Three experiments examined memory-based guidance of visual search using a modified version of the contextual-cueing paradigm (Jiang & Chun, 2001). The target, if present, was a conjunction of color and orientation, with target (and distractor) features randomly varying across trials (multiconjunction search). Under these conditions, reaction times…

Is object-based attention mandatory or under strategic control? In an adapted spatial cuing paradigm, participants focused initially on a central arrow cue that was part of a perceptual group (Experiment 1) or a uniformly connected object (Experiment 2), encompassing one of the potential target locations. The cue always pointed to an opposite,…

The conditions for serial search are described. A multiple target search methodology (Thornton & Gilden, 2007) is used to home in on the simplest target/distractor contrast that effectively mandates a serial scheduling of attentional resources. It is found that serial search is required when (a) targets and distractors are mirror twins, and…

Prior research has shown that the search function in the visual letter search task may reflect the regularities of the orthographic structure of a given script. In the present experiment, we examined whether the search function of letter detection was sensitive to consonant-vowel status of a pre-cued letter. Participants had to detect the…

Holistic face processing was investigated in newborns, 3-month-old infants, and adults through a modified version of the composite face paradigm and the recording of eye movements. After familiarization to the top portion of a face, participants (N = 70) were shown 2 aligned or misaligned faces, 1 of which comprised the familiar top part. In the…

In Experiment 1, it was investigated whether infants process facial identity and emotional expression independently or in conjunction with one another. Eight-month-old infants were habituated to two upright or two inverted faces varying in facial identity and emotional expression. Infants were tested with a habituation face, a switch face, and a…

Recent studies suggest that even infants attend to others' beliefs in order to make sense of their behavior. To warrant the assumption of early belief understanding, corresponding competences need to be demonstrated in a variety of different belief-inducing situations. The present study provides corresponding evidence, using a completely nonverbal…

Many people, whether old or young, male or female, typically developing or living with a disability, become quite anxious at the idea of a needle. They anticipate the possibility of pain, however brief, and try to avoid the experience. The reality is that any discomfort is usually very brief, and the entire process only takes a minute or two from…

Human infants develop a variety of attentional mechanisms that allow them to extract relevant information from a cluttered multimodal world. We know that both social and nonsocial cues shift infants' attention, but not how these cues differentially affect learning of multimodal events. Experiment 1 used social cues to direct 8- and 4-month-olds'…

Previous studies of visually symptomatic dyslexics have found that their contrast thresholds for pattern discrimination are the same as non-dyslexics. However, when noise is added to the stimuli, contrast thresholds rise markedly in dyslexics compared with non-dyslexics. This result could be due to impaired noise exclusion in dyslexics. Some…

Humans have a massive capacity to store detailed information in visual long-term memory. The present studies explored the fidelity of these visual long-term memory representations and examined how conceptual and perceptual features of object categories support this capacity. Observers viewed 2,800 object images with a different number of exemplars…

In this article, the author begins with a proposition asking what if visual thinking were privileged in the English classroom and then proceeds to elaborate on a curriculum grounded on three principles: (1) sense and perception as starting points; (2) meta-conceptual links between visual and verbal texts; and (3) the art of visualization in…

Attentional interference between tasks performed in parallel is known to have strong and often undesired effects. As yet, however, the mechanisms by which interference operates remain elusive. A better knowledge of these processes may facilitate our understanding of the effects of attention on human performance and the debilitating consequences…

A within-subjects group experimental design was used to test whether three manipulated characteristics of multiple baseline across participants (MBL-P) data showing at least a month delayed change in slope affected experts' inference of a functional relation and agreement on this judgment. Thirty-six experts completed a survey composed of 16 MBL-P…

Several groups have recently reported that people with autism may suffer from a deficit in visual motion processing and proposed that these deficits may be related to a general dorsal stream dysfunction. In order to test the dorsal stream deficit hypothesis, we investigated coherent and biological motion perception as well as coherent form…