Visual information affects speech perception as demonstrated by the McGurk effect (McGurk & McDonald, 1976): when audio /ba/ is dubbed with a visual /ga/, what is perceived is /da/. This study aims at observing how visual information, intended as articulatory orofacial movements, is processed by eye, i.e., if gaze is related to articulatory information processing. The results indicate that visu...

Traditionally, the visual enumeration of a small number of items (1 to about 4), referred to as subitizing, has been thought of as a parallel and pre-attentive process and functionally different from the serial attentive enumeration of larger numerosities. We tested this hypothesis by employing a dual task paradigm that systematically manipulated the attentional resources available to an enumer...

The concepts of attention and intrinsic motivations are of great interest within adaptive robotic systems, and can be exploited in order to guide, activate, and coordinate multiple concurrent behaviors. Attention allocation strategies represent key capabilities of human beings, which are strictly connected with action selection and execution mechanisms, while intrinsic motivations directly affe...

Studies are reviewed that examine how perceptual and attentional systems operate in the cortically disconnected human. The data indicate that even though both simple and complex perceptual information associated with the cognitive activities of each disconnected half brain show virtually no interactions, the attentional system remains largely integrated in the split-brain patient. It also appea...

An attentional blink (AB) paradigm was used to investigate the attentional resources necessary for visual marking. The results showed that distractors presented inside the AB cannot easily be ignored despite participants anticipating a future target display. This supports the hypothesis that attentional resources are required for visual marking. In addition, probe dots were better detected on b...

When combined with realtime knowledge of user context and goals, haptic feedback can contribute to the need for transparent, appropriately salient information display in information-rich pervasive environments. Designed with respect for human perceptual and attentional limits, it can serve as a “background” communication channel by freeing visual resources, and being naturally suitable for low-...