In 7 experiments, the authors explored whether visual attention (the ability to select relevant visual information) and visual working memory (the ability to retain relevant visual information) share the same content representations. The presence of singleton distractors interfered more strongly with a visual search task when it was accompanied by…

Target location probability was manipulated in a visual search task. When the target was twice as likely to appear on 1 side of the display as the other, manual button-press response times were faster (Experiment 1A) and first saccades were more frequently directed (Experiment 1B) to the more probable locations. When the target appeared with equal…

The authors assessed new microswitch clusters (i.e., combinations of two microswitches) and contingent stimulation to increase adaptive responses (i.e., foot and head movements) and reduce aberrant behavior (i.e., finger mouthing) in a boy with multiple disabilities. Initially, intervention was directed at increasing the frequency of each adaptive…

Thirty-two subjects completed 2 stimulus equivalence tasks using a matching-to-sample paradigm. One task involved direct reinforcement of conditional discriminations designed to produce derived relations between self-referring stimuli (e.g., me, myself, I) and positive evaluation words (e.g., whole, desirable, perfect). The other task was designed…

A brief target that is visible when displayed alone can be rendered invisible by a trailing stimulus (metacontrast masking). It has been difficult to determine the temporal dynamics of masking to date because increments in stimulus duration have been invariably confounded with apparent brightness (Bloch's law). In the research reported here,…

Attentional allocation in feature-search mode (W. F. Bacon & H. E. Egeth, 1994) is thought to be solely determined by top-down factors, with no role for stimulus-driven salience. The authors reassessed this conclusion using variants of the spatial cuing and rapid serial visual presentation paradigms developed by C. L. Folk and colleagues (C. L.…

Research has suggested that perception and action are independent (see M. A. Goodale & A. Haffenden, 1998). The authors used the Ebbinghaus illusion to test this hypothesis in 2 experiments. Verbal reports of perceived size were compared with maximum grip aperture during grasping (Experiment 1) and manual reports of perceived size (Experiment 2).…

This article reports the results of an experiment addressing extrapolation in function learning, in particular the issue of whether participants can extrapolate in a nonmonotonic manner. Existing models of function learning, including the extrapolation association model of function learning (EXAM; E. L. DeLosh, J. R. Busemeyer, & M. A. McDaniel,…

Cued recall with an extralist cue poses a challenge for contemporary memory theory in that there is a need to explain how episodic and semantic information are combined. A parallel activation and intersection approach proposes one such means by assuming that an experimental cue will elicit its preexisting semantic network and a context cue will…

C. L. Gagn? and E. J. Shoben (1997) proposed that concepts are combined via external relations and that lexical entries include information about which relations are frequent for every modifying noun. As evidence for this view, they showed that relations associated with the modifier affected the interpretation of combinations in several studies in…

In the analysis of stimulus competition in causal judgment, 4 variables have been frequently confounded with respect to the conditions necessary for stimuli to compete: causal status of the competing stimuli (causes vs. effects), temporal order of the competing stimuli (antecedent vs. subsequent) relative to the noncompeting stimulus,…

S. W. Allen and L. R. Brooks (1991) have shown that exemplar memory can affect categorization even when participants are provided with a classification rule. G. Regehr and L. R. Brooks (1993) argued that stimuli must be individuated for such effects to occur. In this study, the authors further analyze the conditions that yield exemplar effects in…

Can people learn causal structure more effectively through intervention rather than observation? Four studies used a trial-based learning paradigm in which participants obtained probabilistic data about a causal chain through either observation or intervention and then selected the causal model most likely to have generated the data. Experiment 1…

The ability to keep track of locations in a dynamic, multimodal environment is crucial for successful interactions with other people and objects. The authors investigated the existence and flexibility of spatial indexing in adults and 6-month-old infants by adapting an eye-tracking paradigm from D. C. Richardson and M. J. Spivey (2000). Multimodal…

According to D. E. Broadbent's (1958) selective filter theory, people do not process unattended stimuli beyond the analysis of basic physical properties. This theory was later rejected on the basis of numerous findings that people identify irrelevant (and supposedly unattended) stimuli. A careful review of this evidence, however, reveals strong…