Research on naive physics and naive optics have shown that people hold surprising beliefs about everyday phenomena that are in contrast with what they see. In this article, we investigated what adults expect to be the field of view of a mirror from various viewpoints. The studies presented here confirm that humans have difficulty dealing with the…

In three experiments, this study addressed two basic questions about the detection of multiletter patterns: (1) How is the detection of a multiletter pattern related to the detection of its individual components? (2) How is the detection of a sequence of letters influenced by the observer's familiarity with that sequence? (Author/BW)

Human visual recognition on the basis of shape but regardless of size was investigated by reaction time methods. Results suggested two processes of size scaling: mental-image transformation and perceptual-scale transformation. Image transformation accounted for matching performance based on visual short-term memory, whereas scale transformation…

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…

The experiments reported here are aimed at exploring in more detail the possibility that context can improve perception itself. In particular, they are concerned with clarifying the conditions under which context might aid perception and with localizing the stage of processing at which context would have its effects. (Author)