Effects of maze appearance on maze solving.

As mazes are typically complex, cluttered stimuli, solving them is likely limited by visual crowding. Thus, several aspects of the appearance of the maze - the thickness, spacing, and curvature of the paths, as well as the texture of both paths and walls - likely influence the performance. In the current study, we investigate the effects of perceptual aspects of maze design on maze-solving performance to understand the role of crowding and visual complexity.

Peripheral vision and crowding in mental maze-solving.

Solving a maze effectively relies on both perception and cognition. Studying maze-solving behavior contributes to our knowledge about these important processes. Through psychophysical experiments and modeling simulations, we examine the role of peripheral vision, specifically visual crowding in the periphery, in mental maze-solving.

Temporal integration of target features across and within trials in the attentional blink.

Attentional blink research has typically investigated attentional limitations in multiple target processing. The current study investigated the temporal integration of target features in the attentional blink. Across two experiments, we demonstrated that the orientation estimations of individual target items in the attentional blink paradigm were systematically biased.

Variability leads to overestimation of mean summaries.

Research on ensemble perception has shown that people can extract both mean and variance information, but much less is understand how these two different types of summaries interact with one another. Some research has argued that people are more erroneous in extracting the mean of displays that have greater variability. In all three experiments, we manipulated the variability in the displays.

Natural image clutter degrades overt search performance independently of set size.

Although studies of visual search have repeatedly demonstrated that visual clutter impairs search performance in natural scenes, these studies have not attempted to disentangle the effects of search set size from those of clutter per se. Here, we investigate the effect of natural image clutter on performance in an overt search for categorical targets when the search set size is controlled. Observers completed a search task that required detecting and localizing common objects in a set of natural images.

Intrinsic position uncertainty impairs overt search performance.

Uncertainty regarding the position of the search target is a fundamental component of visual search. However, due to perceptual limitations of the human visual system, this uncertainty can arise from intrinsic, as well as extrinsic, sources. The current study sought to characterize the role of intrinsic position uncertainty (IPU) in overt visual search and to determine whether it significantly limits human search performance.