Categorical perception (CP) effects manifest as faster or more accurate discrimination between objects that come from different categories compared with objects that come from the same category, controlling for the physical differences between the objects. The most popular explanations of CP effects have relied on perceptual warping causing…

Perception and action are closely related. Responses are assumed to be represented in terms of their perceptual effects, allowing direct links between action and perception. In this regard, the integration of features of stimuli (S) and responses (R) into S-R bindings is a key mechanism for action control. Previous research focused on the…

Within the domain of associative learning, there is substantial evidence that people (and other animals) select among environmental cues on the basis of their reinforcement history. Specifically, people preferentially attend to, and learn about, cueing stimuli that have previously predicted events of consequence (a predictiveness bias). By…

Previous research has shown that early in the word recognition process, there is some degree of uncertainty concerning letter identity and letter position. Here, we examined whether this uncertainty also extends to the mapping of letter features onto letters, as predicted by the Bayesian Reader (Norris & Kinoshita, 2012). Indeed, anecdotal…

We report an experiment designed to provide a qualitative contrast between knowledge-limited versions of mixed-state and variable-resources (VR) models of visual change detection. The key data pattern is that observers often respond "same" on big-change trials, while simultaneously being able to discriminate between same and small-change…

Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined…

Memory performance in linear order reasoning tasks (A > B, B > C, C > D, etc.) shows quicker, and more accurate responses to queries on wider (AD) than narrower (AB) pairs on a hypothetical linear mental model (A -- B -- C -- D). While indicative of an analogue representation, research so far did not provide positive evidence for spatial…

Research on the topic of distractor inhibition has used different empirical approaches to study how the human mind selects relevant information from the environment, and the results are controversially discussed. One key question that typically arises is how selection deals with the irrelevant information. We used a new selection task, in which…

Six experiments examined the influence of emotional valence on the tagging and enumeration of multiple targets. Experiments 1, 5 and 6 found that there was no difference in the efficiency of tagging/enumerating multiple negative or positive stimuli. Experiment 2 showed that, when neutral-expression face distractors were present, enumerating…

We live in a dynamic environment in which objects change location over time. To maintain stable object representations the visual system must determine how newly sampled information relates to existing object representations, the "correspondence problem". Spatiotemporal information is clearly an important factor that the visual system takes into…

In a variety of conflict paradigms, target and distractor stimuli are defined in terms of perceptual features. Interference evoked by distractor stimuli tends to be reduced when the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials is decreased, suggesting conflict-induced perceptual filtering (i.e., adjusting the processing weights assigned to stimuli…

Stereotypes, expectations, and emotions influence an observer's ability to detect and categorize objects as guns. In light of recent work in action-perception interactions, however, there is another unexplored factor that may be critical: The action choices available to the perceiver. In five experiments, participants determined whether another…

How does executive attentional control contribute to memory for sequences of visual objects, and what does this reveal about storage and processing in working memory? Three experiments examined the impact of a concurrent executive load (backward counting) on memory for sequences of individually presented visual objects. Experiments 1 and 2 found…

Accounts of task-set control generally assume that the current task's stimulus-response (S-R) rules must be elevated to a privileged state of activation. How are they represented in this state? In 3 task-cuing experiments, we tested the hypothesis that phonological working memory is used to represent S-R rules for task-set control by getting…

We present novel evidence showing that new self-relevant visual associations can affect performance in simple shape recognition tasks. Participants associated labels for themselves, other people, or neutral terms with geometric shapes and then immediately judged whether subsequent label-shape pairings were matched. Across 4 experiments there was a…