Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined…

Despite the discovery of body-selective neural areas in occipitotemporal cortex, little is known about how bodies are visually coded. We used perceptual adaptation to determine how body identity is coded. Brief exposure to a body (e.g., anti-Rose) biased perception toward an identity with opposite properties (Rose). Moreover, the size of this…

Color and intensity coding provide perceptual cues to segregate categories of objects within a visual display, allowing operators to search more efficiently for needed information. Even within a perceptually distinct subset of display elements, however, it may often be useful to prioritize items representing urgent or task-critical information.…

Purpose: Communication about feelings is a core element of human interaction. Aided augmentative and alternative communication systems must therefore include symbols representing these concepts. The symbols must be readily distinguishable in order for users to communicate effectively. However, emotions are represented within most systems by…

CHROMACODE is a conceptual tool that uses systematic, logical, and visual processes for organizing and analyzing qualitative research findings for the researcher with relatively low technical knowledge of data analysis. It can best be described as a visual conceptual scheme with coding based on a color-dependent procedure. Color provides a sense…

Do readers encode the sequencing of consonant (C) and vowel (V) phonemes (skeletal structure) in printed words? The authors used the Stroop task to examine readers' sensitivity to skeletal structure. In Experiment 1, CVC nonwords (e.g., pof) facilitated the naming of colors with congruent frames (e.g., red, a CVC word) but not with incongruent…

Examined the effect of different levels of color and black/gray/white in visuals to facilitate student achievement of facts, concepts, and generalizations. Participants were 244 high school students in Puerto Rico. Results indicated a significant Intelligence-Quotient and learning-style effect on dependent measures and the color-coding effect…

The role of color used in graphics in facilitating recall of verbal material was studied in a follow-up to previous research on the use of a color code in graphics presentations. An analysis of variance for repeated measures was used to test the hypothesis that significant interactions and differences would occur. Independent variables manipulated…