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)…

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…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is a crucial repository of information when events unfold rapidly before our eyes, yet it maintains only a fraction of the sensory information encoded by the visual system. Here, we tested the hypothesis that saccadic eye movements provide a natural bottleneck for the transition of fragile content in sensory memory…

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…

The present study investigated whether learning how to use a web service with an interactive tutorial can be enhanced by cueing. We expected the attentional guidance provided by visual cues to facilitate the selection of information in static screen displays that corresponded to spoken explanations. Unlike most previous studies in this area, we…

Eye gaze is a powerful directional cue that automatically evokes joint attention states. Even when faces are ignored, there is incidental learning of the reliability of the gaze cueing of another person, such that people who look away from targets are judged less trustworthy. In a series of experiments, we demonstrated further properties of the…

Variability in attention towards direct gaze and child-directed speech may contribute to heterogeneity of clinical presentation in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). To evaluate this hypothesis, we clustered sixty-five 20-month-old toddlers with ASD based on their visual responses to dyadic cues for engagement, identifying three…

Inhibition of return (IOR) is modulated by task set and appears later in discrimination tasks than in detection tasks. Several hypotheses have been suggested to account for this difference. We tested three of these hypotheses in two experiments by examining the influence of cue and target level of processing on the onset of IOR. In the first…

Nine studies showed a bidirectional link (a) between a global processing style and generation of similarities and (b) between a local processing style and generation of dissimilarities. In Experiments 1-4, participants were primed with global versus local perception styles and then asked to work on an allegedly unrelated generation task. Across…