Simultaneous and temporal masking are two frequently used techniques in psychology and vision science. Although there are many studies and theories related to each masking technique, there are no systematic investigations of their mutual relationship, even though both techniques are often applied together. Here, the authors show that temporal…

We report a series of investigations into the effects of common names, physical identity, and physical similarity on visual detection time. The effect of these factors on the capacity of the system processing the signals was also examined. We used a redundant targets design with separate testing of the target-distractor (single target),…

A briefly presented target can be rendered invisible by a lingering sparse mask that does not even touch it. This form of visual backward masking, called object substitution masking, is thought to occur at the object level of processing. However, it remains unclear whether object-level interference alone produces substitution masking because…

Humans have an extremely flexible ability to categorize regularities in their environment, in part because of attentional systems that allow them to focus on important perceptual information. In formal theories of categorization, attention is typically modeled with weights that selectively bias the processing of stimulus features. These theories…

We investigated the roles of top-down task set and bottom-up stimulus salience for feature-specific attentional capture. Spatially nonpredictive cues preceded search arrays that included a color-defined target. For target-color singleton cues, behavioral spatial cueing effects were accompanied by cue-induced N2pc components, indicative of…

The main purpose of this study was to assess whether seventh-grade students use of information and communication technology (ICT) was related to performance on working memory tasks. In addition, the study tested whether the relationship between ICT use and performance on working memory tasks interacted with seventh-grade students' socioeconomic…

Recent spatial cuing studies have shown that detection sensitivity can be increased by the allocation of attention. This increase has been attributed to one of two mechanisms: signal enhancement or uncertainty reduction. Signal enhancement is an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio at the cued location; uncertainty reduction is a reduction in the…

The metacognitive performance of four groups of students was examined. The students' processes of visual analysis and discrimination of real-life pictures were used to measure metacognition. There were 61 participants: 18 hearing students, 18 deaf and hard of hearing students, 16 students with mild mental disabilities, and 9 students with physical…