Previous research has suggested that people are unable to correctly choose which unfamiliar voice and static image of a face belong to the same person. Here, we present evidence that people can perform this task with greater than chance accuracy. In Experiment 1, participants saw photographs of two, same-gender models, while simultaneously…

Stimuli that have previously been associated with the delivery of reward involuntarily capture attention when presented as unrewarded and task-irrelevant distractors in a subsequent visual search task. It is unknown how long such effects of reward learning on attention persist. One possibility is that value-driven attentional biases are plastic…

Distractor dilution, which reflects little distractor interference in a context of high display load but easy target processing, has sparked debate between theoretical viewpoints. These two viewpoints can be integrated into a model in which grouping and the efficacy of attention control influence the relative activation strength between the…

Grapheme-color synesthesia is an atypical condition in which individuals experience sensations of color when reading printed graphemes such as letters and digits. For some grapheme-color synesthetes, seeing a printed grapheme triggers a sensation of color, but "hearing" the name of a grapheme does not. This dissociation allowed us to…

Three experiments measured the efficiency of monitoring complex scenes composed of changing objects, or events. All events lasted about 4 s, but in a given block of trials, could be of a single type (single task) or of multiple types (multitask, with a total of four event types). Overall accuracy of detecting target events amid distractors was…

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…

Our visual system is highly sensitive to regularities in the environment. Locations that were important in one's previous experience are often prioritized during search, even though observers may not be aware of the learning. In this study we characterized the guidance of spatial attention by incidental learning of a target's spatial probability,…

A retinally stabilized object readily undergoes perceptual fading and disappears from consciousness. This startling phenomenon is commonly believed to arise from local bottom-up sensory adaptation to edge information that occurs early in the visual pathway, such as in the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus or retinal ganglion cells. Here…

Although considerable research has examined the storage limits of visual short-term memory (VSTM), little is known about the initial formation (i.e., the consolidation) of VSTM representations. A few previous studies have estimated the capacity of consolidation to be one item at a time. Here we used a sequential-simultaneous manipulation to…

Readers continuously receive parafoveal information about the upcoming word in addition to the foveal information about the currently fixated word. Previous research (Inhoff, Radach, Starr, & Greenberg, 2000) showed that the presence of a parafoveal word that was similar to the foveal word facilitated processing of the foveal word. We used the…

Inversion disproportionately impairs recognition of face stimuli compared to nonface stimuli arguably due to the holistic manner in which faces are processed. A qualification is put forward in which the first point fixated on is different for upright and inverted faces and this carries some of the face-inversion effect. Three experiments explored…

In two experiments we investigated the relationship between eye movements and performance in visual search tasks of varying difficulty. Experiment 1 provided evidence that a single process is used for search among static and moving items. Moreover, we estimated the functional visual field (FVF) from the gaze coordinates and found that its size…

In object substitution masking (OSM) a sparse, temporally trailing 4-dot mask impairs target identification, even though it has different contours from, and does not spatially overlap with the target. Here, we demonstrate a previously unknown characteristic of OSM: Observers show reduced masking at prolonged (e.g., 640 ms) relative to intermediate…

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…

The contents of working memory (WM) have predominantly been viewed as necessarily conscious. However, recent findings suggest otherwise. Here we investigate whether visual WM can represent subliminal stimuli, such that the positions of an invisible moving object can be extrapolated or learned about in terms of their task-relevant predictive power.…