Statistical knowledge of a target's location may benefit visual search, and rapidly understanding the changes in regularity would increase the adaptability in visual search situations where fast and accurate performance is required. The current study tested the sources of statistical knowledge--explicitly-given instruction or experience-driven…

Matching the identity of unfamiliar faces is important in applied identity verification tasks, for example when verifying photo ID at border crossings, in secure access areas, or when issuing identity credentials. In these settings, other biographical details--such as name or date of birth on an identity document--are also often compared to…

Findings from Navon letters paradigm studies among individuals with autism spectrum disorder are inconsistent. The different results are often being interpreted in terms of "local bias" and/or "global weakness," according to the predictions of leading theories such as the "weak central coherence" or the "enhanced…

In radiological screening, clinicians scan myriads of radiographs with the intent of recognizing and differentiating lesions. Even though they are trained experts, radiologists' human search engines are not perfect: average daily error rates are estimated around 3-5%. A main underlying assumption in radiological screening is that visual search on…

This study measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to test competing hypotheses regarding the effects of anger and race on early visual processing (N1, P2, and N2) and error recognition (ERN and Pe) during a sequentially primed weapon identification task. The first hypothesis was that anger would impair weapon identification in a biased…

Neurotypical individuals display a leftward attentional bias, called pseudoneglect, for physical space (e.g. landmark task) and mental representations of space (e.g. mental number line bisection). However, leftward bias is reduced in autistic individuals viewing faces, and neurotypical individuals with autistic traits viewing "greyscale"…

How does the concurrent use of language affect perception and memory for exemplars? Labels cue more general category information than a specific exemplar. Applying labels can affect the resulting memory for an exemplar. Here 3 alternative hypotheses are proposed for the role of labeling an exemplar at encoding: (a) labels distort memory toward the…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is a crucial repository of information when events unfold rapidly before our eyes, yet it maintains only a fraction of the sensory information encoded by the visual system. Here, we tested the hypothesis that saccadic eye movements provide a natural bottleneck for the transition of fragile content in sensory memory…

Spatial memory research has attributed systematic bias in location estimates to a combination of a noisy memory trace with a prior structure that people impose on the space. Little is known about intraindividual stability and interindividual variation in these patterns of bias. In the current work, we align recent empirical and theoretical work on…

Our native tongue influences the way we perceive other languages. But does it also determine the way we perceive nonlinguistic sounds? The authors investigated how speakers of Italian, Turkish, and Persian group sequences of syllables, tones, or visual shapes alternating in either frequency or duration. We found strong native listening effects…

Dimly lit targets in the dark are perceived as located about an implicit slanted surface that delineates the visual system's intrinsic bias (Ooi, Wu, & He, 2001). If the intrinsic bias reflects the internal model of visual space--as proposed here--its influence should extend beyond target localization. Our first 2 experiments demonstrated that…

What mechanism implements the mutual exclusivity bias to map novel labels to objects without names? Prominent theoretical accounts of mutual exclusivity (e.g., Markman, 1989, 1990) propose that infants are guided by their knowledge of object names. However, the mutual exclusivity constraint could be implemented via monitoring of object novelty…

Aesthetic preference for the vertical composition of single-object pictures was studied through a series of two-alternative forced-choice experiments. The results reveal the influence of several factors, including spatial asymmetries in the functional properties of the object and the typical position of the object relative to the observer. With…

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…

While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages…