It is harder to find the letter "N" among its mirror reversals than vice versa, an inconvenient finding for bottom-up saliency accounts based on primary visual cortex (V1) mechanisms. However, in line with this account, we found that in dense search arrays, gaze first landed on either target equally fast. Remarkably, after first landing,…

This study integrates agent research with a neurocognitive technique to study how character faces affect cognitive processing. The N170 event-related potential (ERP) was used to study face processing during simple decision-making tasks. Twenty-five adults responded to facial expressions (fear/neutral) presented in three designs…

When data are collected via anonymous Internet surveys, particularly under conditions of obligatory participation (such as with student samples), data quality can be a concern. However, little guidance exists in the published literature regarding techniques for detecting careless responses. Previously several potential approaches have been…

Evidence from human cognitive neuroscience, animal neurophysiology, and behavioral research demonstrates that human adults, infants, and children share a common nonverbal quantity processing system with nonhuman animals. This system appears to represent both discrete and continuous quantity, but the proper characterization of the relationship…

Although object-based attention enhances perceptual processing of information appearing within the boundaries of a selected object, little is known about the consequences for information in the object's surround. The authors show that distance from an attended object's center of mass determines reaction time (RT) to targets in the surround. Of 2…

Preschool, third grade and fifth grade children were presented with two choice-reaction time experiments in which probe stimulus quality was manipulated, to measure the effects of probe stimulus degradation at three developmental levels. Results support the hypothesis that children and adults employ similar strategies in preprocessing degraded…

Examined developmental change and stability of visual expectation and reaction times among 5-, 7-, and 12-month-old term and preterm infants. Found that reaction times declined with age while anticipations increased. Infants with faster reaction times were more likely to anticipate upcoming events; this effect disappeared when time between stimuli…

Comparisons of the regression profile and correlations of physical measures with latency for a 5-year-old subject (who performed 1250 trials in a form recognition task) with those for a group of 25 adults indicated that use of form information was highly consistent across age levels. (Author/WY)

Three experiments employed rectangles in stimulus identification tasks. It was concluded that the initial perceptual processing of rectangles is accomplished by separate dimensional analyzers operating in parallel. Observers adopt different decision strategies for negatively correlated sets and for single dimension sets when the number of…

Results were interpreted in terms of current conceptions of age differences in information-processing speed. (Author)

Two strings of letters were presented. Subjects were instructed to indicate whether the second string contained the same elements as the first, regardless of position. Reaction time increased with the number of positions that the letters were displaced. Results indicate that order may be an important factor in retrieval from memory. (Author/BW)

The similarity match took longer than the identity match, and the difference in latency increased as the number of lines in the pattern increased. (Author)

Presents two experiments which investigated whether there is a shift with age in the relative speed and difficulty of same versus different judgments. Subjects included preschoolers, third graders, and college students. (SDH)

The processing of mental structures in perception appears to be serial, in that viewers can fill in missing parts from an impoverished stimulus following a top down process. To investigate the effects of unfamiliarity, complexity, and legibility on object and layout perception of unfamiliar stimuli, ten subjects were shown one of four ribbon…

Results from three studies involving college, third grade, and kindergarten subjects, suggest that individuals across a wide age range are able to use the visual properties of a stimulus for only a very brief period as the basis for making matched judgments. (Author/SDH)