In visual search, a set of distractor items can be suppressed from future selection if they are presented (previewed) before a second set of search items arrive. This "visual marking" mechanism provides a top-down way of prioritizing the selection of new stimuli, at the expense of old stimuli already in the field (Watson & Humphreys,…

Unexpected and task-irrelevant sounds can capture our attention and may cause distraction effects reflected by impaired performance in a primary task unrelated to the perturbing sound. The present auditory-visual oddball study examines the effect of the informational content of a sound on the performance in a visual discrimination task. The…

In visual searches, stimuli following the law of good continuity attract attention to the global structure and receive attentional priority. Also, targets that have unique features are of high feature contrast and capture attention in visual search. We report on a salient global structure combined with a high orientation contrast to the…

In the present experiments, the question being addressed was whether switching attention between perceptual dimensions and selective attention to dimensions are processes that compete over a common resource? Attention to perceptual dimensions is usually studied by requiring participants to ignore a never-relevant dimension. Selection failure…

This article presents an experimental study on the naturally biased association between shape and color. For each basic geometric shape studied, participants were asked to indicate the color perceived as most closely related to it, choosing from the Natural Color System Hue Circle. Results show that the choices of color for each shape were not…

In a crowded dynamic world, temporal expectations guide our attention in time. Prior investigations have consistently demonstrated that temporal expectations speed motor behavior. We explore effects of temporal expectation on "perceptual" speed in three nonspeeded, cued recognition paradigms. Different hazard rate functions for the…

Mind wandering is a pervasive feature of human cognition often associated with the withdrawal of task-related executive control processes. Here, we explore the possibility that, in tasks requiring executive control to sustain consistent responding, moments of mind wandering could be associated with moments of increased behavioral variability. To…

In human-human interactions, corepresenting a partner's actions is crucial to successfully adjust and coordinate actions with others. Current research suggests that action corepresentation is restricted to interactions between human agents facilitating social interaction with conspecifics. In this study, we investigated whether action…

Typical studies of object substitution masking (OSM) employ a briefly presented search array. The target item is indicated by a cue/mask that surrounds but does not overlap the target and, compared to a common offset control condition, report of the target is reduced when the mask remains present after target offset. Given how little observers are…

People often coordinate their actions with sequences that exhibit temporal variability and unfold at multiple periodicities. We compared oscillator- and timekeeper-based accounts of temporal coordination by examining musicians' coordination of rhythmic musical sequences with a metronome that gradually changed rate at the end of a musical phrase…

There is broad consensus that printed complex words are identified on the basis of their constituent morphemes. This fact raises the issue of how the word identification system codes for morpheme position, hence allowing it to distinguish between words like "overhang" and "hangover", and to recognize that "preheat" is…

Growing experimental evidence suggests that temporal events are represented on a mental time line, spatially oriented from left to right. Support for the spatial representation of time comes mostly from studies that have used spatially organized responses. Moreover, many of these studies did not avoid possible confounds attributable to target…

When two targets follow each other directly in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), they are often identified correctly but reported in the wrong order. These order reversals are commonly explained in terms of the rate at which the two targets are processed, the idea being that the second target can sometimes overtake the first in the race…

Research on bimanual coordination of hand movements has identified several loci of bimanual interference, including interference because of programming different movement parameters or selecting different targets for the two hands. This study investigates the extent and origin of interference when participants execute bimanual actions with tools.…

Systematic errors in time reproduction tasks have been interpreted as a misperception of time and therefore seem to contradict basic assumptions of pacemaker-accumulator models. Here we propose an alternative explanation of this phenomenon based on methodological constraints regarding the direction of time, which cannot be manipulated in…