How does color distribution learning affect goal-directed visuomotor behavior?

While the visual world is rich and complex, importantly, it nevertheless contains many statistical regularities. For example, environmental feature distributions tend to remain relatively stable from one moment to the next. Recent findings have shown how observers can learn surprising details of environmental color distributions, even when the colors belong to actively ignored stimuli such as distractors in visual search.

Effects of arousal on biased competition in attention and short-term memory.

A recent theory proposes that arousal amplifies the competition between stimulus representations, strengthening already strong representations and weakening already weak representations in perception and memory. Here, we report a stringent test of this arousal-biased competition theory in the context of visual attention and short-term memory. We examined whether pre-trial arousal enhances the bottom-up attentional bias toward physically salient versus less salient stimuli in a multi-letter identification task.

Attentional priming: recent insights and current controversies.

Humans possess a primitive memory system for attention deployments that allows quick reorientation of visual attention to stimuli that are relevant to behavior at any given moment. We review recent evidence regarding such attentional priming effects from a number of different perspectives. We discuss recent findings on the time course and duration of such effects, the potential interaction of priming and top-down attentional guidance; how priming can be used to probe the nature of visual representations and attentional templates; findings on the basic nature of priming effects and recent relevant findings on so-called serial dependencies that share many characteristics with attentional priming.

No arousal-biased competition in focused visuospatial attention.

Arousal sometimes enhances and sometimes impairs perception and memory. A recent theory attempts to reconcile these findings by proposing that arousal amplifies the competition between stimulus representations, strengthening already strong representations and weakening already weak representations. Here, we report a stringent test of this arousal-biased competition theory in the context of focused visuospatial attention.

Components of Attention in Grapheme-Color Synesthesia: A Modeling Approach.

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a condition where the perception of graphemes consistently and automatically evokes an experience of non-physical color. Many have studied how synesthesia affects the processing of achromatic graphemes, but less is known about the synesthetic processing of physically colored graphemes. Here, we investigated how the visual processing of colored letters is affected by the congruence or incongruence of synesthetic grapheme-color associations.

Repetition priming in selective attention: A TVA analysis.

Current behavior is influenced by events in the recent past. In visual attention, this is expressed in many variations of priming effects. Here, we investigate color priming in a brief exposure digit-recognition task.

Independent priming of location and color in identification of briefly presented letters.

Attention shifts are facilitated if the items to be attended remain the same across trials. Some researchers argue that this priming effect is perceptual, whereas others propose that priming is postperceptual, involving facilitated response selection. The experimental findings have not been consistent regarding the roles of variables such as task difficulty, response repetition, expectancies, and decision-making.

Saccade performance in the nasal and temporal hemifields.

There are numerous asymmetries in anatomy between the nasal and temporal hemiretinae, which have been connected to various asymmetries in behavioral performance. These include asymmetries in Vernier acuity, saccade selection, and attentional function, in addition to some evidence for latency differences for saccadic eye movements. There is also evidence for stronger retinotectal neural projection from the nasal than the temporal hemiretina.

Episodic retrieval and feature facilitation in intertrial priming of visual search.

Huang, Holcombe, and Pashler (Memory & Cognition, 32, 12-20, 2004) found that priming from repetition of different features of a target in a visual search task resulted in significant response time (RT) reductions when both target brightness and size were repeated. But when only one feature was repeated and the other changed, RTs were longer than when neither feature was repeated. From this, they argued that priming in visual search reflected episodic retrieval of memory traces, rather than facilitation of repeated features.