Group salience is a key variable both in influencing quality of intergroup contact and in moderating the effects of intergroup contact on prejudicial attitudes. Two studies uncovered the communicative dimensions associated with evaluations of age salience in the grandparent–grandchild relationship, and we investigated the extent to which communication dimensions predicted various measures of sa...

Reminders of death tend to produce strong cognitive and behavioral responses, but little or no emotional response. In three experiments, mortality salience produced an automatic coping response that involved tuning to positive emotional information. Subjects showed increased accessibility of positive emotional information (Experiments 1 and 3) and gave more weight to positive emotion in their j...

We propose a novel regional preference model (RPM) where the framing of the decision problem affects the salience of a product through the region in which it lies, and the product’s salience affects the agent’s evaluation of it. RPM accounts for diverse sets of evidence that are anomalous from the traditional rational perspective. Our general framework encompasses the loss aversion model of Tve...

Many common tasks require us to individuate in parallel two or more objects out of a complex scene. Although the mechanisms underlying our abilities to count the number of items, remember the visual properties of objects and to make saccadic eye movements towards targets have been studied separately, each of these tasks require selection of individual objects and shows a capacity limit. Here we...

Observers were cued to attend to two discs from an array and made a discrimination of a target presented within one of the discs. In Experiments 1 and 2, the relative attentional salience of the two attended items was manipulated via the cues (size changes in Experiment 1; size and color changes in Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, the relative salience was manipulated via the luminance contrast ...

Stimuli that are recognized from a prior encounter elicit larger pupil dilations than those not. This study tests an account of this recognition dilation response (RDR) assumes newly encountered signals, like new percepts, attentional orienting responses. Because is moderated by motivational significance and expectation, the RDR was tested for these properties; manipulating incentives “old” ver...