Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

Typists can type 4 to 5 keystrokes per second at around 95% accuracy, yet they appear to have poor declarative knowledge of key locations. Logan and Crump (2011, Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 54, pp. 1–27) accounted for this paradox by proposing that typing is hierarchically organized into two loops, with an outer loop that transforms sentences into words and passes each word, one at a time, to an inner loop that transforms each word into its constituent keystrokes; however, the nature of the inner loop’s spatial knowledge is not well understood. Key locations may be learned through the experiences of locating and traversing between keys. In daily life, people tend to type structured language, and, as a consequence, certain keys and key-to-key transitions are experienced more frequently than others. Here, we asked whether or not this knowledge is structured hierarchically. For example, knowledge of key locations may be nested within representations of words, or the inner loop may rely on knowledge that is independent from higher level structures. To test this, we had people type English, English-like, and random strings during normal, partially occluded, and occluded typing. In both partially occluded and occluded typing, error rates were higher while typing random strings compared to English and English-like strings, whereas there was no difference in error rates between English and English-like strings. This suggests that typists’ spatial knowledge of the keyboard is not driven by hierarchical word-level representations, but instead is likely driven by a collection of individual processes, such as knowledge of the sequential structure of language acquired by typing more frequently occurring letters.

Recent studies indicate that playing action video games improves performance on a number of attention-based tasks. However, it remains unclear whether action video game experience primarily affects endogenous or exogenous forms of spatial orienting. To examine this issue, action video game players and non-action video game players performed an attentional capture task. The results show that action video game players responded quicker than non-action video game players, both when a target appeared in isolation and when a salient, task-irrelevant distractor was present in the display. Action video game players additionally showed a smaller capture effect than did non-action video game players. When coupled with the findings of previous studies, the collective evidence indicates that extensive experience with action video games may enhance players’ top-down attentional control, which, in turn, can modulate the negative effects of bottom-up attentional capture.

As was shown by Wykowska, Schubö, and Hommel (Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception and Performance, 35, 1755–1769, 2009), action control can affect rather early perceptual processes in visual search: Although size pop-outs are detected faster when having prepared for a manual grasping action, luminance pop-outs benefit from preparing for a pointing action. In the present study, we demonstrate that this effect of action–target congruency does not rely on, or vary with, set-level similarity or element-level similarity between perception and action—two factors that play crucial roles in standard stimulus–response interactions and in models accounting for these interactions. This result suggests that action control biases perceptual processes in specific ways that go beyond standard stimulus–response compatibility effects and supports the idea that action–target congruency taps into a fundamental characteristic of human action control.

Under a “cocktail-party” environment with simultaneous multiple talkers, recognition of target speech is effectively improved by a number of perceptually unmasking cues. It remains unclear whether emotions embedded in the target-speaker’s voice can either improve speech perception alone or interact with other cues facilitating speech perception against a masker background. This study used two target-speaker voices with different emotional valences to examine whether recognition of target speech is modulated by the emotional valence when the target speech and the maskers were perceptually co-located or separated. The results showed that both the speech recognition against the masker background and the separation-induced unmasking effect were higher for the target speaker with a negatively emotional voice than for the target speaker with a positively emotional voice. Moreover, when the negative voice was fear conditioned, the target-speech recognition was further improved against speech informational masking. These results suggested that the emotionally vocal unmasking cue interacts significantly with the perceived spatial-separation unmasking cue, facilitating the unmasking effect against a masking background. Thus, emotional features embedded in the target-speaker’s vocal timbre are also useful for unmasking the target speech in “cocktail-party” environments.

Although saccadic eye movements occur frequently—about three or four times a second— humans are astonishingly blind to transsaccadic changes. Locational displacements of the saccade target of up to 2 deg of visual angle, and even large changes of a visual scene, can go unnoticed. For a long time, this insensitivity was ascribed to deficits in transsaccadic memory: Only a coarse, (spatially) imprecise representation would be retained across a saccade. This assumption was contradicted by Deubel’s and Schneider’s (Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17:259–260, 1994) striking finding that locational discrimination performance across a saccade is greatly improved by inserting a short postsaccadic blank. Surprisingly, the question of whether blanking effects occur also for other forms of transsaccadic changes (i.e., surface-feature changes) has been widely ignored. We tested this question by means of a transsaccadic change in spatial frequency. Postsaccadic blanking facilitated spatial-frequency discrimination, but to a smaller amount than the usual blanking effects obtained with locational displacements. This finding bears important implications for models of visual stability and transsaccadic memory.

In time-based visual selection, task-irrelevant, old stimuli can be inhibited in order to allow the selective processing of new stimuli that appear at a later point in time (the preview benefit; Watson & Humphreys, 1997). The current study investigated if illusory and non-illusory perceptual groups influence the ability to inhibit old and prioritize new stimuli in time-based visual selection. Experiment 1 showed that with Kanizsa-type illusory stimuli, a preview benefit occurred only when displays contained a small number of items. Experiment 2 demonstrated that a set of Kanizsa-type illusory stimuli could be selectively searched amongst a set of non-illusory distractors with no additional preview benefit obtained by separating the two sets of stimuli in time. Experiment 3 showed that, similarly to Experiment 1, non-illusory perceptual groups also produced a preview benefit only for a small number of number of distractors. Experiment 4 demonstrated that local changes to perceptually grouped old items eliminated the preview benefit. The results indicate that the preview benefit is reduced in capacity when applied to complex stimuli that require perceptual grouping, regardless of whether the grouped elements elicit illusory contours. Further, inhibition is applied at the level of grouped objects, rather than to the individual elements making up those groups. The findings are discussed in terms of capacity limits in the inhibition of old distractor stimuli when they consist of perceptual groups, the attentional requirements of forming perceptual groups and the mechanisms and efficiency of time-based visual selection.

This article provides an update of the Theory of Event Coding (TEC), which claims that perception and action are identical processes operating on the same codes – event files consisting of integrated networks of sensorimotor feature codes. The original version of the theory emphasized its representational underpinnings, but recent theoretical developments provide the basis for a more integrated view consisting of both the codes that are shared between perception and action in the control processes operating on these codes. Four developments are discussed in more detail: The degree to which the integration and retrieval of event files depends on current goals, how metacontrol states impact the handling of event files, how feature binding relates to event learning, and how the integration of non-social events relates to the integration of social events. Case examples using various versions of the Simon task are used to explain how the new version of TEC explains interactions between perception and action in non-social and social situations.