In this article, we demonstrate limitations of accessibility of information in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, cued-recall has been used to estimate the fidelity of information in VWM, where the feature of a cued object is reproduced from memory (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009; Wilken & Ma, 2004; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Response…

In four experiments we assessed whether visual working memory (VWM) maintains a record of previously processed visual information, allowing old information to be inhibited, and new information to be prioritized. Specifically, we evaluated whether VWM contributes to the inhibition (i.e., visual marking) of previewed distractors in a preview search.…

The present study investigated the mechanisms responsible for the difference between visual processing of stimuli near and far from the observer's hands. The idea that objects near the hands are immediate candidates for action led us to hypothesize that vision near the hands would be biased toward the action-oriented magnocellular visual pathway…

The concepts of God and Devil are well known across many cultures and religions, and often involve spatial metaphors, but it is not well known if our mental representations of these concepts affect visual cognition. To examine if exposure to divine concepts produces shifts of attention, participants completed a target detection task in which they…

In previous work the authors argued that the potential number of effectors in the response set is crucial in discriminating (multiple-effector) keypress from (single-effector) reaching responses. It is not clear, however, what influence the locus of responding (on vs. off the stimulus location for reaching and keypressing, respectively) has on…

Previous studies that have found attentional capture effects for stimuli of motivational significance do not directly measure initial attentional deployment, leaving it unclear to what extent these items produce attentional capture. Visual prior entry, as measured by temporal order judgments (TOJs), rests on the premise that allocated attention…

In this study the authors tested and rejected a recent proposal that response precuing effects depend on the spatial extent of the precues rather than on the number of response choices. Moreover, the authors tested and supported the hypothesis that the number of effectors in the response set is an important determinant of spatial precuing effects.…