In any visual search task in the lab or in the world, observers will make errors. Those errors can be categorized as "deterministic": If you miss this target in this display once, you will definitely miss it again. Alternatively, errors can be "stochastic", occurring randomly with some probability from trial to trial.…

When a visual search target frequently appears in one target-rich region of space, participants learn to search there first, resulting in faster reaction time when the target appears there than when it appears elsewhere. Most research on this location probability learning (LPL) effect uses 2-dimensional (2D) search environments that are distinct…

The perception ability has attained much recognition in the identification of cognitive processing and decision-making in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) individuals. However, the prior studies have subjectively worked on perception ability using conditioning paradigms that can be intolerable for ASD individuals. The present paper quantitatively…

The visual system can learn statistical regularities and form search habits that guide attention to a region where a target frequently appears. Although regularities in the real world can change over time, little is known about how such changes affect habit learning. Using a location probability learning task, we demonstrated that a constant…

Our visual system is highly sensitive to regularities in the environment. Locations that were important in one's previous experience are often prioritized during search, even though observers may not be aware of the learning. In this study we characterized the guidance of spatial attention by incidental learning of a target's spatial probability,…

The Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is a computationally difficult combinatorial optimization problem. In spite of its relative difficulty, human solvers are able to generate close-to-optimal solutions in a close-to-linear time frame, and it has been suggested that this is due to the visual system's inherent sensitivity to certain geometric…

Figure-ground perception is typically described as seeing one surface occluding another. Figure properties, not ground properties, are considered the significant factors. In scenes, however, a near surface will often occlude multiple contours and surfaces, often at different depths, producing alignments that are improbable except under conditions…

Visuospatial attention prioritizes regions of space for perceptual processing. Knowing how attended locations are represented is critical for understanding the architecture of attention. We examined the spatial reference frame of incidentally learned attention and asked how it is influenced by explicit, top-down knowledge. Participants performed a…

Exemplar-similarity models such as the exemplar-based random walk (EBRW) model (Nosofsky & Palmeri, 1997b) were designed to provide a formal account of multidimensional classification choice probabilities and response times (RTs). At the same time, a recurring theme has been to use exemplar models to account for old-new item recognition and to…

A wealth of empirical evidence has now accumulated concerning animals' categorizing photographs of real-world objects. Although these complex stimuli have the advantage of fostering rapid category learning, they are difficult to manipulate experimentally and to represent in formal models of behavior. We present a solution to the representation…

Observers given brief exposures of pairs of colored bars and asked to report both the color and the orientation of each bar showed evidence of stochastic independence between reports of the 4 features (2 colors and 2 orientations). The authors also found virtually perfect stochastic independence between reports of colors and directions of motion…

The relationship between luminance (i.e., the photometric intensity of light) and its perception (i.e., sensations of lightness or brightness) has long been a puzzle. In addition to the mystery of why these perceptual qualities do not scale with luminance in any simple way, "illusions" such as simultaneous brightness contrast, Mach bands,…

The influence of frequency of occurrence of a visual stimulus on encoding processes is investigated, to discover what mechanisms allow cognitive processes to modify perceptual processes. Six experiments are described and the results are discussed. (MH)

The visual system continually selects some information for processing while bypassing the processing of other information, and as a consequence, participants often fail to notice large changes to visual stimuli. In the present studies, the authors investigated whether knowledge about the probability of particular changes occurring over time…