There is growing consensus that selection history strongly guides spatial attention and is distinct from current goals and physical salience. Here, we focused on target-location probability cueing: when the target is more likely to appear in one region, search performance gradually improves for targets appearing in that region. Probability cueing…

Implicit up/down words, such as "bird" and "foot", systematically influence performance on visual tasks involving immediately following targets in compatible versus incompatible locations. Recent studies have observed that the semantic relation between prime words and target pictures can strongly influence the size and even the…

Perceptual learning accounts of orthographic coding predict that transposed-letter (TL) priming effects should be smaller when the prime and target stimuli are not presented in their canonical (left-to-right horizontal in English) orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast, abstract letter…

Little is known about the cross-modal integration of unconscious and conscious information. In the current study, we therefore tested whether the spatial meaning of an unconscious visual word, such as "up", influences the perceived location of a subsequently presented auditory target. Although cross-modal integration of unconscious…

Does visuospatial orientation influence repetition and transposed character (TC) priming effects in logographic scripts? According to perceptual learning accounts, the nature of orthographic (form) priming effects should be influenced by text orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast,…

While most typically developing (TD) participants have a coarse-to-fine processing style, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem to be less globally and more locally biased when processing visual information. The stimulus-specific spatial frequency content might be directly relevant to determine this temporal hierarchy of visual…

Growing experimental evidence suggests that temporal events are represented on a mental time line, spatially oriented from left to right. Support for the spatial representation of time comes mostly from studies that have used spatially organized responses. Moreover, many of these studies did not avoid possible confounds attributable to target…

Directed actions can play a causal role in cognition, shaping thought processes. What drives this cross-talk between action and thought? I investigated the hypothesis that representations in spatial working memory mediate interactions between directed actions and problem solving. Participants attempted to solve an insight problem while…

In a location-selection task, the repetition of a prior distractor location as the target location would slow down the response. This effect is termed the location negative priming (NP) effect. Recently, it has been demonstrated that repetition of a prior target location as the current target location would also slow down response. Because such…

Observation of another person executing an action primes the same action in the observer's motor system. Recent evidence has shown that these priming effects are flexible, where training of new associations, such as making a foot response when viewing a moving hand, can reduce standard action priming effects (Gillmeister, Catmur, Liepelt, Brass,…

According to construal level theory, psychological distance promotes more abstract thought. Theories of creativity, in turn, suggest that abstract thought promotes creativity. Based on these lines of theorizing, we predicted that spatial distancing would enhance creative performance in elementary school children. To test this prediction, we primed…

Four experiments examined whether scene processing is facilitated by layout representation, including layout that was not perceived but could be predicted based on a previous partial view (boundary extension). In a priming paradigm (after Sanocki, 2003), participants judged objects' distances in photographs. In Experiment 1, full scenes (target),…

We investigated the processing of threat-related, positive, and neutral words in parafoveal and in foveal vision as a function of individual differences in trait anxiety. In a lexical-decision task, word primes were presented for 150 ms either parafoveally (2.2[degrees] away from fixation; Experiment 1) or foveally (at fixation; Experiment 3)…

Previous research on dual-tasks has shown that, under some circumstances, actions impair the perception of action-consistent stimuli, whereas, under other conditions, actions facilitate the perception of action-consistent stimuli. We propose a new model to reconcile these contrasting findings. The planning and control model (PCM) of motorvisual…