In 4 experiments, participants made judgments about forces exerted and resistances put up by objects involved in described interactions. Two competing hypotheses were tested: (1) that judgments are derived from the same knowledge base that is thought to be the source of perceptual impressions of forces that occur with visual stimuli, and (2) that…

Simultaneous and temporal masking are two frequently used techniques in psychology and vision science. Although there are many studies and theories related to each masking technique, there are no systematic investigations of their mutual relationship, even though both techniques are often applied together. Here, the authors show that temporal…

We report a series of investigations into the effects of common names, physical identity, and physical similarity on visual detection time. The effect of these factors on the capacity of the system processing the signals was also examined. We used a redundant targets design with separate testing of the target-distractor (single target),…

A briefly presented target can be rendered invisible by a lingering sparse mask that does not even touch it. This form of visual backward masking, called object substitution masking, is thought to occur at the object level of processing. However, it remains unclear whether object-level interference alone produces substitution masking because…

Humans have an extremely flexible ability to categorize regularities in their environment, in part because of attentional systems that allow them to focus on important perceptual information. In formal theories of categorization, attention is typically modeled with weights that selectively bias the processing of stimulus features. These theories…

We investigated the roles of top-down task set and bottom-up stimulus salience for feature-specific attentional capture. Spatially nonpredictive cues preceded search arrays that included a color-defined target. For target-color singleton cues, behavioral spatial cueing effects were accompanied by cue-induced N2pc components, indicative of…

Recent spatial cuing studies have shown that detection sensitivity can be increased by the allocation of attention. This increase has been attributed to one of two mechanisms: signal enhancement or uncertainty reduction. Signal enhancement is an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio at the cued location; uncertainty reduction is a reduction in the…

In many theories of cognition, researchers propose that working memory and perception operate interactively. For example, in previous studies researchers have suggested that sensory inputs matching the contents of working memory will have an automatic advantage in the competition for processing resources. The authors tested this hypothesis by…

The question of whether pupil diameter indicates information processing load during reading was investigated in three experiments involving 24 college students reading passages of varying difficulty. A TV camera and monitor, together with a video-recorder, were used to measure the diameter of the pupil under a reading condition and under three…