A fundamental issue in the design and the interpretation of experimental studies of perception relates to the question of whether the participants in these experiments could perform the perceptual task assigned to them using another feature, or cue, than that intended by the experimenter. An approach frequently used by auditory- and…

A growing number of studies claim that spatial attention can be split "on demand" into several, segregated foci of enhanced processing. Intrigued by the theoretical ramifications of this proposal, we analyzed 19 relevant sets of experiments using four methodological criteria. We typically found several methodological limitations in each study that…

How do humans use target-predictive contextual information to facilitate visual search? How are consistently paired scenic objects and positions learned and used to more efficiently guide search in familiar scenes? For example, humans can learn that a certain combination of objects may define a context for a kitchen and trigger a more efficient…

Human visual perception is a fundamentally relational process: Lightness perception depends on luminance ratios, and depth perception depends on occlusion (difference of depth) cues. Neurons in low-level visual cortex are sensitive to the difference (but not the value itself) of signals, and these differences have to be used to reconstruct the…

The simplest attentional task, detecting a cued stimulus in an otherwise empty visual field, produces complex patterns of performance. Attentional cues interact with backward masks and with spatial uncertainty, and there is a dissociation in the effects of these variables on accuracy and on response time. A computational theory of performance in…