People presume that the light source in pictures comes from above, and there is some evidence that this phenomenon also demonstrates lateral biases. When investigators present multiple ambiguous stimuli or visually complex objects, people assume that the source of light is from above, and to the left. However, when single relatively simple stimuli…

When presented simultaneously with equally discriminable, but unfamiliar, visual and auditory stimuli, 4-year-olds exhibited auditory dominance, processing only auditory information ( Sloutsky & Napolitano, 2003). The current study examined factors underlying auditory dominance. In 6 experiments, 4-year-olds (N181) were presented with auditory and…

Phoneme identification with audiovisually discrepant stimuli is influenced by information in the visual signal (the McGurk effect). Additionally, lexical status affects identification of auditorily presented phonemes. The present study tested for lexical influences on the McGurk effect. Participants identified phonemes in audiovisually discrepant…

The detection or discrimination of the second of 2 targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task is often temporarily impaired-a phenomenon termed the attentional blink. This study demonstrated that the attentional blink also affects localization performance. Spatial cues pointed out the possible target positions in a subsequent visual…

Semantic influences on attention during the 1st fixation on a scene were explored in 3 experiments. Subjects viewed briefly presented scenes; following scene presentation, a spatial probe was presented at the location of an object whose identity was consistent or inconsistent with the scene category. Responses to the probe served as an index of…

The relative contributions of slow and fast (online) components in a modified emotional Stroop task were evaluated. The slow component, neglected in previous research, was shown to lead to the prediction of a reversed emotional intrusion effect using pseudorandomly mixed negative and neutral stimuli. This prediction was supported in Experiments 1…

This study assessed visual selective attention in children with attention difficulties compared to typically achieving children using the flanker task and the feature and conjunction visual search task. Results suggest that children with attention difficulties have a characteristic inability to restrict visual attention to a limited spatial area…

A paradigm was designed to study how infants identify live faces. Eight- to 21-week-old infants were seated comfortably and were presented an adult female, dressed in a white laboratory coat and a white turtle neck sweater, until habituation ensued. The adult then left the room. One minute later either she or an identically garbed confederate…

When fielders catch fly balls they use geometric properties to optically maintain control over the ball. The strategy provides ongoing guidance without indicating precise positional information concerning where the ball is located in space. Here, the authors show that observers have striking misconceptions about what the motion of projectiles…

Although many theories of attention assume that attending to an object results in the processing of all its feature dimensions, there has been no direct evidence that the irrelevant dimensions of an attended nontarget object are encoded. This article explores factors that modulate such processing. In 6 experiments, participants made a speeded…

Human infants actively forage for visual information from the moment of birth onward. Although we know a great deal about how stimulus characteristics influence looking behavior in the first few postnatal weeks, we know much less about the intrinsic dynamics of the behavior. Here we show that a simple stochastic dynamical system acts…

Applying Bloch's law to visual word recognition research, both exposure duration of the prime and its luminance determine the prime's overall energy, and consequently determine the size of the priming effect. Nevertheless, experimenters using fast-priming paradigms traditionally focus only on the SOA between prime and target to reflect the…

Recent research indicates that by 4.5 months, infants use shape and size information as the basis for individuating objects but that it is not until 11.5 months that they use color information for this purpose. The present experiments investigated the extent to which infants' sensitivity to color information could be increased through select…

This study was designed to differentiate between structural description and bias accounts of performance in the possible/impossible object-decision test. Two event-related potential (ERP) studies examined how the visual system processes structurally possible and impossible objects. Specifically, the authors investigated the effects of object…