In the field of numerical cognition, researchers conventionally assess nonsymbolic numerical abilities with the help of number comparison tasks, in which participants need to compare two arrays. Many studies emphasized that visual (non-numerical) dimensions can serve as strategic cues and influence the decision on numerosity in these tasks. In…

Ratings of perceptual experience on a trial-by-trial basis are increasingly used in masked priming studies to assess prime awareness. It is argued that such subjective ratings more adequately capture the content of phenomenal consciousness compared to the standard objective psychophysical measures obtained in a session after the priming…

It is difficult to recognize the identity of a face presented in negative contrast. This difficulty, however, is substantially reduced when only the eye region is contrast positive in an otherwise negative face image, and recognition of these so-called contrast chimeras approaches performance with full positive faces. This apparently similar…

When encountering new people for a brief instant, some seem to last in our memories while others are quickly forgotten. "Memorability"-whether a stimulus is likely to be later remembered-is highly consistent across different group of observers; people tend to remember and forget the same face images. However, is memorability intrinsic to…

It is well established that visual working memory (WM) for face identity is enhanced when faces display threatening versus nonthreatening expressions. During social interaction, it is also important to bind person identity with location information in WM to remember who was where, but we lack a clear understanding of how emotional expression…

How does the concurrent use of language affect perception and memory for exemplars? Labels cue more general category information than a specific exemplar. Applying labels can affect the resulting memory for an exemplar. Here 3 alternative hypotheses are proposed for the role of labeling an exemplar at encoding: (a) labels distort memory toward the…

Recent reports have suggested that the attended features of an item may be rapidly forgotten once they are no longer relevant for an ongoing task (attribute amnesia). This finding relies on a surprise memory procedure that places high demands on declarative memory. We used intertrial priming to examine whether the representation of an item's…

The perceptual fluency hypothesis claims that items that are easy to perceive at encoding induce an illusion that they will be easier to remember, despite the finding that perception does not generally affect recall. The current set of studies tested the predictions of the perceptual fluency hypothesis with a picture generation manipulation.…

Mental color imagery abilities are commonly measured using paradigms that involve naming, judging, or comparing the colors of visual mental images of well-known objects (e.g., "Is a sunflower darker yellow than a lemon"?). Although this approach is widely used in patient studies, differences in the ability to perform such color…

The goal of the study was to examine whether speakers naming pairs of objects would retrieve the names of the objects in parallel or in sequence. To this end, we recorded the speakers' eye movements and determined whether the difficulty of retrieving the name of the 2nd object affected the duration of the gazes to the 1st object. Two experiments,…

The authors conducted 4 repetition priming experiments that manipulated prime duration and prime diagnosticity in a visual forced-choice perceptual identification task. The strength and direction of prime diagnosticity produced marked effects on identification accuracy, but those effects were resistant to subsequent changes of diagnosticity.…

We show that perceptual sensitivity to visual stimuli can be modulated by matches between the contents of working memory (WM) and stimuli in the visual field. Observers were presented with an object cue (to hold in WM or to merely attend) and subsequently had to identify a brief target presented within a colored shape. The cue could be…

The authors address whether a hindsight bias exists for visual perception tasks. In 3 experiments, participants identified degraded celebrity faces as they resolved to full clarity (Phase 1). Following Phase 1, participants either recalled the level of blur present at the time of Phase 1 identification or predicted the level of blur at which a…