The World (of Warcraft) through the eyes of an expert.

Negative correlations between pupil size and the tendency to look at salient locations were found in recent studies (e.g., Mathôt et al.

Effects of number, complexity, and familiarity of flankers on crowded letter identification.

We tested identification of target letters surrounded by a varying number (2, 4, 6) of horizontally aligned flanking elements. Strings were presented left or right of a central fixation dot, and targets were always at the center of the string. Flankers could be other letters, digits, symbols, simple shapes, or false fonts, and thus varied both in terms of visual complexity and familiarity.

Constraints on Letter-in-String Identification in Peripheral Vision: Effects of Number of Flankers and Deployment of Attention.

Effects of non-adjacent flanking elements on crowding of letter stimuli were examined in experiments manipulating the number of flanking elements and the deployment of spatial attention. To this end, identification accuracy of single letters was compared with identification of letter targets surrounded by two, four, or six flanking elements placed symmetrically left and right of the target. Target stimuli were presented left or right of a central fixation, and appeared either unilaterally or with an equivalent number of characters in the contralateral visual field (bilateral presentation).

Serial position effects in the identification of letters, digits, symbols, and shapes in peripheral vision.

Three experiments measured serial position functions for character-in-string identification in peripheral vision. In Experiment 1, random strings of five letters (e.g.

Deciphering CAPTCHAs: what a Turing test reveals about human cognition.

Turning Turing's logic on its head, we used widespread letter-based Turing Tests found on the internet (CAPTCHAs) to shed light on human cognition. We examined the basis of the human ability to solve CAPTCHAs, where machines fail. We asked whether this is due to our use of slow-acting inferential processes that would not be available to machines, or whether fast-acting automatic orthographic processing in humans has superior robustness to shape variations.

Word processing speed in peripheral vision measured with a saccadic choice task.

A saccadic choice task (Kirchner & Thorpe, 2006) was used to measure word processing speed in peripheral vision. To do so, word targets were accompanied by distractor stimuli, which were random strings of consonants presented in the contralateral visual field. Participants were also tested with the animal stimuli of Kirchner and Thorpe's original study.

The influence of clutter on real-world scene search: evidence from search efficiency and eye movements.

We investigated the relationship between visual clutter and visual search in real-world scenes. Specifically, we investigated whether visual clutter, indexed by feature congestion, sub-band entropy, and edge density, correlates with search performance as assessed both by traditional behavioral measures (response time and error rate) and by eye movements. Our results demonstrate that clutter is related to search performance.