Spatial judgments and actions are often based on multiple cues. The authors review a multitude of phenomena on the integration of spatial cues in diverse species to consider how nearly optimally animals combine the cues. Under the banner of Bayesian perception, cues are sometimes combined and weighted in a near optimal fashion. In other instances…

Color coding is used to guide attention in computer displays for such critical tasks as baggage screening or air traffic control. It has been shown that a display object attracts more attention if its color is more similar to the color for which one is searching. However, what does "similar" precisely mean? Can we predict the amount of attention…

What role does the initial glimpse of a scene play in subsequent eye movement guidance? In 4 experiments, a brief scene preview was followed by object search through the scene via a small moving window that was tied to fixation position. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the scene preview resulted in more efficient eye movements compared with a…

Human movement performance is subject to interference if the performer simultaneously observes an incongruent action. It has been proposed that this phenomenon is due to motor contagion during simultaneous movement performance-observation, with coactivation of shared action performance and action observation circuitry in the premotor cortex. The…

Young children find meaning in the drawings they create that may not be apparent to an adult observer. The purpose of this study is to access the children's views using a drawing change task. Seventy-three pre-schoolers were asked to draw a person and then draw a person with a belly button. It was anticipated that tadpole (no separate body)…

Previous studies have suggested a right hemineglect in schizophrenia, however few assessed possible visual-perceptual implication in this lateralized anomaly. A manual line bisection without (i.e., lines presented on their own) or with a local cueing paradigm (i.e., a number placed at one or both ends of the line) and the Motor-free Visual…

Perspective is a rich area for mathematical work, and one that should be accessible to many students, since it is based on the everyday experience of viewing the 3D world directly and through familiar 2D representations (drawings, photographs, images on a television or cinema screen, etc). A nice feature of perspective tasks is that they can be…

Do infants perceive visual cues as diverse as frontal-view faces, profiles or bodies as being different aspects of the same object, a fellow human? If that is the case, visual exposure to one such cue should facilitate the subsequent processing of the others. To verify this hypothesis, we recorded event-related responses in 4-month-old infants and…

Do we view the world differently if it is described to us in figurative rather than literal terms? An answer to this question would reveal something about both the conceptual representation of figurative language and the scope of top-down influences on scene perception. Previous work has shown that participants will look longer at a path region of…

The authors investigated whether anomalous information in the periphery of a scene attracts saccades when the anomaly is not distinctive in its low-level visual properties. Subjects viewed color photographs for 8 s while their eye movements were monitored. Each subject saw 2 photographs of different scenes. One photograph was a control scene in…

Nine experiments examined the means by which visual memory for individual objects is structured into a larger representation of a scene. Participants viewed images of natural scenes or object arrays in a change detection task requiring memory for the visual form of a single target object. In the test image, 2 properties of the stimulus were…

Understanding the relative role of top-down and bottom-up guidance is crucial for models of visual search. Previous studies have addressed the role of top-down and bottom-up processes in search for a conjunction of features but with inconsistent results. Here, the author used an attentional capture method to address the role of top-down and…

Visual constructive and visual-motor skills in the deaf population were investigated by comparing performance of deaf native signers (n = 20) to that of hearing nonsigners (n = 20) on the Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration, Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test, Wechsler Memory Scale Visual Reproduction subtest, and…

People perceive and conceive of activity in terms of discrete events. Here the authors propose a theory according to which the perception of boundaries between events arises from ongoing perceptual processing and regulates attention and memory. Perceptual systems continuously make predictions about what will happen next. When transient errors in…

This article presents a speech delivered by the author for the Kent M. Christiansen Memorial Lecture series in April 2008 at Arizona State University. The author discusses why he thinks that approaches to academic advising theory and research that arises out of the humanities can be of great value to practitioners in the field of academic…