Spatial updating in superimposed real and virtual environments.

Wang (2004) showed that people do not always simultaneously update their relationships to real and imagined environments in a dual-environment situation. Employing the same paradigm, we examined whether spatial updating operates on virtual reality as it does on a real or fictitious environment. Participants learned target locations in a real room and a virtual kitchen.

Intertrial inhibition of focused attention in pop-out search.

When a visual search for a color oddball is performed, responses to target-present trials are affected by the color of items in immediately preceding target-absent trials, a phenomenon known as the distractor-previewing effect (DPE). Specifically, the color of the items in the target-absent trial suppresses responses to a target of that color in the subsequent trial, even though participants report a target feature uncorrelated with color. We believe that this suppression reflects a transient inhibitory effect on focused attention that biases attention away from items that are of the same color as the items in the target-absent trial.