Two experiments examined biases in selective attention during contextual cuing of visual search. When participants were instructed to search for a target of a particular color, overt attention (as measured by the location of fixations) was biased strongly toward distractors presented in that same color. However, when participants searched for…

Recent empirical and theoretical work suggests that visual features such as color and orientation can be stored or retrieved independently in visual working memory (VWM), even in cases when they belong to the same object. Yet it remains unclear whether different feature dimensions have their own capacity limits, or whether they compete for shared…

Episodic memories are not veridical records of our lives, but rather are better described as organized summaries of experience. Theories and empirical research suggest that shifts in perceptual, temporal, and semantic information lead to a chunking of our continuous experiences into segments, or "events." However, the consequences of…

Working memory is a basic cognitive process that predicts higher-level skills. A central question in theories of working memory development is the generality of the mechanisms proposed to explain improvements in performance. Prior theories have been closely tied to particular tasks and/or age groups, limiting their generalizability. The cognitive…

In this article, we demonstrate limitations of accessibility of information in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, cued-recall has been used to estimate the fidelity of information in VWM, where the feature of a cued object is reproduced from memory (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009; Wilken & Ma, 2004; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Response…

Studies on "intertrial priming" have shown that in visual search experiments, the preceding trial automatically affects search performance: facilitating it when the target features repeat and giving rise to switch costs when they change--so-called (short-term) intertrial priming. These effects also occur at longer time scales: When 1 of…

Joint attention--the mutual focus of 2 individuals on an item--speeds detection and discrimination of target information. However, what happens to that information beyond the initial perceptual episode? To fully comprehend and engage with our immediate environment also requires working memory (WM), which integrates information from second to…

Previous research has illustrated the unique benefits of three-dimensional (3-D) Virtual Reality (VR) technology in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) children. This study examined the use of 3-D VR technology as an assessment tool in ASD children, and further compared its use to two-dimensional (2-D) tasks. Additionally, we aimed to examine…

Study stimuli presented at the same time as unrelated targets in a detection task are better remembered than stimuli presented with distractors. This attentional boost effect (ABE) has been found with pictorial (Swallow & Jiang, 2010) and more recently verbal materials (Spataro, Mulligan, & Rossi-Arnaud, 2013). The present experiments…

Visuospatial attention prioritizes regions of space for perceptual processing. Knowing how attended locations are represented is critical for understanding the architecture of attention. We examined the spatial reference frame of incidentally learned attention and asked how it is influenced by explicit, top-down knowledge. Participants performed a…

How does executive attentional control contribute to memory for sequences of visual objects, and what does this reveal about storage and processing in working memory? Three experiments examined the impact of a concurrent executive load (backward counting) on memory for sequences of individually presented visual objects. Experiments 1 and 2 found…

In the current study, we explored the influence of synesthesia on memory for word lists. We tested 10 grapheme-color synesthetes who reported an experience of color when reading letters or words. We replicated a previous finding that memory is compromised when synesthetic color is incongruent with perceptual color. Beyond this, we found that,…

Three experiments examined memory-based guidance of visual search using a modified version of the contextual-cueing paradigm (Jiang & Chun, 2001). The target, if present, was a conjunction of color and orientation, with target (and distractor) features randomly varying across trials (multiconjunction search). Under these conditions, reaction times…

Although the influence of colour on size perception has been known for a century, there is only limited research on interventions that can reduce this effect. This study was therefore undertaken in order to identify appropriate interventions and propose design guidelines for information visualisation, especially in applications where size…

A sparse mask that persists beyond the duration of a target can reduce its visibility, a phenomenon called "object substitution masking". Y. Jiang and M. M. Chun (2001a) found an asymmetric pattern of substitution masking such that a mask on the peripheral side of the target caused stronger substitution masking than on the central side.…