High perceptual load in a task is known to reduce the visual perception of unattended items (e.g., Lavie, Beck, & Konstantinou, 2014). However, it remains an open question whether perceptual load in one modality (e.g., vision) can affect the detection of stimuli in another modality (e.g., hearing). We report four experiments that establish that high visual perceptual load leads to reduced detec...

Perceptual accuracy is unnecessary for the control of action. For purposes of motor control, sensitivity is more important than accuracy: Systematic (i.e., stable) bias can be corrected for by calibration; variance cannot. Our experiments show that there is a systematic perceptual (i.e., in phenomenology) expansion of angular perceptual variables, such as surface orientation and gaze declinatio...

Four experiments investigated the influence of categorization training on perceptual discrimination. Ss were trained according to 1 of 4 different categorization regimes. Subsequent to category learning, Ss performed a Same-Different judgment task. Ss' sensitivities (d's) for discriminating between items that varied on category-(ir)relevant dimensions were measured. Evidence for acquired distin...

We measured human visuomotor sensitivity to visual information about three-dimensional surface orientation by analyzing movements made to place an object on a slanted surface. We applied linear discriminant analysis to the kinematics of subjects' movements to surfaces with differing slants (angle away form the fronto-parallel) to derive visuomotor d's for discriminating surfaces differing in sl...

In order to obtain a coherent representation of the outside world, auditory and visual information are integrated during human information processing. There is remarkable variance among observers in the capability to integrate auditory and visual information. Here, we propose that visuo-perceptual capabilities predict detection performance for audiovisually coinciding transients in multi-elemen...

Evaluation of faces is an important dimension of social relationships. A degraded sensitivity to facial perceptual cues might contribute to atypical social interactions in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study investigated whether face based social judgment is atypical in ASD and if so, whether it could be related to a degraded sensitivity to facial perceptual cues. Individuals with...

When an observer is faced with an ambiguous, occluded or degraded image, the image will frequently be perceptually completed. In perceptual completion observers report seeing the presence of features or objects which are actually absent that are the complement or “completion” of features or objects in the image. We report a novel completion effect resulting from adding half of a bilaterally sym...

This study investigated two aspects of the perception of bronchoconstriction ("sensitivity" and "absolute perceptual magnitude") in asthmatic patients and identified which clinical characteristics are related to these two aspects of perception of bronchoconstriction. The perception of histamine induced bronchoconstriction was measured in 128 asthmatic patients. Subjects quantified their breathl...

Perceptual learning not only improves sensitivity, but it also changes our subjective experience. However, the question of how these two learning effects relate is largely unexplored. Here we investigate how subjects learn to see initially indiscriminable metacontrast-masked shapes. We find that sensitivity and subjective awareness increase with training. However, sensitivity and subjective awa...