In visual search, a set of distractor items can be suppressed from future selection if they are presented (previewed) before a second set of search items arrive. This "visual marking" mechanism provides a top-down way of prioritizing the selection of new stimuli, at the expense of old stimuli already in the field (Watson & Humphreys,…

In a crowded dynamic world, temporal expectations guide our attention in time. Prior investigations have consistently demonstrated that temporal expectations speed motor behavior. We explore effects of temporal expectation on "perceptual" speed in three nonspeeded, cued recognition paradigms. Different hazard rate functions for the…

When observers search for a target object, they incidentally learn the identities and locations of "background" objects in the same display. This learning can facilitate search performance, eliciting faster reaction times for repeated displays. Despite these findings, visual search has been successfully modeled using architectures that maintain no…

The delayed discrimination methodology has been used to demonstrate a high-fidelity nondecaying visual short-term memory (VSTM) for so-called preattentive basic features. In the current Study, I show that the nondecaying high VSTM precision is not restricted to basic features by using the same method to measure memory precision for gait direction…

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…

The human visual system can notice differences between memories of previous visual inputs and perceptions of new visual inputs, but the comparison process that detects these differences has not been well characterized. In this study, the authors tested the hypothesis that differences between the memory of a stimulus array and the perception of a…

Traditionally, dual-task interference has been attributed to the consequences of task load exceeding capacity limitations. However, the current study demonstrates that in addition to task load, the mutual compatibility of the concurrent processes modulates whether 2 tasks can be performed in parallel. In 2 psychological refractory period…

Although it is intuitive that familiarity with complex visual objects should aid their preservation in visual working memory (WM), empirical evidence for this is lacking. This study used a conventional change-detection procedure to assess visual WM for unfamiliar and famous faces in healthy adults. Across experiments, faces were upright or…

Observers often miss the 2nd of 2 visual targets (first target [T1] and second target [T2]) when these targets are presented closely in time; the attentional blink (AB). The authors hypothesized that the AB occurs because the attentional response to T2 is delayed by T1 processing, causing T2 to lose a competition for attention to the item that…