Spatial memory is important for supporting the successful completion of everyday activities and is a particularly vulnerable domain in late life. Grouping items together in memory, or chunking, can improve spatial memory performance. In memory for desktop scale spaces and well-learned large-scale environments, error patterns suggest that…

The FedEx logo makes clever use of figure-ground ambiguity to create an "invisible" arrow in the background space between "E" and "x". Most designers believe the hidden arrow can convey an unconscious impression of speed and precision about the FedEx brand, which may influence subsequent behavior. To test this…

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…

Visual working memory (WM) plays a pivotal role in integrating fragments into meaningful units, but no study has addressed how visual WM integration takes place in children. The current study examined whether WM integration emerges once preschoolers master Gestalt cue and can retain two representations in WM (automatic integration hypothesis), or…

This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

It is a prevailing theoretical claim that path integration is the primary means of developing global spatial representations. However, this claim is at odds with reported difficulty to develop global spatial representations of a multiscale environment using path integration. The current study tested a new hypothesis that locally similar but…

The process of spoken word recognition is influenced by both bottom-up sensory information and top-down cognitive information. These cues are used to process the phonological and semantic representations of speech. Several studies have used EEG/ERPs to study the neural mechanisms of children's spoken word recognition, but less is known about the…

Visual search is faster when a fixed target location is paired with a spatially invariant (vs. randomly changing) distractor configuration, thus indicating that repeated contexts are learned, thereby guiding attention to the target (contextual cueing [CC]). Evidence for memory-guided attention has also been revealed with electrophysiological…

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…

Background: The ability to translate concrete manipulatives into abstract mathematical formulas can aid in the solving of mathematical word problems among students, and metacognitive prompts play a significant role in enhancing this process. Aims: Based on the concept of semantic congruence, we explored the effects of metacognitive prompts and…

How are scene representations stored in memory? Researchers have often posited that scene representations have a hierarchical structure with background elements providing a scaffold for more detailed foreground elements. To further investigate scene representation and the role of background and foreground information, we introduced a new stimulus…

Infants' ability to perform visual short-term memory (VSTM) tasks develops rapidly between 6 and 8 months. Here we tested the hypothesis that infants' VSTM performance is influenced by their ability to individuate simultaneously presented objects. We used a "one-shot change detection task" to ask whether 6-month-old infants (N = 47)…

The association between a word and typical location (e.g., cloud-up) appears to modulate healthy individuals' response times and visual attention. This study examined whether similar effects can be observed in a clinical population characterized by difficulties in both spatial representation and lexical processing. In an eye-tracking experiment,…

Referential gaze has been shown to benefit language processing in situated communication in terms of shifting visual attention and leading to shorter reaction times on subsequent tasks. The present study simultaneously assessed both visual attention and, importantly, the immediate cognitive load induced at different stages of sentence processing.…

Visual categorization is ubiquitous in many professions, yet training programs are typically time- and effort-intensive. This work focuses on developing methods to improve human learning and performance on challenging visual categorization tasks, e.g., bird species identification, diagnostic dermatology. As part of the general approach, we infer…