For nearly half a century now, Garner interference has been serving as the gold standard measure of dimensional interaction and selective attention. But the mechanisms that generate Garner interference are still not well understood. The current study proposes a novel theory that ascribes the interference (and dimensional interaction in general) to…

The size congruity effect (SiCE) shows that number and physical size interact as magnitudes. That is, response times are faster when number and size are congruent (e.g., 2 4) than when they are incongruent (e.g., 2 4). A shared representational system has been the most influential account for the SiCE. Recently, this account has been challenged by…

The goal of the present study was to examine if and how arousal can modulate response inhibition. Two competing hypotheses can be drawn from previous literature. One holds that alerting cues that elevate arousal should result in an impulsive response and therefore impair response inhibition. The other suggests that alerting enhances processing of…

In configuration problems, such as the construction of a weekly study schedule, decision makers must assemble a combination of parts under a set of constraints. Interactions may be present between the parts, and more than a single objective function may exist, such as minimizing the number of days on campus and maximizing the interest level of the…

This book contains a compilation of papers presented at the International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT) 2023, organized by the World Institute for Advanced Research and Science (WIARS), held in International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT) 2023, held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 22 to 24 of April…

Inhibition of return (IOR) is modulated by task set and appears later in discrimination tasks than in detection tasks. Several hypotheses have been suggested to account for this difference. We tested three of these hypotheses in two experiments by examining the influence of cue and target level of processing on the onset of IOR. In the first…

A skew in the base rate of upcoming events can often provide a better cue for accurate predictions than a contingency between signals and events. The authors study prediction behavior and test people's sensitivity to both base rate and contingency; they also examine people's ability to compare the benefits of both for prediction. They formalize…

The type of visual information needed for categorizing faces and nonface objects was investigated by manipulating spatial frequency scales available in the image during a category verification task addressing basic and subordinate levels. Spatial filtering had opposite effects on faces and airplanes that were modulated by categorization level. The…