Extensive research has focused on face recognition, and much is known about this topic. However, much of this work seems to be based on an assumption that faces are the most important aspect of person recognition. Here we test this assumption in two experiments. We show that when viewers are forced to choose, they "do" use the face more than the…

When searching for a "pop-out" target, interference from a salient but irrelevant distractor can be reduced or even prevented under certain circumstances. Here, five experiments were conducted to further our understanding of three different aspects of top-down interference reduction: first, whether or not qualitatively different search modes can…

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…

Several different explanations have been proposed to account for the search asymmetry (SA) for angry schematic faces (i.e., the fact that an angry face target among friendly faces can be found faster than vice versa). The present study critically tested the perceptual grouping account, (a) that the SA is not due to emotional factors, but to…

Five experiments examined crowding effects with letter and symbol stimuli. Experiments 1 through 3 compared 2-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) identification accuracy for isolated targets presented left and right of fixation with targets flanked either by 2 other items of the same category or a single item situated to the right or left of targets.…

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…

The visual system groups image elements that belong to an object and segregates them from other objects and the background. Important cues for this grouping process are the Gestalt criteria, and most theories propose that these are applied in parallel across the visual scene. Here, we find that Gestalt grouping can indeed occur in parallel in some…

When the auditory and visual components of spoken audiovisual nonsense syllables are mismatched, perceivers produce four different types of perceptual responses, auditory correct, visual correct, fusion (the so-called "McGurk effect"), and combination (i.e., two consonants are reported). Here, quantitative measures were developed to account for…

A sparse mask that persists beyond the duration of a target can reduce its visibility, a phenomenon called "object substitution masking". Y. Jiang and M. M. Chun (2001a) found an asymmetric pattern of substitution masking such that a mask on the peripheral side of the target caused stronger substitution masking than on the central side.…