Recent studies indicate that young children preferentially attend to snakes, spiders, and lions compared with nondangerous species, but these results have yet to be replicated in populations that actually experience dangerous animals in nature. This multi-site study investigated the visual-detection biases of southern Indian children towards two…

In light of the adult model of a hemispheric asymmetry of global and local processing, we compared children (M [subscript age] = 8.4 years) to adults in a global-local reaction time (RT) paradigm. Hierarchical designs (large shapes made of small shapes) were presented randomly to each visual field, and participants were instructed to identify…

The present study examined whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are able to update and monitor working memory representations of visual input, and whether performance is influenced by stimulus and task complexity. 15 high-functioning adults with ASD and 15 controls were asked to allocate either elements of abstract figures or…

Eye gaze is a powerful directional cue that automatically evokes joint attention states. Even when faces are ignored, there is incidental learning of the reliability of the gaze cueing of another person, such that people who look away from targets are judged less trustworthy. In a series of experiments, we demonstrated further properties of the…

Selective attention in multidimensional displays has usually been examined using search tasks requiring the detection of a single target. We examined the ability to perceive a spatial structure in multi-item subsets of a display that were defined either conjunctively or disjunctively. Observers saw two adjacent displays and indicated whether the…

A salient stimulus may interrupt visual search because of attentional capture. It has been shown that attentional capture occurs with a wide, but not with a small attentional window. We tested the hypothesis that capture depends more strongly on the shape of the attentional window than on its size. Search elements were arranged in two nested…

The presence of a salient distractor interferes with visual search. According to the salience-driven selection hypothesis, this interference is because of an initial deployment of attention to the distractor. Three event-related potential (ERP) findings have been regarded as evidence for this hypothesis: (a) salient distractors were found to…

Maljkovic and Nakayama have demonstrated memory influences in singleton search from one trial to the next, an effect they termed "priming of pop-out" (PoP). This effect was described as resulting from the persistence of an implicit memory trace, the influence of which could be observed for around 5-8 subsequent trials. Thomson and…

What cognitive processes influence how well we maintain information in visual short-term memory (VSTM)? We used a developmentally informed design to delve into the interplay of top-down spatial biases with the nature of the internal memory codes, motivated by documented changes for both factors over childhood. Seven-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and…

This study examined factors affecting perception training of vowel duration in L2 Japanese with transfer to production. In a pre-test, training, post-test design, 48 L1 English speakers were assigned to one of three groups: auditory-visual (AV) training using waveform displays, auditory-only (A-only), or no training. Within-group variables were…

Experiments were conducted to test a modern exemplar-familiarity model on its ability to account for both short-term and long-term probe recognition within the same memory-search paradigm. Also, making connections to the literature on attention and visual search, the model was used to interpret differences in probe-recognition performance across…

In this study we quantify for the first time electrophysiological components associated with incorporating long-term semantic knowledge with visuo-spatial information using two variants of a traditional matrix patterns task. Results indicated that the matrix task with greater semantic content was associated with enhanced accuracy and RTs in a…

Research on the topic of distractor inhibition has used different empirical approaches to study how the human mind selects relevant information from the environment, and the results are controversially discussed. One key question that typically arises is how selection deals with the irrelevant information. We used a new selection task, in which…

Forty-four preschoolers completed 2 conditions of a Stroop-like procedure (e.g., saying "boat" for car and "car" for boat) that differed in whether a 3-s delay was imposed before responding. The test card was visible during the delay period for half of the children and occluded for the other children. Preschoolers' interference control was…

The authors evaluated age-related variations in contextual cueing, which reflects the extent to which visuospatial regularities can facilitate search for a target. Previous research produced inconsistent results regarding contextual cueing effects in young children and in older adults, and no study has investigated the phenomenon across the life…