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…

We study people's abilities to transfer object category knowledge across visual and haptic domains. If a person learns to categorize objects based on inputs from one sensory modality, can the person categorize these same objects when the objects are perceived through another modality? Can the person categorize novel objects from the same…

We perceive structure through a process of perceptual organization. Here we report a new perceptual organization phenomenon--the facilitation of visual grouping by global curvature. Observers viewed patterns that they perceived as organized into collections of curves. The patterns were perceptually ambiguous such that the perceived orientation of…

Studies of infant looking times over the past 50 years have provided profound insights about cognitive development, but their dependent measures and analytic techniques are quite limited. In the context of infants' attention to discrete sequential events, we show how a Bayesian data analysis approach can be combined with a rational cognitive…

Adults can integrate multiple sensory estimates to reduce their uncertainty in perceptual and motor tasks. In recent studies, children did not show this ability until after 8 years. Here we investigated development of the ability to integrate vision with proprioception to localize the hand. We tested 109 4- to 12-year-olds and adults on a simple…

Human response time (RT) data are widely used in experimental psychology to evaluate theories of mental processing. Typically, the data constitute the times taken by a subject to react to a succession of stimuli under varying experimental conditions. Because of the sequential nature of the experiments there are trends (due to learning, fatigue,…

Our first review article (Wagemans et al., 2012) on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Gestalt psychology focused on perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. It concluded that further progress requires a reconsideration of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the Gestalt approach, which is provided here. In…

A new process model of the interplay between memory and judgment processes was recently suggested, assuming that retrieval fluency--that is, the speed with which objects are recognized--will determine inferences concerning such objects in a single-cue fashion. This aspect of the fluency heuristic, an extension of the recognition heuristic, has…

A variety of studies have demonstrated that organizing stimuli into categories can affect the way the stimuli are perceived. We explore the influence of categories on perception through one such phenomenon, the perceptual magnet effect, in which discriminability between vowels is reduced near prototypical vowel sounds. We present a Bayesian model…

A dominant theme in modeling human perceptual judgments is that sensory neural activity is summed or integrated until a critical bound is reached. Such models predict that, in general, the shape of response time distributions change across conditions, although in practice, this shape change may be subtle. An alternative view is that response time…

A. Redish et al. (2007) proposed a reinforcement learning model of context-dependent learning and extinction in conditioning experiments, using the idea of "state classification" to categorize new observations into states. In the current article, the authors propose an interpretation of this idea in terms of normative statistical inference. They…

Binocular rivalry occurs when the eyes are presented with different stimuli and subjective perception alternates between them. Though recent years have seen a number of models of this phenomenon, the mechanisms behind binocular rivalry are still debated and we still lack a principled understanding of why a cognitive system such as the brain should…

Many of the problems studied in cognitive science are inductive problems, requiring people to evaluate hypotheses in the light of data. The key to solving these problems successfully is having the right inductive biases--assumptions about the world that make it possible to choose between hypotheses that are equally consistent with the observed…