In visual communication, people glean insights about patterns of data by observing visual representations of datasets. Colormap data visualizations ("colormaps") show patterns in datasets by mapping variations in color to variations in magnitude. When people interpret colormaps, they have expectations about how colors map to magnitude,…

We investigated whether increased perceptual processing difficulty during reading or listening to a Sherlock Holmes novella impacts mind wandering as well as text comprehension. We presented 175 participants with a novella in either a visual or an auditory presentation format and probed their thoughts and motivational states from time to time…

When a highly salient distractor is present in a search array, it speeds target absent visual search and increases errors during target present visual search, suggesting lowered quitting thresholds (Moher in Psychol Sci 31(1):31-42, 2020). Missing a critical target in the presence of a highly salient distractor can have dire consequences in…

Observers' memory for a person's appearance can be compromised by the presence of a weapon, a phenomenon known as the weapon-focus effect (WFE). According to the unusual-item hypothesis, attention shifts from the perpetrator to the weapon because a weapon is an unusual object in many contexts. To test this assumption, we monitored participants'…

Prior research has shown that interruptions lead to a variety of performance costs. However, these costs are heterogenous and poorly understood. Under some circumstances, interruptions lead to large decreases in accuracy on the primary task, whereas in others task duration increases, but task accuracy is unaffected. Presently, the underlying cause…

Memorizing the multiplication table is a major challenge for elementary school students: there are many facts to memorize, and they are often similar to each other, which creates interference in memory. Here, we examined whether learning would improve if the degree of interference is reduced, and which memory processes are responsible for this…

Cognition and action are often intertwined in everyday life. It is thus pivotal to understand how cognitive processes operate with concurrent actions. The present study aims to assess how simple physical effort operationalized as isometric muscle contractions affects visual attention and inhibitory control. In a dual-task paradigm, participants…