The importance of vocabulary in reading comprehension emphasizes the need to accurately assess an individual's familiarity with words. The present article highlights problems with using occurrence counts in corpora as an index of word familiarity, especially when studying individuals varying in reading experience. We demonstrate via computational…

When we recognize an object, do we automatically know how big it is in the world? We employed a Stroop-like paradigm, in which two familiar objects were presented at different visual sizes on the screen. Observers were faster to indicate which was bigger or smaller on the screen when the real-world size of the objects was congruent with the visual…

Extensive research has focused on face recognition, and much is known about this topic. However, much of this work seems to be based on an assumption that faces are the most important aspect of person recognition. Here we test this assumption in two experiments. We show that when viewers are forced to choose, they "do" use the face more than the…

Despite the ubiquity of dancing and synchronized movement to music, relatively few studies have examined cognitive representations of musical rhythm and meter among listeners from contrasting cultures. We aimed to disentangle the contributions of culture-general and culture-specific influences by examining American and Turkish listeners' detection…

During reading information is acquired from word(s) beyond the word that is currently looked at. It is still an open question whether such parafoveal information can influence the current viewing of a word, and if so, whether such parafoveal-on-foveal effects are attributable to distributed processing or to mislocated fixations which occur when…

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,…

Figural aftereffects are commonly believed to be transient and to fade away in the course of milliseconds. We tested face aftereffects using familiar faces and found sustained effects lasting up to 1 week. In 3 experiments, participants were first exposed to distorted pictures of famous persons and then had to select the veridical face in a…

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…

One might assume that familiarity with a scene or previous encounters with objects embedded in a scene would benefit subsequent search for those items. However, in a series of experiments we show that this is not the case: When participants were asked to subsequently search for multiple objects in the same scene, search performance remained…

The current study examined the nature of the processes underlying working memory updating. In 4 experiments using the n-back paradigm, the authors demonstrate that continuous updating of items in working memory prevents strong binding of those items to their contexts in working memory, and hence leads to an increased susceptibility to proactive…

It is well established that in masked priming, a target word (e.g., "JUDGE") is primed more effectively by a transposed letter (TL) prime (e.g., "jugde") than by an orthographic control prime (e.g., "junpe"). This is inconsistent with the slot coding schemes used in many models of visual word recognition. Several…

The authors examined face perception models with regard to the functional and temporal organization of facial identity and expression analysis. Participants performed a manual 2-choice go/no-go task to classify faces, where response hand depended on facial familiarity (famous vs. unfamiliar) and response execution depended on facial expression…

This study aimed to determine the relative processing cost associated with comprehension of an unfamiliar native accent under adverse listening conditions. Two sentence verification experiments were conducted in which listeners heard sentences at various signal-to-noise ratios. In Experiment 1, these sentences were spoken in a familiar or an…

Previous psychophysical studies have shown that the adult human visual system makes use of form information such as occlusion to determine whether to integrate or segregate local motion signals (J. McDermott, Y. Weiss, & E. H. Adelson, 2001). Using the displays developed by McDermott et al., these experiments examined whether occlusion and amodal…

Theories of figure-ground perception entail inhibitory competition between either low-level units (edge or feature units) or high-level shape properties. Extant computational models instantiate the 1st type of theory. The authors investigated a prediction of the 2nd type of theory: that shape properties suggested on the ground side of an edge are…