The generality of the critical spacing for crowded optotypes: From Bouma to the 21st century.

It is rare to find a crowding manuscript that fails to mention "Bouma's law," the rule of thumb stating that flankers within a distance of about one half of the target eccentricity will induce crowding. Here we investigate the generality of this rule (even for just optotypes), the factors that modulate the critical spacing, and the evidence for the rule in Bouma's own data. We explore these questions by reanalyzing a variety of studies from the literature, running several new control experiments, and by utilizing a model that unifies flanked identification measurements between psychophysical paradigms.

The dynamics of buffered and triggered selection from rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams.

From an incoming stream of visual information, only a limited number of stimuli can be selected for extensive processing. Much of the literature assumes that selection of cued items in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams is a result of attentional sampling being triggered by the cue. We provide evidence for another process-selection from a buffer of stimulus representations.

Children's understanding of habitual behaviour.

Research into the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) has shown how children from a very early age infer other people's goals. However, human behaviour is sometimes driven not by plans to achieve goals, but by habits, which are formed over long periods of reinforcement. Habitual and goal-directed behaviours are often aligned with one another but can diverge when the optimal behavioural policy changes without being directly reinforced (thus specifically hobbling the habitual learning strategy).