Previous research shows that directed actions can unconsciously influence higher-order cognitive ... more Previous research shows that directed actions can unconsciously influence higher-order cognitive processing, helping learners to retain knowledge and guiding problem solvers to useful insights (e.g.
The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor... more The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.g., toward) matches the direction of the action in the to-be-judged sentence (e.g., Art gave you the pen describes action toward you). We report on a pre-registered, multi-lab replication of one version of the ACE. The results show that none of the 18 labs involved in the study observed a reliable ACE, and that the meta-analytic estimate of the size of the ACE was essentially zero.
Observers show biases in attention when viewing objects within versus outside of their hands'... more Observers show biases in attention when viewing objects within versus outside of their hands' grasping space. While the hands' proximity to stimuli plays a key role in these effects, recent evidence suggests an observer's affordances for grasping actions also shape visual processing near the hands. The current study examined the relative contributions of proximity and affordances in introducing attentional biases in peripersonal space. Participants placed a single hand on a visual display and detected targets appearing near or far from the hand. Across conditions, the hand was either free, creating an affordance for a grasping action, or immobilized using an orthosis, interfering with the potential to grasp. Replicating previous findings, participants detected targets appearing near the hand more quickly than targets appearing far from the hand. Immobilizing the hands did not disrupt this effect, suggesting that proximity alone is sufficient to facilitate target detectio...
People perceive individual objects as being closer when they have the ability to interact with th... more People perceive individual objects as being closer when they have the ability to interact with the objects than when they do not. We asked how interaction with multiple objects impacts representations of the environment. Participants studied multiple-object layouts, by manually exploring or simply observing each object, and then drew a scaled version of the environment (Exp. 1) or reconstructed a copy of the environment and its boundaries (Exp. 2) from memory. The participants who interacted with multiple objects remembered these objects as being closer together and reconstructed smaller environment boundaries than did the participants who looked without touching. These findings provide evidence that action-based perceptual distortions endure in memory over a moving observer's multiple interactions, compressing not only representations between touched objects, but also untouched environmental boundaries.
Directed actions can play a causal role in cognition 1-4 How do actions guide thoughts? Embodied ... more Directed actions can play a causal role in cognition 1-4 How do actions guide thoughts? Embodied guidance of insight: Directed eye movements can prime performance on DunckerĘĽs radiation problem 5-7 Hypothesis: Compatibilities between action and thought reflect interactions within spatial working memory
Experiment 2: Does passive observer motion also impair MOT? Experiment 3: Which components of obs... more Experiment 2: Does passive observer motion also impair MOT? Experiment 3: Which components of observer motion impair MOT? Self-motion impairs MOT. Passive and active observer motion both impair MOT. Observer location changes are sufficient to impair MOT. Targets Cued 1700 ms Balls Moved 5000 ms Is blue ball a target? Respond Yes/No Conclusions Observer motion (active or passive, with or without visual motion feedback) impairs the ability to track multiple moving objects. Viewpoint changes are not the source of impairment that self-motion causes in MOT. Vestibular movement signals may interfere with MOT.
When people manipulate a moving object, such as writing with a pen or driving a car, they experie... more When people manipulate a moving object, such as writing with a pen or driving a car, they experience their actions as intimately related to the object's motion, that is they perceive control. Here, we tested the hypothesis that observers would feel more control over a moving object if an unrelated task drew attention to a location to which the object subsequently moved. Participants steered an object within a narrow path and discriminated the color of a flash that appeared briefly close to the object. Across two experiments, participants provided higher ratings of perceived control when an object moved over a flash's location than when an object moved away from a flash's location. This result suggests that we use the location of spatial attention to determine the perception of control. If an object goes where we are attending, we feel like we made it go there.
Previous research has shown that attention is prioritized for the space near the hand, leading to... more Previous research has shown that attention is prioritized for the space near the hand, leading to faster detection of visual targets appearing close to one's own hand. In the present study, we examined whether observers are also facilitated in detecting targets presented near another's hand by having participants perform a Posner cueing task while sitting next to a friend. Across blocks, either the participant or the friend placed a hand next to one of the target locations. Our results robustly showed that participants detected targets appearing near their own hands more quickly than targets appearing away from their hands, replicating previous work demonstrating that spatial attention is prioritized near one's own hand (Experiments 1-4). No such attentional bias effects were found for targets appearing near the friend's hand, suggesting that spatial attention is not automatically prioritized near another's hand (Experiments 1 and 2). However, participants were faster to detect targets near the friend's hand following a joint action task, suggesting a shared body representation plays an influential role in biasing attention to the space near another's hand (Experiment 4).
Observers experience biases in visual processing for objects within easy reach of their hands; th... more Observers experience biases in visual processing for objects within easy reach of their hands; these biases may assist them in evaluating items that are candidates for action. I investigated the hypothesis that hand postures that afford different types of actions differentially bias vision. Across three experiments, participants performed global-motion-detection and global-form-perception tasks while their hands were positioned (a) near the display in a posture affording a power grasp, (b) near the display in a posture affording a precision grasp, or (c) in their laps. Although the power-grasp posture facilitated performance on the motion-detection task, the precision-grasp posture instead facilitated performance on the form-perception task. These results suggest that the visual system weights processing on the basis of an observer's current affordances for specific actions: Fast and forceful power grasps enhance temporal sensitivity, whereas detail-oriented precision grasps enh...
During stress, attentional capture by threatening stimuli may be particularly adaptive. Individua... more During stress, attentional capture by threatening stimuli may be particularly adaptive. Individuals are more efficient at identifying threatening faces in a crowd than identifying nonthreatening faces (e.g., Ă–hman et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(3): 466-478, 2001a, Ă–hman et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(3): 381-396, 2001b). However, under conditions of stress, when attention to threat may be most critical, cognitive processes are generally disrupted. The present study explored the attentional advantage of threatening stimuli under stressful conditions. We exposed participants to either high or low stress conditions during a visual search task displaying threatening and nonthreatening facial targets among distractors. Participants' accuracy, reaction times, and self-reported stress were measured. Stress introduced a speed-accuracy trade-off: participants in the high-stress condition were faster, but less accurate, than participants...
Observers experience affordance-specific biases in visual processing for objects within the hands... more Observers experience affordance-specific biases in visual processing for objects within the hands' grasping space, but the mechanism that tunes visual cognition to facilitate action remains unknown. I investigated the hypothesis that altered vision near the hands is a result of experience-driven plasticity. Participants performed motion-detection and form-perception tasks-while their hands were either near the display, in atypical grasping postures, or positioned in their laps-both before and after learning novel grasp affordances. Participants showed enhanced temporal sensitivity for stimuli viewed near the backs of the hands after training to execute a power grasp using the backs of their hands (Experiment 1), but showed enhanced spatial sensitivity for stimuli viewed near the tips of their little fingers after training to use their little fingers to execute a precision grasp (Experiment 2). These results show that visual biases near the hands are plastic, facilitating process...
Attention, perception & psychophysics, Jan 14, 2016
Objects in peripersonal space are of great importance for interaction with the sensory world. A v... more Objects in peripersonal space are of great importance for interaction with the sensory world. A variety of research exploring sensory processing in peripersonal space has produced extensive evidence for altered vision near the hands. However, visual representations of the peripersonal space surrounding the feet remain unexplored. In a set of four experiments, we investigated whether observers experience biases in visual processing for objects near the feet that mirror the alterations associated with near-hand space. Participants performed attentional-cueing tasks in which they detected targets appearing (1) near or far from a single visible foot, (2) near one of two visible feet, (3) near or far from a nonfoot visual anchor, or (4) near or far from an occluded foot. We found a temporal cost associated with detecting targets appearing far from a visible foot, but no biases were associated with targets appearing near versus far from either a nonfoot visual anchor or an occluded foot. ...
Journal of experimental psychology. General, Jan 25, 2015
People use facial appearance to predict social behavior, but can social context also influence fa... more People use facial appearance to predict social behavior, but can social context also influence face perception? Leveraging a link between competition and aggression, we investigated the effects of competitive interactions with confederates on participants' performance in a face reconstruction task. Participants played a game either in competition or cooperation with confederates and were then asked to create facial portraits of these confederates by arranging their component features into their best estimate of an accurate configuration. Across 2 experiments, participants who played in a competitive context reconstructed faces in a more aggressive configuration-with higher width-to-height ratios-than did participants who played cooperatively or alone. This result demonstrates that the social perception of faces is not merely a feed-forward process, but instead that the social contexts in which people interact can shape memory for faces. (PsycINFO Database Record
Building on a well-established link between elevation and social power, we demonstrate that-when ... more Building on a well-established link between elevation and social power, we demonstrate that-when perceptual information is limited-subtle visual cues can shape people's representations of others and, in turn, alter strategic social behavior. A cue to elevation (unrelated to physical size) provided by the placement of web cameras in a video chat biased individuals' perceptions of a partner's height (Experiment 1) and shaped the extent to which they made decisions in their own self-interest: participants tended to coordinate their behavior in a manner that benefitted the preferences of a partner pictured from a low camera angle during a game of asymmetric coordination (Experiment 2). Our results suggest that people are vulnerable to the influence of a limited viewpoint when forming representations of others in a manner that shapes their strategic choices.
Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning b... more Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning by way of an implicit eye-movement-to-cognition link. We tested this proposal and investigated the nature of this link by continuously monitoring eye movements and asking participants to perform a problem-solving task under free-viewing conditions while occasionally guiding their eye movements (via an unrelated tracking task), either in a pattern related to the problem's solution or in unrelated patterns. Although participants reported that they were not aware of any relationship between the tracking task and the problem, those who moved their eyes in a pattern related to the problem's solution were the most successful problem solvers. Our results support the existence of an implicit compatibility between spatial cognition and the eye movement patterns that people use to examine a scene.
Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning b... more Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning by way of an implicit eye-movement-to-cognition link. We tested this proposal and investigated the nature of this link by continuously monitoring eye movements and asking participants to perform a problem-solving task under free-viewing conditions while occasionally guiding their eye movements (via an unrelated tracking task), either in a pattern related to the problem's solution or in unrelated patterns. Although participants reported that they were not aware of any relationship between the tracking task and the problem, those who moved their eyes in a pattern related to the problem's solution were the most successful problem solvers. Our results support the existence of an implicit compatibility between spatial cognition and the eye movement patterns that people use to examine a scene.
There is a growing commitment within cognitive psychology to understand the mind in the context o... more There is a growing commitment within cognitive psychology to understand the mind in the context of its ties to a physical body, championing the notion that the mind uses the body to accomplish cognitive goals, not only through direct action but also by tapping into perceptual and motor resources to represent and manipulate information (e.g.,
Previous research shows that directed actions can unconsciously influence higher-order cognitive ... more Previous research shows that directed actions can unconsciously influence higher-order cognitive processing, helping learners to retain knowledge and guiding problem solvers to useful insights (e.g.
The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor... more The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.g., toward) matches the direction of the action in the to-be-judged sentence (e.g., Art gave you the pen describes action toward you). We report on a pre-registered, multi-lab replication of one version of the ACE. The results show that none of the 18 labs involved in the study observed a reliable ACE, and that the meta-analytic estimate of the size of the ACE was essentially zero.
Observers show biases in attention when viewing objects within versus outside of their hands'... more Observers show biases in attention when viewing objects within versus outside of their hands' grasping space. While the hands' proximity to stimuli plays a key role in these effects, recent evidence suggests an observer's affordances for grasping actions also shape visual processing near the hands. The current study examined the relative contributions of proximity and affordances in introducing attentional biases in peripersonal space. Participants placed a single hand on a visual display and detected targets appearing near or far from the hand. Across conditions, the hand was either free, creating an affordance for a grasping action, or immobilized using an orthosis, interfering with the potential to grasp. Replicating previous findings, participants detected targets appearing near the hand more quickly than targets appearing far from the hand. Immobilizing the hands did not disrupt this effect, suggesting that proximity alone is sufficient to facilitate target detectio...
People perceive individual objects as being closer when they have the ability to interact with th... more People perceive individual objects as being closer when they have the ability to interact with the objects than when they do not. We asked how interaction with multiple objects impacts representations of the environment. Participants studied multiple-object layouts, by manually exploring or simply observing each object, and then drew a scaled version of the environment (Exp. 1) or reconstructed a copy of the environment and its boundaries (Exp. 2) from memory. The participants who interacted with multiple objects remembered these objects as being closer together and reconstructed smaller environment boundaries than did the participants who looked without touching. These findings provide evidence that action-based perceptual distortions endure in memory over a moving observer's multiple interactions, compressing not only representations between touched objects, but also untouched environmental boundaries.
Directed actions can play a causal role in cognition 1-4 How do actions guide thoughts? Embodied ... more Directed actions can play a causal role in cognition 1-4 How do actions guide thoughts? Embodied guidance of insight: Directed eye movements can prime performance on DunckerĘĽs radiation problem 5-7 Hypothesis: Compatibilities between action and thought reflect interactions within spatial working memory
Experiment 2: Does passive observer motion also impair MOT? Experiment 3: Which components of obs... more Experiment 2: Does passive observer motion also impair MOT? Experiment 3: Which components of observer motion impair MOT? Self-motion impairs MOT. Passive and active observer motion both impair MOT. Observer location changes are sufficient to impair MOT. Targets Cued 1700 ms Balls Moved 5000 ms Is blue ball a target? Respond Yes/No Conclusions Observer motion (active or passive, with or without visual motion feedback) impairs the ability to track multiple moving objects. Viewpoint changes are not the source of impairment that self-motion causes in MOT. Vestibular movement signals may interfere with MOT.
When people manipulate a moving object, such as writing with a pen or driving a car, they experie... more When people manipulate a moving object, such as writing with a pen or driving a car, they experience their actions as intimately related to the object's motion, that is they perceive control. Here, we tested the hypothesis that observers would feel more control over a moving object if an unrelated task drew attention to a location to which the object subsequently moved. Participants steered an object within a narrow path and discriminated the color of a flash that appeared briefly close to the object. Across two experiments, participants provided higher ratings of perceived control when an object moved over a flash's location than when an object moved away from a flash's location. This result suggests that we use the location of spatial attention to determine the perception of control. If an object goes where we are attending, we feel like we made it go there.
Previous research has shown that attention is prioritized for the space near the hand, leading to... more Previous research has shown that attention is prioritized for the space near the hand, leading to faster detection of visual targets appearing close to one's own hand. In the present study, we examined whether observers are also facilitated in detecting targets presented near another's hand by having participants perform a Posner cueing task while sitting next to a friend. Across blocks, either the participant or the friend placed a hand next to one of the target locations. Our results robustly showed that participants detected targets appearing near their own hands more quickly than targets appearing away from their hands, replicating previous work demonstrating that spatial attention is prioritized near one's own hand (Experiments 1-4). No such attentional bias effects were found for targets appearing near the friend's hand, suggesting that spatial attention is not automatically prioritized near another's hand (Experiments 1 and 2). However, participants were faster to detect targets near the friend's hand following a joint action task, suggesting a shared body representation plays an influential role in biasing attention to the space near another's hand (Experiment 4).
Observers experience biases in visual processing for objects within easy reach of their hands; th... more Observers experience biases in visual processing for objects within easy reach of their hands; these biases may assist them in evaluating items that are candidates for action. I investigated the hypothesis that hand postures that afford different types of actions differentially bias vision. Across three experiments, participants performed global-motion-detection and global-form-perception tasks while their hands were positioned (a) near the display in a posture affording a power grasp, (b) near the display in a posture affording a precision grasp, or (c) in their laps. Although the power-grasp posture facilitated performance on the motion-detection task, the precision-grasp posture instead facilitated performance on the form-perception task. These results suggest that the visual system weights processing on the basis of an observer's current affordances for specific actions: Fast and forceful power grasps enhance temporal sensitivity, whereas detail-oriented precision grasps enh...
During stress, attentional capture by threatening stimuli may be particularly adaptive. Individua... more During stress, attentional capture by threatening stimuli may be particularly adaptive. Individuals are more efficient at identifying threatening faces in a crowd than identifying nonthreatening faces (e.g., Ă–hman et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(3): 466-478, 2001a, Ă–hman et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(3): 381-396, 2001b). However, under conditions of stress, when attention to threat may be most critical, cognitive processes are generally disrupted. The present study explored the attentional advantage of threatening stimuli under stressful conditions. We exposed participants to either high or low stress conditions during a visual search task displaying threatening and nonthreatening facial targets among distractors. Participants' accuracy, reaction times, and self-reported stress were measured. Stress introduced a speed-accuracy trade-off: participants in the high-stress condition were faster, but less accurate, than participants...
Observers experience affordance-specific biases in visual processing for objects within the hands... more Observers experience affordance-specific biases in visual processing for objects within the hands' grasping space, but the mechanism that tunes visual cognition to facilitate action remains unknown. I investigated the hypothesis that altered vision near the hands is a result of experience-driven plasticity. Participants performed motion-detection and form-perception tasks-while their hands were either near the display, in atypical grasping postures, or positioned in their laps-both before and after learning novel grasp affordances. Participants showed enhanced temporal sensitivity for stimuli viewed near the backs of the hands after training to execute a power grasp using the backs of their hands (Experiment 1), but showed enhanced spatial sensitivity for stimuli viewed near the tips of their little fingers after training to use their little fingers to execute a precision grasp (Experiment 2). These results show that visual biases near the hands are plastic, facilitating process...
Attention, perception & psychophysics, Jan 14, 2016
Objects in peripersonal space are of great importance for interaction with the sensory world. A v... more Objects in peripersonal space are of great importance for interaction with the sensory world. A variety of research exploring sensory processing in peripersonal space has produced extensive evidence for altered vision near the hands. However, visual representations of the peripersonal space surrounding the feet remain unexplored. In a set of four experiments, we investigated whether observers experience biases in visual processing for objects near the feet that mirror the alterations associated with near-hand space. Participants performed attentional-cueing tasks in which they detected targets appearing (1) near or far from a single visible foot, (2) near one of two visible feet, (3) near or far from a nonfoot visual anchor, or (4) near or far from an occluded foot. We found a temporal cost associated with detecting targets appearing far from a visible foot, but no biases were associated with targets appearing near versus far from either a nonfoot visual anchor or an occluded foot. ...
Journal of experimental psychology. General, Jan 25, 2015
People use facial appearance to predict social behavior, but can social context also influence fa... more People use facial appearance to predict social behavior, but can social context also influence face perception? Leveraging a link between competition and aggression, we investigated the effects of competitive interactions with confederates on participants' performance in a face reconstruction task. Participants played a game either in competition or cooperation with confederates and were then asked to create facial portraits of these confederates by arranging their component features into their best estimate of an accurate configuration. Across 2 experiments, participants who played in a competitive context reconstructed faces in a more aggressive configuration-with higher width-to-height ratios-than did participants who played cooperatively or alone. This result demonstrates that the social perception of faces is not merely a feed-forward process, but instead that the social contexts in which people interact can shape memory for faces. (PsycINFO Database Record
Building on a well-established link between elevation and social power, we demonstrate that-when ... more Building on a well-established link between elevation and social power, we demonstrate that-when perceptual information is limited-subtle visual cues can shape people's representations of others and, in turn, alter strategic social behavior. A cue to elevation (unrelated to physical size) provided by the placement of web cameras in a video chat biased individuals' perceptions of a partner's height (Experiment 1) and shaped the extent to which they made decisions in their own self-interest: participants tended to coordinate their behavior in a manner that benefitted the preferences of a partner pictured from a low camera angle during a game of asymmetric coordination (Experiment 2). Our results suggest that people are vulnerable to the influence of a limited viewpoint when forming representations of others in a manner that shapes their strategic choices.
Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning b... more Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning by way of an implicit eye-movement-to-cognition link. We tested this proposal and investigated the nature of this link by continuously monitoring eye movements and asking participants to perform a problem-solving task under free-viewing conditions while occasionally guiding their eye movements (via an unrelated tracking task), either in a pattern related to the problem's solution or in unrelated patterns. Although participants reported that they were not aware of any relationship between the tracking task and the problem, those who moved their eyes in a pattern related to the problem's solution were the most successful problem solvers. Our results support the existence of an implicit compatibility between spatial cognition and the eye movement patterns that people use to examine a scene.
Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning b... more Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning by way of an implicit eye-movement-to-cognition link. We tested this proposal and investigated the nature of this link by continuously monitoring eye movements and asking participants to perform a problem-solving task under free-viewing conditions while occasionally guiding their eye movements (via an unrelated tracking task), either in a pattern related to the problem's solution or in unrelated patterns. Although participants reported that they were not aware of any relationship between the tracking task and the problem, those who moved their eyes in a pattern related to the problem's solution were the most successful problem solvers. Our results support the existence of an implicit compatibility between spatial cognition and the eye movement patterns that people use to examine a scene.
There is a growing commitment within cognitive psychology to understand the mind in the context o... more There is a growing commitment within cognitive psychology to understand the mind in the context of its ties to a physical body, championing the notion that the mind uses the body to accomplish cognitive goals, not only through direct action but also by tapping into perceptual and motor resources to represent and manipulate information (e.g.,
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Papers by Laura Thomas