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…

From infrared body temperature surveillance to lifeguarding, real-life visual search is usually continuous and comes with rare targets. Previous research has examined realistic search tasks involving separate slides (such as baggage screening and radiography), but search tasks that require continuous monitoring have generally received less…

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…

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…

Despite the discovery of body-selective neural areas in occipitotemporal cortex, little is known about how bodies are visually coded. We used perceptual adaptation to determine how body identity is coded. Brief exposure to a body (e.g., anti-Rose) biased perception toward an identity with opposite properties (Rose). Moreover, the size of this…

Mathematicians have proven that four colors are sufficient to color 2-D maps so that no neighboring regions share the same color. Here we consider the psychological 4-color problem: Identifying which 4 colors should be used to make a map easy to use. We build a model of visual search for this design task and demonstrate how to apply it to the task…

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…

A sparse mask that persists beyond the duration of a target can reduce its visibility, a phenomenon called "object substitution masking". Y. Jiang and M. M. Chun (2001a) found an asymmetric pattern of substitution masking such that a mask on the peripheral side of the target caused stronger substitution masking than on the central side.…

Observers given brief exposures of pairs of colored bars and asked to report both the color and the orientation of each bar showed evidence of stochastic independence between reports of the 4 features (2 colors and 2 orientations). The authors also found virtually perfect stochastic independence between reports of colors and directions of motion…

Do the viewpoint costs incurred when naming rotated familiar objects arise during initial identification or during consolidation? To answer this question we employed an attentional blink (AB) task where two target objects appeared amongst a rapid stream of distractor objects. Our assumption was that while both targets and distractors undergo…

Changes to a scene often go unnoticed if the objects of the change are unattended, making change detection an index of where attention is focused during scene perception. We measured change detection in school-age children and young adults by repeatedly alternating two versions of an image. To provide an age-fair assessment we used a bimanual…

The investigation was undertaken to obtain data on the number of kindergarten, second, and seventh grade Ss classified as having color vision defects by the American Optical-Hardy, Rand, Rittler Test (AO-HRR) and two tests by S. Ishihara. Also studied was the ability of color vision defective and color normal Ss to utilize color as measured by the…