Television producers, across all types of programming, assume young viewers can parallel process simultaneously presented messages. For instance, television news producers appear to believe that young viewers can attend to weather icons, lexical news crawls, and sports scores while they also attend to news anchors who present the news.…

Through the preferential pairing of response positions to pitch, here we show that the internal representation of pitch height is spatial in nature and affects performance, especially in musically trained participants, when response alternatives are either vertically or horizontally aligned. The finding that our cognitive system maps pitch height…

Different genetic disorders predispose individuals to display specific, etiology-related profiles, personalities, and maladaptive behaviors. Using groups with genetic etiologies as stand-ins or proxies for a specific behavior or set of behaviors, one can then examine how others in the child's environment react and whether such reactions are…

This study explored whether hand location affected spatial attention. The authors used a visual covert-orienting paradigm to examine whether spatial attention mechanisms--location prioritization and shifting attention--were supported by bimodal, hand-centered representations of space. Placing 1 hand next to a target location, participants detected…

The focus of the present study was to examine covert orienting responses to peripheral flash cues among children with autism in a situation where attentional processes were taxed by the presence of distractors in the visual field. Fourteen children with autism (MA = 6-7 years) were compared to their MA-matched peers without autism on a forced…

The present study investigates visual orienting to directional cues (arrow or eyes) in adults with high functioning autism (n = 19) and age matched controls (n = 19). A choice reaction time paradigm is used in which eye-or arrow direction correctly (congruent) or incorrectly (incongruent) cues target location. In typically developing participants,…

The authors conducted 3 experiments to explore the roles of curvature, density, and relative proximity in the perceptual organization of ambiguous dot patterns. To this end, they developed a new family of regular dot patterns that tend to be perceptually grouped into parallel contours, dot-sampled structured grids (DSGs). DSGs are similar to the…

D. N. Lee (1976) described a braking strategy based on optical expansion in which the driver brakes so that the target's time-to-contact declines around a constant slope in the range -0.5 less than or equal to tau less than 0. The present results from a series of braking simulations confirm and extend earlier reports (E. H. Yilmaz & W. H. Warren,…

Evidence suggests that adults in school settings are doing less than they should to stop student peer sexual harassment. When such behavior persists, it creates an intrusive environment that may interfere with learning. The study was designed to determine teachers' attitudes toward sexual harassment; their perceptions of sexually harassing student…

Do locomotor after effects depend specifically on visual feedback? In 7 experiments, 116 college students were tested, with closed eyes, at stationary running or at walking to a previewed target after adaptation, with closed eyes, to treadmill locomotion. Subjects showed faster inadvertent drift during stationary running and increased distance…

Using a lexical-decision task performed by Dutch-English bilinguals, the author showed that the recognition of visually presented first language (L1; e.g., touw) and second language (L2; e.g., back) targets is facilitated by L2 and L1 masked primes, respectively, which are pseudohomophones (roap and ruch) of the target's translation equivalent…

Contextual cuing refers to the facilitation of performance in visual search due to the repetition of the same displays. Whereas previous studies have focused on contextual cuing within single-search trials, this study tested whether 1 trial facilitates visual search of the next trial. Participants searched for a T among Ls. In the training phase,…

The authors investigated how 2-digit Arabic numerals are named by looking at the effects of masked primes on the naming latencies. Target numerals were named faster when prime and target shared a digit at the same position (e.g., the target 28 primed by 18 and 21). In contrast, naming latencies were slower when prime and target shared 1 or 2…

Point-light displays of human gait provide information sufficient to recognize the gender of a walker and are taken as evidence of the exquisite tuning of the visual system to biological motion. The authors revisit this topic with the goals of quantifying human efficiency at gender recognition. To achieve this, the authors first derive an ideal…

The enumeration of small numbers of objects (approximately 4) proceeds rapidly, accurately, and with little effort via a process termed subitization. Four experiments examined whether it was possible to subitize the number of features rather than objects present in a display. Overall, the findings showed that when features are presented randomly…