Assessing the time course under which underlying memory representations can be formed is an important question for understanding memory. Several studies assessing item memory have shown that gist representations of items are laid out more rapidly than verbatim representations. However, for associations among items/components, which form the core…

Inhibition of return (IOR) is modulated by task set and appears later in discrimination tasks than in detection tasks. Several hypotheses have been suggested to account for this difference. We tested three of these hypotheses in two experiments by examining the influence of cue and target level of processing on the onset of IOR. In the first…

In cross-dimensional visual search tasks, target discrimination is faster when the previous trial contained a target defined in the same visual dimension as the current trial. The dimension-weighting account (DWA; A. Found & H. J. Muller, 1996) explains this intertrial facilitation by assuming that visual dimensions are weighted at an early…

The aim of this study was to determine what visual information expert soccer players encode when they are asked to make a decision. We used a repetition-priming paradigm to test the hypothesis that experts encode a soccer pattern's structure independently of the players' physical characteristics (i.e., posture and morphology). The participants…

Nine studies showed a bidirectional link (a) between a global processing style and generation of similarities and (b) between a local processing style and generation of dissimilarities. In Experiments 1-4, participants were primed with global versus local perception styles and then asked to work on an allegedly unrelated generation task. Across…

What happens after visual attention is allocated to an object? Although many theories of attention assume that all of its features are selected and processed, there has been little direct evidence that an irrelevant feature dimension of an attended nontarget is processed. In 5 experiments presented here, the authors used a singleton paradigm to…

The experiment compared the visual sensory sensitivity of six deaf and six hearing Ss (mean age 11.2 years) in a signal detection paradigm. Ss were required to give forced-choice responses to a brightness discrimination task under three stimulus probability conditions. (Author/PHR)

Infants at two age levels were shown six patterns which represented three levels of stimulus complexity and two types of organization, facial and nonfacial. Results agree with previous studies in suggesting a change between ages 10 and 15 weeks in dimensions which underlie infants' response to facelike patterns. (Author/HS)

The efficacy of gating in the processing of simple, multidimensional stimuli was investigated. In Experiment 1, a continuous classification task was used, with subjects sorting cards according to binary dimensions of line orientation and location. Results suggested that orientation and location are integral dimensions, facilitation occurring with…

The holistic-discriminability model of object-space perception recognizes various classes of stimuli having different task requirements, with few assumptions. The alternative analytic model, contrary to Dykes and Cooper, is inadequate; it involves many assumptions, predicts only a limited set of data and makes some incorrect predictions.…

Testing Pollack's hypothesis that decreases in effective contour contrast (resulting from a decrease in receptor sensitivity with age or from a change in actual stimulus contrast) lead to decreases in illusion magnitude. Conclusions are questioned by Sjostrom and Pollack (PS 501 740). (Author/MB)

The effects of orthographic regularity and visual familiarity on internal coding and processing of visual stimuli were investigated in four experiments using college student subjects. Consistent effects of orthography on the activation of all codes were found. Familiarity influenced semantic more than phonetic codes. Implications for reading…

INFANT SCRIBBLING ACTIVITY IS NOT SIMPLY PLAY. IT CONTRIBUTES TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF VISUAL ATTENTION AND PERCEPTION. YET, SCRIBBLING, UNLIKE WRITING IN THE COMMUNICATION SENSE, IS NOT MOTIVATED BY THE DESIRE TO INFORM, NOR TO SET DOWN THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS. THE EXPERIMENTAL HYPOTHESIS OF THIS STUDY WAS THAT THE MOTIVATIONS FOR SCRIBBLING ARE (1)…