Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is a crucial repository of information when events unfold rapidly before our eyes, yet it maintains only a fraction of the sensory information encoded by the visual system. Here, we tested the hypothesis that saccadic eye movements provide a natural bottleneck for the transition of fragile content in sensory memory…

Joint attention--the mutual focus of 2 individuals on an item--speeds detection and discrimination of target information. However, what happens to that information beyond the initial perceptual episode? To fully comprehend and engage with our immediate environment also requires working memory (WM), which integrates information from second to…

We assessed the extent to which previous experience of joint gaze with people (i.e., looking toward the same object) modulates later gaze cueing of attention elicited by those individuals. Participants in Experiments 1 and 2a/b first completed a saccade/antisaccade task while a to-be-ignored face either looked at, or away from, the participants'…

Recent research in adults has made great use of the gaze cuing paradigm to understand the behavior of the follower in joint attention episodes. We implemented a gaze leading task to investigate the initiator--the other person in these triadic interactions. In a series of gaze-contingent eye-tracking studies, we show that fixation dwell time upon…

Prosodic boundaries can be used to guide syntactic parsing in both spoken and written sentence comprehension, but it is unknown whether the processing of prosodic boundaries affects the processing of upcoming lexical information. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, participants read silently sentences that allow for 2 possible syntactic interpretations…

Switching tasks prolongs response times, an effect reduced but not eliminated by active preparation. To explore the role of attentional selection of the relevant stimulus attribute in these task-switch costs, we measured eye fixations in participants cued to identify either a face or a letter displayed on its forehead. With only 200 ms between cue…

Adults use eye contact as a cue to the mental and emotional states of others. Here, we examined developmental changes in the ability to discriminate between eye contact and averted gaze. Children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults (n=18/age) viewed photographs of a model fixating the center of a camera lens and a series of positions to the…

This study aimed to evaluate the type of attentional selection (location- and/or object-based) triggered by two different types of central noninformative cues: eye gaze and arrows. Two rectangular objects were presented in the visual field, and subjects' attention was directed to the end of a rectangle via the observation of noninformative…

We report how the trajectories of saccadic eye movements are affected by memory interference acquired during associative learning. Human participants learned to perform saccadic choice responses based on the presentation of arbitrary central cues A, B, AC, BC, AX, BY, X, and Y that were trained to predict the appearance of a peripheral target…

Several studies have demonstrated that as listeners hear sentences describing events in a scene, their eye movements anticipate upcoming linguistic items predicted by the unfolding relationship between scene and sentence. While this may reflect active prediction based on structural or contextual expectations, the influence of local thematic…

The issue of whether young children use spatio-temporal information (e.g., movement of objects through time and space) and/or contact-mechanical information (e.g., interaction between objects) to search for a hidden object was investigated. To determine whether one cue can have priority over the other, a dynamic event that put these cues into…

The reported experiments aimed to investigate whether a person and his or her gaze direction presented in the context of a naturalistic scene cause perception, memory, and attention to be biased in typically developing adolescents and high-functioning adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A novel computerized image manipulation program…

In dialog settings, conversational partners converge on similar names for referents. These "lexically entrained" terms [Garrod, S., & Anderson, A. (1987). "Saying what you mean in dialog: A study in conceptual and semantic co-ordination." "Cognition, 27," 181-218] are part of the common ground between the particular individuals who established the…

Transient attention to a visually salient cue enhances processing of a subsequent target in the same spatial location between 50 to 150 ms after cue onset (K. Nakayama & M. Mackeben, 1989). Do stimuli from a categorically defined target set, such as letters or digits, also generate transient attention? Participants reported digit targets among…

Three forced-choice perceptual word identification experiments tested the claim that transitions from positive to negative priming as a function of increasing prime duration are due to cognitive aftereffects. These aftereffects are similar in nature to perceptual aftereffects that produce a negative image due to overexposure and habituation to a…