This study tested whether including objects perceived as highly interesting by children with autism during a gaze following task would result in increased first fixation durations on the target objects. It has previously been found that autistic children differentiate less between an object another person attends to and unattended objects in terms…

Psychological research has documented again and again marked performance decrements whenever humans perform 2 or more tasks at the same time. In fact, the available evidence seems to suggest that any type of behavior is subject to such limitations. The present experiments employed the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm to identify a…

"Time-based prospective memory" (PM) refers to performing intended actions at a future time. Participants with time-based PM tasks can be slower to perform ongoing tasks (costs) than participants without PM tasks because internal control is required to maintain the PM intention or to make prospective-timing estimates. However, external…

Performing 2 highly similar tasks at the same time requires an adaptive regulation of cognitive control to shield prioritized primary task processing from between-task (cross-talk) interference caused by secondary task processing. In the present study, the authors investigated how implicitly and explicitly delivered information promotes the…

Salient objects in the visual field tend to capture attention. The present study aimed to examine the time-course of salience effects using a probe-detection task. Eight experiments investigated how the salience of different orientation singletons affected probe reaction time as a function of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the…

This study investigated the active inhibition of precued distractor locations. In this study, the distractor location was precued by an arrow. Experiment 1 indicated that a valid precue could facilitate target localization. Experiment 2 demonstrated that when conflict trials were included, the distractor precue benefit was eliminated. Experiment 3…

The substantial distractor interference obtained for small displays when the target appears alone is reduced in large displays when the target is embedded among neutral letters. This finding has been interpreted as reflecting low-load and high-load processing, respectively, thereby supporting the theory of perceptual load (Lavie & Tsal, 1994).…