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…

A sound presented in temporal proximity to a light can alter the perceived temporal occurrence of that light (temporal ventriloquism). The authors explored whether spatial discordance between the sound and light affects this phenomenon. Participants made temporal order judgments about which of 2 lights appeared first, while they heard sounds…

The authors conducted 3 experiments to explore the roles of curvature, density, and relative proximity in the perceptual organization of ambiguous dot patterns. To this end, they developed a new family of regular dot patterns that tend to be perceptually grouped into parallel contours, dot-sampled structured grids (DSGs). DSGs are similar to the…

Visual search has been studied extensively, yet little is known about how its constituent processes affect subsequent emotional evaluation of searched-for and searched-through items. In 3 experiments, the authors asked observers to locate a colored pattern or tinted face in an array of other patterns or faces. Shortly thereafter, either the target…