Communication and navigation in real environments rely heavily on the ability to distinguish objects in acoustic space. However, auditory spatial information is often corrupted by conflicting cues and noise such as acoustic reflections. Fortunately the brain can apply mechanisms at multiple levels to emphasize target information and mitigate such…

Flanker congruency effects were measured in a masked flanker task to assess the properties of spatial attention during conscious and nonconscious processing of form, color, and conjunctions of these features. We found that (1) consciously and nonconsciously processed colored shape distractors (i.e., flankers) produce flanker congruency effects;…

Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined…

Bipedal gaits have been classified on the basis of the group symmetry of the minimal network of identical differential equations (alias "cells") required to model them. Primary gaits are characterized by dihedral symmetry, whereas secondary gaits are characterized by a lower, cyclic symmetry. This fact was used in a test of human…

A large part of the empirical research in the field of visual attention has focused on various concrete paradigms. However, as yet, there has been no clear demonstration of whether or not these paradigms are indeed measuring the same underlying construct. We collected a very large data set (nearly 1.3 million trials) to address this question. We…

Targets presented just beyond arm's reach look closer when observers intend to touch them with a reach-extending tool rather than without the tool. This finding is one of several that suggest that a person's ability to act influences perceived distance to objects. However, some critics have argued that apparent action effects were actually due to…

Caparos and Linnell (2009, 2010) used a variable-separation flanker paradigm to show that (a) when cognitive load is low, increasing perceptual load causes spatial attention to focus and (b) when perceptual load is high, decreasing cognitive load causes spatial attention to focus. Here, we tested whether the effects of perceptual and cognitive…

We conducted a haptic search experiment to investigate the influence of the Gestalt principles of proximity, similarity, and good continuation. We expected faster search when the distractors could be grouped. We chose edges at different orientations as stimuli because they are processed similarly in the haptic and visual modality. We therefore…

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…

Recent results from Vo and Wolfe (2012b) suggest that the application of memory to visual search may be task specific: Previous experience searching for an object facilitated later search for that object, but object information acquired during a different task did not appear to transfer to search. The latter inference depended on evidence that a…

Selective attention in multidimensional displays has usually been examined using search tasks requiring the detection of a single target. We examined the ability to perceive a spatial structure in multi-item subsets of a display that were defined either conjunctively or disjunctively. Observers saw two adjacent displays and indicated whether the…

Historically, the bodily senses have often been regarded as impeccable sources of spatial information and as being the teacher of vision. Here, the authors report that the haptic perception of slope by means of the foot is greatly exaggerated. The exaggeration is present in verbal as well as proprioceptive judgments. It is shown that this…

Many studies have examined the processes involved in recognizing types of human action through sound, but little is known about whether the physical characteristics of an action (such as kinetic and kinematic parameters) can be perceived and imitated from sound. Twelve young healthy adults listened to recordings of footsteps on a gravel path taken…

Tactile stimulus location is automatically transformed from somatotopic into external spatial coordinates, rendering information about the location of touch in three-dimensional space. This process is referred to as tactile remapping. Whereas remapping seems to occur automatically for the hands and feet, the fingers may constitute an exception in…

Presenting a face inverted (upside down) disrupts perceptual sensitivity to the spacing between the features. Recently, it has been shown that this disruption is greater for vertical than horizontal changes in eye position. One explanation for this effect proposed that inversion disrupts the processing of long-range (e.g., eye-to-mouth distance)…