The relation between mental imagery and visual perception is a long debated topic in experimental psychology. In a recent study, Wantz, Borst, Mast, and Lobmaier (2015) demonstrated that color imagery could benefit color perception in a task that involved generating imagery in response to a cue prior to a forced-choice color discrimination task.…

Perception and action are closely related. Responses are assumed to be represented in terms of their perceptual effects, allowing direct links between action and perception. In this regard, the integration of features of stimuli (S) and responses (R) into S-R bindings is a key mechanism for action control. Previous research focused on the…

The composite face paradigm (Young, Hellawell, & Hay, 1987) is widely used to demonstrate holistic perception of faces (Rossion, 2013). In the paradigm, parts from different faces (usually the top and bottom halves) are recombined. The principal criterion for holistic perception is that responses involving the component parts of composites in…

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…

As a large heterogeneity is observed across studies on interference control in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), research may benefit from the use of a cognitive framework that models specific processes underlying reactive and proactive control of interference. Reactive control refers to the expression and suppression of responses and proactive…

The detrimental effect of increased memory load on selective attention has been demonstrated in many situations. However, in search tasks over time using RSVP methods, it is not clear how memory load affects attentional processes; no effects as well as beneficial and detrimental effects of memory load have been found in these types of tasks. The…

Accounts of task-set control generally assume that the current task's stimulus-response (S-R) rules must be elevated to a privileged state of activation. How are they represented in this state? In 3 task-cuing experiments, we tested the hypothesis that phonological working memory is used to represent S-R rules for task-set control by getting…

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…

This study investigated the visual information that children and adults consider while switching or maintaining object-matching rules. Eye movements of 5- and 6-year-old children and adults were collected with two versions of the Advanced Dimensional Change Card Sort, which requires switching between shape- and color-matching rules. In addition to…

Objective: In this study, the authors investigated whether ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) behaviors share associations with problems in cognitive functioning and/or family risk factors in adolescence. This was done by examining independent as well as specific associations of cognitive functioning and family risk factors with ADHD and…

This research focused on the observation of infants between the ages of 2 and 18 months with regard to their aesthetic preferences for a variety of visual stimuli. These stimuli included: a black-and-white schematic drawing of a baby, a popular cartoon image, a colorful abstract painting of a baby, and a photographic image of a baby's face. Prior…

This study examined three visual strategies for timing the initiation of the landing flare based on perceptions of either: (a) a critical height above ground level; (b) a critical runway width angle ([psi]); or (c) a critical time-to-contact (TTC) with the runway. Visual displays simulated landing approaches with trial-to-trial variations in…

The aim of this study was to determine what visual information expert soccer players encode when they are asked to make a decision. We used a repetition-priming paradigm to test the hypothesis that experts encode a soccer pattern's structure independently of the players' physical characteristics (i.e., posture and morphology). The participants…

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…

Simple name-retrieval models of spoken word planning (Bloem & La Heij, 2003; Starreveld & La Heij, 1996) maintain (1) that there are two levels in word planning, a conceptual and a lexical phonological level, and (2) that planning a word in both object naming and oral reading involves the selection of a lexical phonological representation.…