Spatial Attention and Saccade Preparation Both Independently Contribute to the Discrimination of Oblique Orientations.

The extent to which the preparation of an eye movement and spatial attention both independently influence performance within the same task has long been debated. In a recent study that combined computational modelling with a dual-task, both saccade preparation and spatial cueing were revealed to separately contribute to the discrimination of targets oriented along the cardinal axis (horizontal and vertical). However, it remains to be seen whether and to what degree the same holds true when different perceptual stimuli are used.

Establishing the separable contributions of spatial attention and saccade preparation across tasks with varying acuity demands.

One common way to investigate the relationship between eye movements and attention is to pair the cueing paradigm with a saccadic dual-task. Here eye movements are directed to one location in the visual field, while a spatial cue simultaneously directs attention to the same or a different location. The magnitude of the cueing effect is then compared between trials where gaze is maintained at fixation and trials where eye movements are prepared.

Using evidence accumulation modeling to quantify the relative contributions of spatial attention and saccade preparation in perceptual tasks.

A typical way to investigate the relationship between spatial attention and the programming of an eye movement is with a dual-task. Here, participants simultaneously make an eye movement in 1 direction and discriminate a target at the same or a different location. Results of these tasks consistently find that performance is best at the goal of an upcoming eye movement.

A reach-to-touch investigation on the nature of reading in the Stroop task.

In a Stroop task, participants can be presented with a color name printed in color and need to classify the print color while ignoring the word. The Stroop effect is typically calculated as the difference in mean response time (RT) between congruent (e.g.

Distinguishing the time- and magnitude-difference accounts of the Simon effect: Evidence from the reach-to-touch paradigm.

A Simon effect occurs when the irrelevant spatial attributes of a stimulus conflict with choice responses based on non-spatial stimulus attributes. Many theories of the Simon effect assume that activation from task-irrelevant spatial attributes becomes available before the activation from task-relevant attributes. We refer to this as the time-difference account.

The upper-hemifield advantage for masked face processing: Not just an attentional bias.

Recent evidence suggests that face processing may be more robust in the upper visual field (UVF) than in the lower visual field (LVF). We asked whether this UVF advantage is due to an upward bias in participants' visuospatial attention. Participants classified the sex of a UVF or LVF target face that was preceded by a congruent or incongruent masked prime face.

Gaining the upper hand: evidence of vertical asymmetry in sex-categorisation of human hands.

Visual perception is characterised by asymmetries arising from the brain's preferential response to particular stimulus types at different retinal locations. Where the lower visual field (LVF) holds an advantage over the upper visual field (UVF) for many tasks (e.g.

Direct evidence of cognitive control without perceptual awareness.

A central question within the domain of human cognition is whether or not the ability to replace a current action with a new one (i.e., cognitive control) depends on a conscious appreciation of the environmental change that necessitates the new behavior.

Face-sex categorization is better above fixation than below: Evidence from the reach-to-touch paradigm.

The masked congruence effect (MCE) elicited by nonconsciously presented faces in a sex-categorization task has recently been shown to be sensitive to the effects of attention. Here we investigated how spatial location along the vertical meridian modulates the MCE for face-sex categorization. Participants made left and right reaching movements to classify the sex of a target face that appeared either immediately above or below central fixation.

Dismissing subliminal perception because of its famous problems is classic "baby with the bathwater".

Newell & Shanks (N&S) appeal to well-known problems in establishing subliminality to argue that there is little convincing evidence that subliminally presented stimuli can affect decision making. We discuss how recent studies have successfully addressed these well-known problems and, in turn, have revealed clear evidence that subliminally presented stimuli can affect decision making.

The negative compatibility effect with relevant masks: a case for automatic motor inhibition.

For many years controversy has surrounded the so-called "negative compatibility effect" (NCE), a surprising phenomenon whereby responses to a target stimulus are delayed when the target is preceded by an unconscious, response-compatible prime. According to proponents of the "self-inhibition" hypothesis, the NCE occurs when a low-level self-inhibitory mechanism supresses early motor activations that are no longer supported by perceptual evidence. This account has been debated, however, by those who regard the NCE to be a stimulus-specific phenomenon that can be explained without recourse to a self-inhibitory mechanism.

Responding to the direction of the eyes: in search of the masked gaze-cueing effect.

Recent studies have demonstrated that masked gaze cues can produce a cueing effect. Those studies, however, all utilized a localization task and, hence, are ambiguous with respect to whether the previously observed masked gaze-cueing effect reflects the orienting of attention or the preparation of a motor response. The aim of the present study was to investigate this issue by determining whether masked gaze cues can modulate responses in detection and discrimination tasks, both of which isolate spatial attention from response priming.

Masked and unmasked priming in schizophrenia.

Dehaene et al. (2003) showed an absence of conscious, but not masked, conflict effects when patients with schizophrenia performed a number-categorisation priming task. We aimed to replicate these influential results using a different word-categorisation priming task.

Pointing the way to new constraints on the dynamical claims of computational models.

The reach-to-touch paradigm has become an increasingly popular tool in the study of human cognition. It is widely held that reaching responses are able to reveal the moment-by-moment unfolding of decision processes by virtue of an assumed continuity between reaching trajectories and the underlying "cognitive trajectory." Yet the standard analysis of reaching trajectories aggregates the trajectories across stimulus viewing times, which yields ambiguous results.

Spatial and temporal attention modulate the early stages of face processing: behavioural evidence from a reaching paradigm.

A presently unresolved question within the face perception literature is whether attending to the location of a face modulates face processing (i.e. spatial attention).

Subcortical human face processing? Evidence from masked priming.

Face processing without awareness might depend on subcortical structures (retino-collicular projection), cortical structures, or a combination of the two. The present study was designed to tease apart these possibilities. Because the retino-collicular projection is more sensitive to low spatial frequencies, we used masked (subliminal) face prime images that were spatially low-pass filtered, or high-pass filtered.

Effective processing of masked eye gaze requires volitional control.

The purpose of the present study was to establish whether the validity effect produced by masked eye gaze cues should be attributed to strictly reflexive mechanisms or to volitional top-down mechanisms. While we find that masked eye gaze cues are effective in producing a validity effect in a central cueing paradigm, we also find that the efficacy of masked gaze cues is sharply constrained by the experimental context. Specifically, masked gaze cues only produced a validity effect when they appeared in the context of unmasked and predictive gaze cues.

The flexibility of nonconsciously deployed cognitive processes: evidence from masked congruence priming.

Background: It is well accepted in the subliminal priming literature that task-level properties modulate nonconscious processes. For example, in tasks with a limited number of targets, subliminal priming effects are limited to primes that are physically similar to the targets. In contrast, when a large number of targets are used, subliminal priming effects are observed for primes that share a semantic (but not necessarily physical) relationship with the target.

Viewing and feeling touch modulates hand position for reaching.

Action requires knowledge of our body location in space. Here we asked if interactions with the external world prior to a reaching action influence how visual location information is used. We investigated if the temporal synchrony between viewing and feeling touch modulates the integration of visual and proprioceptive body location information for action.

Subliminal priming with nearly perfect performance in the prime-classification task.

The subliminal priming paradigm is widely used by cognitive scientists, and claims of subliminal perception are common nowadays. Nevertheless, there are still those who remain skeptical. In a recent critique of subliminal priming, Pratte and Rouder (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 71, 1276-1283, 2009) suggested that previous claims of subliminal priming may have been due to a failure to control the task difficulty between the experiment proper and the prime-classification task.

The word class effect in the picture-word interference paradigm.

The word class effect in the picture-word interference paradigm is a highly influential finding that has provided some of the most compelling support for word class constraints on lexical selection. However, methodological concerns called for a replication of the most convincing of those effects. Experiment 1 was a direct replication of Pechmann and Zerbst (2002; Experiment 4).

Can the dual-route cascaded computational model of reading offer a valid account of the masked onset priming effect?

The masked onset priming effect (MOPE) refers to the empirical finding that target naming is faster when the target (SIB) is preceded by a briefly presented masked prime that starts with the same letter/phoneme (suf) than when it does not (mof; Kinoshita, 2000, Experiment 1). The dual-route cascaded (DRC) computational model of reading (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) has offered an explanation for how the MOPE might occur in humans. However, there has been some empirical discrepancy regarding whether for nonword items the effect is limited to the first-letter/phoneme overlap between primes and targets or whether orthographic/phonological priming effects occur beyond the first letter/phoneme.

The role of spatial attention in nonconscious processing: a comparison of face and nonface stimuli.

Recent findings from the masked priming paradigm have revealed a surprising influence of higher-level cognitive systems (i.e., attention) on nonconscious cognitive processes.

Modulating the masked congruence priming effect with the hands and the mouth.

The authors report a series of experiments in which they use the masked congruence priming paradigm to investigate the processing of masked primes in the manual and verbal response modalities. In the manual response modality, they found that masked incongruent primes produced interference relative to both congruent and neutral primes. This finding, which replicates the standard finding in the masked congruence priming literature, is presumed to reflect the conflict that arises between two incompatible responses and, thus, to index the extent of processing of the masked prime.