We have investigated the relation between visuo-tactile interactions and the self-other distinction. In the Visual Enhancement of Touch (VET) effect, non-informative vision of one's own hand improves tactile spatial perception. Previous studies suggested that looking at "another"person's hand could also enhance tactile perception, but did not…

We examined whether illusory self-motion perception ("vection") induced by viewing upward and downward grating motion stimuli can alter the emotional valence of recollected autobiographical episodic memories. We found that participants recollected positive episodes more often while perceiving upward vection. However, when we tested a small moving…

We study people's abilities to transfer object category knowledge across visual and haptic domains. If a person learns to categorize objects based on inputs from one sensory modality, can the person categorize these same objects when the objects are perceived through another modality? Can the person categorize novel objects from the same…

The present research aimed to investigate whether, as previously observed with pictures, background auditory rhythm would also influence visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with bisyllabic visual words, segmented into two successive groups of letters, while an irrelevant strongly metric auditory…

Humans have the ability to attentionally select the most relevant visual information from their extrapersonal world and to retain it in a temporary buffer, known as visual short-term memory (VSTM). Research suggests that at least two non-contiguous items can be selected simultaneously when they are distributed across the two visual hemifields. In…

When we look at a scene, we are conscious of only a small fraction of the available visual information at any given point in time. This raises profound questions regarding how information is selected, when awareness occurs, and the nature of the mechanisms underlying these processes. One tool that may be used to probe these issues is…

It is now well-known that the absence of attention can leave us "blind" to visual stimuli that are very obvious under normal viewing conditions (e.g. a person dressed as a gorilla; Simons & Chabris, 1999). However, the question of whether hearing can ever be susceptible to such effects remains open. Here, we present evidence that the absence of…

Numerous studies have attributed the face inversion effect (FIE) to configural processing of internal facial features in upright but not inverted faces. Recent findings suggest that face mechanisms can be activated by faceless stimuli presented in the context of a body. Here we asked whether faceless stimuli with or without body context may induce…

Inferences of others' social traits from their faces can influence how we think and behave towards them, but little is known about how perceptions of people's traits may affect downstream cognitions, such as memory. Here we explored the relationship between targets' perceived social traits and how well they were remembered following a single brief…

Subitizing is traditionally described as the rapid, preattentive and automatic enumeration of up to four items. Counting, by contrast, describes the enumeration of larger sets of items and requires slower serial shifts of attention. Although recent research has called into question the preattentive nature of subitizing, whether or not numerosities…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the controlled versus the automatic nature of temporal preparation. If temporal preparation involves controlled rather than automatic processing, it should be reduced by the addition of a concurrent demanding task. This hypothesis was tested by comparing participants' performance in a temporal…

The function of consciousness was explored in two contexts of audio-visual speech, cross-modal visual attention guidance and McGurk cross-modal integration. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 utilized a novel cueing paradigm in which two different flash suppressed lip-streams cooccured with speech sounds matching one of these streams. A visual target was…

While perceiving speech, people see mouth shapes that are systematically associated with sounds. In particular, a vertically stretched mouth produces a /woo/ sound, whereas a horizontally stretched mouth produces a /wee/ sound. We demonstrate that hearing these speech sounds alters how we see aspect ratio, a basic visual feature that contributes…

The observation of cueing effects (faster responses for cued than uncued targets) rapidly following centrally-presented arrows has led to the suggestion that arrows trigger rapid automatic shifts of spatial attention. However, these effects have primarily been observed during easy target-detection tasks when both cue and target remain on the…

Subitizing is the immediate apprehension of the exact number of items in small sets. Despite more than a 100 years of research around this phenomenon, its nature and origin are still unknown. One view posits that it reflects a number estimation process common for small and large sets, which precision decreases as the number of items increases,…