Can we use attentional control to ignore known distractor features? Providing cues before a visual search trial about an upcoming distractor color (negative cue) can lead to reaction time benefits compared with no cue trials. This suggests top-down control may use negative templates to actively suppress distractor features, a notion that…

Working memory (WM) has a limited capacity; however, this limitation can be mitigated by selecting individual items from the set currently held in WM for prioritization. The selection mechanism underlying this prioritization ability is referred to as the focus of attention (FOA) in WM. Although impressive progress has been achieved in recent…

We examined spontaneous attention orienting to visual salience in stimuli without social significance using a modified Dot-Probe task during functional magnetic resonance imaging in high-functioning preadolescent children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and age- and IQ-matched control children. While the magnitude of attentional bias (faster…

How does developing attentional control operate within visual short-term memory (VSTM)? Seven-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults (total n = 205) were asked to report whether probe items were part of preceding visual arrays. In Experiment 1, central or peripheral cues oriented attention to the location of to-be-probed items either prior to…

By varying the probabilities that a stimulus would appear at particular times after the presentation of a cue and modeling the data by the theory of visual attention (Bundesen, 1990), Vangkilde, Coull, and Bundesen (2012) provided evidence that the speed of encoding a singly presented stimulus letter into visual short-term memory (VSTM) is…

Faces convey many signals (i.e., gaze or expressions) essential for interpersonal interaction. We have previously shown that facial expressions of emotion and gaze direction are processed and integrated in specific combinations early in life. These findings open a number of developmental questions and specifically in this paper we address whether…

Difficulties in visual attention are increasingly being linked to dyslexia. To date, the majority of studies have inferred functionality of attention from response times to stimuli presented for an indefinite duration. However, in paradigms that use reaction times to investigate the ability to orient attention, a delayed reaction time could also…

When searching for a "pop-out" target, interference from a salient but irrelevant distractor can be reduced or even prevented under certain circumstances. Here, five experiments were conducted to further our understanding of three different aspects of top-down interference reduction: first, whether or not qualitatively different search modes can…

Current models of visual search assume that visual attention can be guided by tuning attention toward specific feature values (e.g., particular size, color) or by inhibiting the features of the irrelevant nontargets. The present study demonstrates that attention and eye movements can also be guided by a relational specification of how the target…

Research suggests that visual selective attention develops across childhood. However, there is relatively little understanding of the neurological changes that accompany this development, particularly in the context of adult theories of selective attention, such as N. Lavie's (1995) perceptual load theory of attention. This study examined visual…

Alerting, orienting and executive control of attention are investigated in five adult cases of dyslexia. In comparison with a control group, alerting and executive control were found to be generally intact for each case. Two spatial cueing tasks were employed. For the task requiring target detection, orienting difficulties were evident only in…

The authors propose that there are 2 different mechanisms whereby spatial cues capture attention. The voluntary mechanism is the strategic allocation of perceptual resources to the location most likely to contain the target. The involuntary mechanism is a reflexive orienting response that occurs even when the spatial cue does not indicate the…

Models of attentional control usually describe online shifts in control settings that accommodate changing task demands. The current studies suggest that online control over distractor exclusion--a core component of visual selection--can be accomplished without online shifts in top-down settings. Measurements of target discrimination accuracy…

The relation between reflexive and voluntary orienting of visual attention was investigated with 4 experiments: a simple detection task, a localization task, a saccade toward the target task, and a target identification task in which discrimination difficulty was manipulated. Endogenous and exogenous orienting cues were presented in each trial and…

A recent proposal suggests that dyslexic individuals suffer from attentional deficiencies, which impair the ability to selectively process incoming visual information. To investigate this possibility, we employed a spatial cueing procedure in conjunction with a single fixation visual search task measuring thresholds for discriminating the…