Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

In a first stage of training, participants learned to associate four visual cues (two different colors and two different shapes) with verbal labels. For Group S, one label was applied to both colors and another to both shapes; for Group D, one label...

Visual word recognition is commonly argued to be automatic in the sense that it is obligatory and ballistic. The present experiments combined Stroop and visual search paradigms to provide a novel test of this claim. An array of three, five, or seven...

In two experiments, we explored whether diminutives (e.g., birdie, Patty, bootie), which are characteristic of child-directed speech in many languages, aid word segmentation by regularizing stress patterns and word endings. In an implicit learning task,...

Humans process a visual display more efficiently when they encounter it for a second time, showing learning of the display. This study tests whether implicit learning of complex visual contexts depends on attention. Subjects searched for a white target...

The allocation of human participants to resources was studied by observing the population dynamics of people interacting in real time within a common virtual world. Resources were distributed in two spatially separated pools with varying relative reinforcement...

This article reports evidence of two kinds of serial position effects in immediate serial recall: One involves interresponse pauses, and the other response durations. In forward and backward recall, responding was faster at initial and final positions...

In immediate serial recall, items are better recalled when they are all drawn from the same semantic category. This is usually accounted for by a two-stage retrieval-based framework, in which, at recall, long-term knowledge is used to reconstruct degraded...

Repeating list items leads to better recall when the repetitions are separated by several unique items than when they are presented successively; the spacing effect refers to improved recall for spaced versus successive repetition (lag > 0 vs. lag...

In the present study, the lengthening phenomenon (Tsal & Shalev, 1996), namely, the increase in perceived length of unattended lines, was reexamined in light of criticisms by Prinzmetal and Wilson (1997) and Masin (1999). Prinzmetal and Wilson suggested...

Love, Rouder, and Wisniewski (1999) obtained interesting results showing that, in a same/different task on abstract visual scenes, subjects were able to process global properties quickly, even before local properties were identified. Our aim in this...

It is a matter of common sense that a person is easier to recognize when close than when far away. A possible explanation for why this happens begins with two observations. First, the human visual system, like many image-processing devices, can be viewed...