When observers search for a target object, they incidentally learn the identities and locations of "background" objects in the same display. This learning can facilitate search performance, eliciting faster reaction times for repeated displays. Despite these findings, visual search has been successfully modeled using architectures that maintain no…

We report 3 experiments that examined whether presentation of a spoken word creates an attentional bottleneck associated with lexical processing in the absence of a response to that word. A spoken word and a visual stimulus were presented in quick succession, but only the visual stimulus demanded a response. Response times to the visual stimulus…

Contextual cueing refers to the facilitated ability to locate a particular visual element in a scene due to prior exposure to the same scene. This facilitation is thought to reflect implicit learning, as it typically occurs without the observer's knowledge that scenes repeat. Unlike most other implicit learning effects, contextual cueing can be…

Difficulties in visual attention are increasingly being linked to dyslexia. To date, the majority of studies have inferred functionality of attention from response times to stimuli presented for an indefinite duration. However, in paradigms that use reaction times to investigate the ability to orient attention, a delayed reaction time could also…

It is common practice to log-transform response times before analyzing them with standard factor analytical methods. However, sometimes the log-transformation is not capable of linearizing the relation between the response times and the latent traits. Therefore, a more general approach to response time analysis is proposed in the current…

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,…

22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (22q11DS) is a common microdeletion disorder associated with mild to moderate intellectual disability and specific neurocognitive deficits, particularly in visual-motor and attentional abilities. Currently there is evidence that the visual-motor profile of 22q11DS is not entirely mediated by intellectual disability and…

The presentation of a hand grasp facilitates the recognition of subsequent objects when the grasp is coherent with the object to be identified. This outcome is usually explained as the integration of two different processes: descriptive visual processes in ventral visual areas and processes in charge of the computations of action metrics in dorsal…

Evidence for inhibitory processes in visual search comes from studies using preview conditions, where responses to new targets are delayed if they carry a featural attribute belonging to the old distractor items that are currently being ignored--the negative carry-over effect (Braithwaite, Humphreys, & Hodsoll, 2003). We examined whether…

The "body inversion effect" refers to superior recognition of upright than inverted images of the human body and indicates typical configural processing. Previous research by Reed et al. using static images of the human body shows that people with autism fail to demonstrate this effect. Using a novel task in which adults, adolescents…

This study aimed to evaluate the type of attentional selection (location- and/or object-based) triggered by two different types of central noninformative cues: eye gaze and arrows. Two rectangular objects were presented in the visual field, and subjects' attention was directed to the end of a rectangle via the observation of noninformative…

How information is exchanged between the cognitive mechanisms responsible for gaze perception and social attention is unclear. These systems could be independent; the "gaze cueing" effect could emerge from the activation of a general-purpose attentional mechanism that is ignorant of the social nature of the gaze cue. Alternatively, orienting to…

Learning movement sequences is thought to develop from an initial controlled attentive phase to a more automatic inattentive phase. Furthermore, execution of sequences becomes faster with practice, which may result from changes at a general motor processing level rather than at an effector specific motor processing level. In the current study, we…

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…

What accounts for the Right Hemisphere (RH) functional superiority in visual change detection? An original task which combines one-shot and divided visual field paradigms allowed us to direct change information initially to the RH or the Left Hemisphere (LH) by deleting, respectively, an object included in the left or right half of a scene…