Losses and External Outcomes Interact to Produce the Gambler's Fallacy.

When making serial predictions in a binary decision task, there is a clear tendency to assume that after a series of the same external outcome (e.g., heads in a coin flip), the next outcome will be the opposing one (e.

Predicting the unpredictable: critical analysis and practical implications of predictive anticipatory activity.

A recent meta-analysis of experiments from seven independent laboratories (n = 26) indicates that the human body can apparently detect randomly delivered stimuli occurring 1-10 s in the future (Mossbridge etal., 2012). The key observation in these studies is that human physiology appears to be able to distinguish between unpredictable dichotomous future stimuli, such as emotional vs.

Neural activity tied to reading predicts individual differences in extended-text comprehension.

Reading comprehension depends on neural processes supporting the access, understanding, and storage of words over time. Examinations of the neural activity correlated with reading have contributed to our understanding of reading comprehension, especially for the comprehension of sentences and short passages. However, the neural activity associated with comprehending an extended text is not well-understood.

Seeing the song: left auditory structures may track auditory-visual dynamic alignment.

Auditory and visual signals generated by a single source tend to be temporally correlated, such as the synchronous sounds of footsteps and the limb movements of a walker. Continuous tracking and comparison of the dynamics of auditory-visual streams is thus useful for the perceptual binding of information arising from a common source. Although language-related mechanisms have been implicated in the tracking of speech-related auditory-visual signals (e.

Rapid volitional control of apparent motion during percept generation.

How rapidly can one voluntarily influence percept generation? The time course of voluntary visual-spatial attention is well studied, but the time course of intentional control over percept generation is relatively unknown. We investigated the latter question using "one-shot" apparent motion. When a vertical or horizontal pair of squares is replaced by its 90º-rotated version, the bottom-up signal is ambiguous.

Changes in auditory frequency guide visual-spatial attention.

How do the characteristics of sounds influence the allocation of visual-spatial attention? Natural sounds typically change in frequency. Here we demonstrate that the direction of frequency change guides visual-spatial attention more strongly than the average or ending frequency, and provide evidence suggesting that this cross-modal effect may be mediated by perceptual experience. We used a Go/No-Go color-matching task to avoid response compatibility confounds.

Learning and generalization on asynchrony and order tasks at sound offset: implications for underlying neural circuitry.

Normal auditory perception relies on accurate judgments about the temporal relationships between sounds. Previously, we used a perceptual-learning paradigm to investigate the neural substrates of two such relative-timing judgments made at sound onset: detecting stimulus asynchrony and discriminating stimulus order. Here, we conducted parallel experiments at sound offset.

Perceptual-learning evidence for separate processing of asynchrony and order tasks.

Normal perception depends, in part, on accurate judgments of the temporal relationships between sensory events. Two such relative-timing skills are the ability to detect stimulus asynchrony and to discriminate stimulus order. Here we investigated the neural processes contributing to the performance of auditory asynchrony and order tasks in humans, using a perceptual-learning paradigm.