Attention is biased toward features aligning with task goals and stimuli previously allocated attentional priority (selection history). The relationship between selection history and the strategic control of attention has scarcely been explored. In the present study, we utilized a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS) task…

Irrelevant salient distractors can trigger early quitting in visual search, causing observers to miss targets they might otherwise find. Here, we asked whether task-relevant salient cues can produce a similar early quitting effect on the subset of trials where those cues fail to highlight the target. We presented participants with a difficult…

Previous research suggests that children's ability to label visual features (e.g. "red") and dimensions (e.g. "color") impacts attention to visual dimensions. The goal of this study is to investigate variations in the quality of the neural system supporting dimensional label comprehension and production in relation to…

Children (N = 103, 4-9 years, 59 females, 84% White, c. 2019) completed visual processing, visual feature integration (color, luminance, motion), and visual search tasks. Contrast sensitivity and feature search improved with age similarly for luminance and color-defined targets. Incidental feature integration improved more with age for…

Background: Circumscribed interests (CIs) are regarded as one of the common symptoms for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Although some studies have found attentional bias toward CI-related stimuli for individuals with ASD, few studies have directly explored the reasons for these findings. Method: Children with ASD (n = 15) and…

This study investigates the influence of plant landscape colors on the quality of life of college students at Sichuan Vocational College of Health and Rehabilitation in Zigong City, China. The research employed a mixed-methods approach, integrating quantitative data from 328 student questionnaires with qualitative insights from in-depth interviews…

Purpose: Aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) displays are often designed as symmetrical row--column grids, with each square in the grid containing a symbol. To maximize vocabulary on displays, symbols are often placed close to one another, and background color cuing is used to signal/differentiate symbols across different…

The presented study examines the question of colour categorization in relation to the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. The study is based on research conducted by Gilbert et al. (2006) and their claim that linguistic colour categorization in a particular language helps colour recognition and speeds the process of colour discrimination for…

Working memory (WM) improves dramatically during childhood but what drives this improvement is not well understood. One influential account thus far has proposed a simple increase in storage capacity. However, recent findings have shown that multiple factors, such as differences in the ability to use attention to enhance the maintenance of…

Understanding others' preference for a relational category of objects (e.g., prefer darker colored shirts) can be challenging for young children, as it involves comparison of choice options within and across exemplars. Adding to the challenge is occasional inconsistency in choices made by others. Here the authors examined whether 14-month-olds…

This study explored whether the color of letters could influence letter discrimination task performances and whether this effect of color could be modulated by processing level (global vs. local) and attention level of color (color-attended vs. color-unattended). We used the Navon letters in red, green, or white as stimuli at a relatively small…

Mounting evidence suggests that monetary reward induces an incidentally learned selection bias toward highly rewarded features. It remains controversial, however, whether learning of reward regularities has similar effects on spatial attention. Here we ask whether spatial biases toward highly rewarded locations are learned implicitly, or are…

Redundant modifiers can facilitate referential interpretation by narrowing attention to intended referents. This is intriguing because, on traditional accounts, redundancy should impair comprehension. Little is known, however, about the effects of redundancy on older adults' comprehension. Older adults may show different patterns due to…

Automaticity can be established by consistently reinforcing contingencies during practice. During reinforcement learning, however, new relations can also be derived, which were never directly reinforced. For instance, reinforcing the overlapping contingencies A [right arrow] B and A [right arrow] C, can lead to a new relation B-C, which was never…

Although domain-specificity is prevalent in models of human cognition, its presence is not always easy to verify. For example, according to one prominent model, experiencing conflict from an incongruent distractor in a Stroop-like task triggers an upregulation of domain-specific control that facilitates the resolution of the same, but not a…