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…

The ability to individuate objects is one of our most fundamental cognitive capacities. Recent research has revealed that when objects vary in color or luminance alone, infants fail to individuate those objects until 11.5 months. However, color and luminance frequently covary in the natural environment, thus providing a more salient and reliable…

The experiments reported here investigated the development of a fundamental component of cognition: to recognize and generalize abstract relations. Infants were presented with simple rule-governed patterned sequences of visual shapes (ABB, AAB, and ABA) that could be discriminated from differences in the position of the repeated element (late,…

The failure to discriminate between a pattern consisting of four orthogonal bars and the same pattern rotated by 45 degrees has been interpreted in the literature as evidence against pictorial representations in honeybees. This study determines whether prior training can facilitate the discrimination. In Experiment 1, one group of bumblebees was…

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…

An operant conditioning technique was used to study visual discrimination of simple patterns by infants aged 6-12 weeks. The appropriate direction of head turning to the patterns was developed and maintained by social reinforcement. Results showed that visual discriminative control of the direction of head turning can be achieved. (WY)

Several propositions deduced from the discrepancy hypothesis were tested with four-month-old infants using random shapes in a habituation/discrepancy paradigm. (JMB)

Reports three experiments which investigated the discrimination of simple visual arrangements by three-month-old infants. An operant high-amplitude sucking technique was used in a stimulus familiarization-novelty paradigm. (JMB)

Adult subjects viewed pictures at brief intervals, testing their reactions to informative objects--those not redundant with or predictive of the rest of the picture, such as a tractor in an underwater scene. Results indicated that observers fixate earlier, more often, and longer on informative objects. (Author/SJL)

Gestalt psychologists have given many examples to demonstrate that laws of visual organization cause one view of scene to dominate others. This is also true for simple shapes. A figure can be articulated into many fragments but only a few will be perceptually dominant. (Author)

Butler (1980) compared errors representing intrusions and mislocalizations on 3x3 letter displays under pattern-mask versus no-mask conditions and found that pattern masking increased character mislocalization errors (naming a character in the display but not in the target position as being the target) over intrusion errors (naming a character not…