When an actor performs an action on an external object, the actor feels that he or she is exerting a force on that object. By extension, when an observer views a collision between 2 objects, he or she is able to perceive the force that is exerted on the objects during the collision. The latter case is puzzling, as force is not a visual feature per…

The attentional weight of a visual object depends on the contrast of the features of the object to its local surroundings (feature contrast) and the relevance of the features to one's goals (feature relevance). We investigated the dependency in partial report experiments with briefly presented stimuli but unspeeded responses. The task was to…

Many modern theories propose that perceptual information is represented by the sensorimotor activity elicited by the original stimulus. Scanpath theory (Noton & Stark, 1971) predicts that reinstating a sequence of eye fixations will help an observer recognize a previously seen image. However, the only studies to investigate this are…

Consistent with long-standing findings from behavioral studies, neuroimaging investigations have identified a region of the inferior temporal cortex that, in adults, shows greater face selectivity in the right than left hemisphere and, conversely, a region that shows greater word selectivity in the left than right hemisphere. What has not been…

Regulatory conflict can emerge when people experience a strong motivation to act on goals but a conflicting inclination to withhold action because physical resources available, or "physiological potentials", are low. This study demonstrated that distance perception is biased in ways that theory suggests assists in managing this conflict.…

Can the mind be divorced from the body? As evidenced by a host of findings in the traditions of grounded cognition and embodiment, sensorimotor experience can exert a powerful influence on what and how people think. The current investigation explores the conditions that temper or enable this influence, proposing that level of mental construal may…

Is one's temporal perception of the world truly as seamless as it appears? This article presents a computationally motivated theory suggesting that visual attention samples information from temporal episodes (episodic simultaneous type/serial token model; Wyble, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2009). Breaks between these episodes are punctuated by periods…

Visual perceptual learning (PL) and perceptual expertise (PE) traditionally lead to different training effects and recruit different brain areas, but reasons for these differences are largely unknown. Here, we tested how the learning history influences visual object representations. Two groups were trained with tasks typically used in PL or PE…

It has been proposed that two major axes, dominance and trustworthiness, characterize the social dimensions of face evaluation. Whether evaluation of faces on these social dimensions is restricted to conscious appraisal or happens at a preconscious level is unknown. Here we provide behavioral evidence that such preconscious evaluations exist and…

Is it easier to detect angry or happy facial expressions in crowds of faces? The present studies used several variations of the visual search task to assess whether people selectively attend to expressive faces. Contrary to widely cited studies (e.g., Ohman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001) that suggest angry faces "pop out" of crowds, our review of…

Comparing experts with novices offers unique insights into the functioning of cognition, based on the maximization of individual differences. Here we used this expertise approach to disentangle the mechanisms and neural basis behind two processes that contribute to everyday expertise: object and pattern recognition. We compared chess experts and…

In the past 20 years, numerous theories and findings have suggested that the unit of visual attention is the object. In this study, I first clarify 2 different meanings of unit of visual attention, namely the unit of access in the sense of measurement and the unit of selection in the sense of division. In accordance with this distinction, I argue…

Current models of visual search assume that visual attention can be guided by tuning attention toward specific feature values (e.g., particular size, color) or by inhibiting the features of the irrelevant nontargets. The present study demonstrates that attention and eye movements can also be guided by a relational specification of how the target…

Actions do not have inherent meaning but rather can be interpreted in many ways. The interpretation a person adopts has important effects on a range of higher order cognitive processes. One dimension on which interpretations can vary is the extent to which actions are identified abstractly--in relation to broader goals, personal characteristics,…

Brain-electric correlates of reading have traditionally been studied with word-by-word presentation, a condition that eliminates important aspects of the normal reading process and precludes direct comparisons between neural activity and oculomotor behavior. In the present study, we investigated effects of word predictability on eye movements (EM)…