. However, in line with this account, we found that in dense search arrays, gaze first landed on either target equally fast. Remarkably, after first landing,…

Although object-based attention enhances perceptual processing of information appearing within the boundaries of a selected object, little is known about the consequences for information in the object's surround. The authors show that distance from an attended object's center of mass determines reaction time (RT) to targets in the surround. Of 2…

Three experiments employed rectangles in stimulus identification tasks. It was concluded that the initial perceptual processing of rectangles is accomplished by separate dimensional analyzers operating in parallel. Observers adopt different decision strategies for negatively correlated sets and for single dimension sets when the number of…

Two strings of letters were presented. Subjects were instructed to indicate whether the second string contained the same elements as the first, regardless of position. Reaction time increased with the number of positions that the letters were displaced. Results indicate that order may be an important factor in retrieval from memory. (Author/BW)

Earlier research with the lexical decision task led to the hypothesis that semantic context facilitates the encoding of words related to the context. Six experiments which employed different tasks (e.g., making a lexical decision) and different experimental paradigms (e.g., tachistoscopic exposures with masking stimuli) further investigated this…