Ratings of perceptual experience on a trial-by-trial basis are increasingly used in masked priming studies to assess prime awareness. It is argued that such subjective ratings more adequately capture the content of phenomenal consciousness compared to the standard objective psychophysical measures obtained in a session after the priming…

Visual inspection of luggage using X-ray technology at airports is a time-sensitive task that is often supported by automated systems to increase performance and reduce workload. The present study evaluated how time pressure and automation support influence visual search behavior and performance in a simulated luggage screening task. Moreover, we…

This pilot study explored the impact of an eight-session attentional skills training (AST) program for elementary-age school children. Twenty-four students, 3rd through 6th grade, participated in guidance sessions involving exposure to mindfulness exercises and video gaming activities designed to challenge visual attention, memory, and…

This study examined the use of an instructional package consisting of structured criteria, extrastimulus prompts, prompt delay, and reinforcement contingencies to improve decision making based on visual analysis of case-study (A/B) design data. Four participants without backgrounds in behavior analysis received training under two experimental…

A central question in working memory research concerns the degree to which information in working memory is accessible to other cognitive processes (e.g., decision-making). Theories assuming that the focus of attention can only store a single object at a time require the focus to orient to a target representation before further processing can…

Perceptual simulations are unconscious and automatic, whereas perceptual imagery is conscious and deliberate, but it is unclear how easily one can transfer perceptual information from unconscious to conscious awareness. We investigated whether it is possible to be aware of what one is mentally representing; that is, whether it is possible to…

Reaction times in lexical decision are more sensitive to a words' length and orthographic-neighborhood density when the stimulus is presented to the left visual field (LVF) than to the right visual field (RVF). We claim that the length effect is equivalent to the neighborhood effect, and propose a novel explanation of why the LVF, but not the RVF,…

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 the bottom halves of two faces differ, people's behavioral judgment of the identical top halves of those faces is impaired: they report that the top halves are different, and/or take more time than usual to provide a response. This behavioral measure is known as the composite face effect (CFE) and has traditionally been taken as evidence that…

Psychological research has placed great emphasis on inhibitory control due to its integral role in normal cognition and clinical disorders. The stop-signal task and associated measure--stop-signal reaction time (SSRT)--provides a well-established paradigm for measuring response inhibition. However, motivational influences on stop-signal…

The simplest attentional task, detecting a cued stimulus in an otherwise empty visual field, produces complex patterns of performance. Attentional cues interact with backward masks and with spatial uncertainty, and there is a dissociation in the effects of these variables on accuracy and on response time. A computational theory of performance in…

Research on bilingual word recognition suggests that lexical access is nonselective with respect to language, i.e., that word representations of both languages become active during recognition. One piece of evidence supporting nonselective access is that bilinguals recognize cognates (words that are identical or similar in form and meaning in two…

Perceptual-cognitive processes play an important role in open, fast-paced, interceptive sports such as tennis, basketball, and soccer. Visual information processing has been shown to distinguish skilled from less skilled athletes. Research on the perceptual demands of sports performance has raised questions regarding athletes' visual information…

The aim of this study was to determine what visual information expert soccer players encode when they are asked to make a decision. We used a repetition-priming paradigm to test the hypothesis that experts encode a soccer pattern's structure independently of the players' physical characteristics (i.e., posture and morphology). The participants…