Eye movements of Chinese readers were recorded for sentences in which high- and low-frequency target words were presented normally or with reduced stimulus quality in two experiments. We found stimulus quality and word frequency produced strong additive effects on fixation durations for target words. The results demonstrate that stimulus quality…

With eye-tracking technology the eye is thought to give researchers a window into the mind. Importantly, eye-tracking has significant advantages over traditional online processing measures: chiefly that it allows for more "natural" processing as it does not require a secondary task, and that it provides a very rich moment-to-moment data…

With many features competing for attention in their visual environment, infants must learn to deploy attention toward informative cues while ignoring distractions. Three eye tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether 6- and 8-month-olds (total N = 102) would shift attention away from a distractor stimulus to learn a cue-reward…

Relative to low scorers, high scorers on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) show enhanced performance on the Embedded Figures Test and the Radial Frequency search task (RFST), which has been attributed to both enhanced local processing and differences in combining global percepts. We investigate the role of local and global processing further using…

Background: It is frequently observed that listeners demonstrate gaze aversion to stuttering. This response may have profound social/communicative implications for both fluent and stuttering individuals. However, there is a lack of empirical examination of listeners' eye gaze responses to stuttering, and it is unclear whether cultural background…

The hypothesis that lonely children show hypervigilance for social threat was examined in a series of three studies that employed different methods including advanced eye-tracking technology. Hypervigilance for social threat was operationalized as hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion in a variation of the hostile attribution…

This article presents an eye-tracking study using a novel combination of visual saliency maps and "area-of-interest" analyses to explore online feature extraction during category learning in infants. Category learning in 12-month-olds (N = 22) involved a transition from looking at high-saliency image regions to looking at more…

Six-month-olds reliably discriminate different monkey and human faces whereas 9-month-olds only discriminate different human faces. It is often falsely assumed that perceptual narrowing reflects a permanent change in perceptual abilities. In 3 experiments, ninety-six 12-month-olds' discrimination of unfamiliar monkey faces was examined. Following…

Previous research has shown that the detection of a visual target can be guided not only by the temporal integration of two percepts, but also by integrating a percept and an image held in working memory. Behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) measures were obtained in a target detection task that required temporal integration of 2…

Research points to a right hemisphere bias for processing social stimuli. Hemispheric specialization for attention shifts cued by social stimuli, however, has been rarely studied. We examined the capacity of each hemisphere to orient attention in response to social and nonsocial cues using a lateralized spatial cueing paradigm. We compared the…

This study investigated feature- and dimension-based intertrial effects in visual search for a pop-out target. The 2 prominent theories explaining intertrial effects, priming of pop-out and dimension weighting, both assume that repeating the target from the previous trial facilitates attention shifts to the target, whereas changing the target…

Previous studies that have found attentional capture effects for stimuli of motivational significance do not directly measure initial attentional deployment, leaving it unclear to what extent these items produce attentional capture. Visual prior entry, as measured by temporal order judgments (TOJs), rests on the premise that allocated attention…

The attentional blink refers to the transient impairment in perceiving the 2nd of two targets presented in close temporal proximity in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect on human attentional-blink performance of disrupting the function of the magnocellular pathway--a major…

Adults have little difficulty perceiving objects as complete despite occlusion, but newborn infants perceive moving partly occluded objects solely in terms of visible surfaces. The developmental mechanisms leading to perceptual completion have never been adequately explained. Here, the authors examine the potential contributions of oculomotor…