It is harder to find the letter "N" among its mirror reversals than vice versa, an inconvenient finding for bottom-up saliency accounts based on primary visual cortex (V1) mechanisms. However, in line with this account, we found that in dense search arrays, gaze first landed on either target equally fast. Remarkably, after first landing,…

This study integrates agent research with a neurocognitive technique to study how character faces affect cognitive processing. The N170 event-related potential (ERP) was used to study face processing during simple decision-making tasks. Twenty-five adults responded to facial expressions (fear/neutral) presented in three designs…

Adult subjects viewed pictures at brief intervals, testing their reactions to informative objects--those not redundant with or predictive of the rest of the picture, such as a tractor in an underwater scene. Results indicated that observers fixate earlier, more often, and longer on informative objects. (Author/SJL)