To describe a scene, speakers must map visual information to a linguistic plan. Eye movements capture features of this linkage in a tendency for speakers to fixate referents just before they are mentioned. The current experiment examined whether and how this pattern changes when speakers create atypical mappings. Eye movements were monitored as…

The ability to detect a change, to accurately assess the magnitude of the change, and to react to that change in a commensurate fashion are of critical importance in many decision domains. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that systematically affect people's reactions to change. In this article we document a novel effect: Decision…

Given a changing visual environment, and the limited capacity of visual working memory (VWM), the contents of VWM must be in constant flux. Using a change detection task, the authors show that VWM is subject to obligatory updating in the face of new information. Change detection performance is enhanced when the item that may change is…