Previous research has shown that processing words with an up/down association (e.g., bird, foot) can influence the subsequent identification of visual targets in congruent location (at the top/bottom of the screen). However, as facilitation and interference were found under similar conditions, the nature of the underlying mechanisms remained…

According to a recent hypothesis, the CV pattern (i.e., the arrangement of consonant and vowel letters) constrains the mental representation of letter strings, with each vowel or vowel cluster being the core of a unit. Six experiments with the same/different task were conducted to test whether this structure is extracted prelexically. In the…

Decision-makers effortlessly balance the need for urgency against the need for caution. Theoretical and neurophysiological accounts have explained this tradeoff solely in terms of the "quantity" of evidence required to trigger a decision (the "threshold"). This explanation has also been used as a benchmark test for evaluating…