A visual search experiment employed strings of Landolt "C"s to examine how the gap size of and frequency of exposure to distractor strings affected eye movements. Increases in gap size were associated with shorter first-fixation durations, gaze durations, and total times, as well as fewer fixations. Importantly, both the number and duration of…

Visual processing is highly sensitive to stimulus orientation; for example, face perception is drastically worse when faces are oriented inverted vs. upright. However, stimulus orientation must be established in relation to a particular reference frame, and in most studies, several reference frames are conflated. Which reference frame(s) matter in…

Where are we? In three experiments, we explore preschoolers' and adults' intuitions about the location of the self using a novel method that asks when an object is closet to a person. Children and adults judge objects near a person's eyes to be closer to her than objects near other parts of her body. This holds even when considering an alien…

Four experiments demonstrate that closing one's eyes affects ethical judgment and behavior because it induces people to mentally simulate events more extensively. People who considered situations with their eyes closed rather than open judged immoral behaviors as more unethical and moral behaviors as more ethical. In addition, considering…

This paper investigates the classification of shapes into broad natural categories such as "animal" or "leaf". We asked whether such coarse classifications can be achieved by a simple statistical classification of the shape skeleton. We surveyed databases of natural shapes, extracting shape skeletons and tabulating their…

The rapid visual detection of other people in our environment is an important first step in social cognition. Here we provide evidence for selective sensitivity of the human visual system to upright depictions of conspecifics. In a series of seven experiments, we assessed the impact of stimulus inversion on the detection of person silhouettes,…

We examine the nature of motor representations evoked during comprehension of written sentences describing hand actions. We distinguish between two kinds of hand actions: a functional action, applied when using the object for its intended purpose, and a volumetric action, applied when picking up or holding the object. In Experiment 1, initial…

A highly familiar type of movement occurs whenever a person walks towards you. In the present study, we investigated whether this type of motion has an effect on face processing. We took a range of different 3D head models and placed them on a single, identical 3D body model. The resulting figures were animated to approach the observer. In a first…

Perception of the human body appears to involve predictive simulations that project forward to track unfolding body-motion events. Here we use representational momentum (RM) to investigate whether implicit knowledge of a learned arbitrary system of body movement such as sign language influences this prediction process, and how this compares to…

Memory for objects helps us to determine how we can most effectively and appropriately interact with them. This suggests a tightly coupled interplay between action and background knowledge. Three experiments demonstrate that grasping circumference can be affected by the size of a visual stimulus (Experiment 1), whether that stimulus appears to be…

The experience of controlling one's own actions, and through them events in the outside world, is a pervasive feature of human mental life. Two experiments investigated the relation between this sense of control and the internal processes involved in action selection and cognitive control. Action selection was manipulated by subliminally priming…

Our body-shadows are special stimuli in the visual world. They often have anatomical resemblance with our own body-parts and move as our body moves, with spatio-temporal correlation. Here, we show that self-attributed body-shadows cue attention to the body-part they refer to, rather than the location they occupy. Using speeded spatial…