Andrew Clement

Millsaps College · Department of Psychology

What we pay attention to in the visual environment is often driven by what we know about the world. For example, a number of studies have found that observers can adopt attentional sets for a particular semantic category. However, some objects are more typical members of a category than others. While previous evidence suggests that an object’s typi...

The last ten years of attention research have witnessed a revolution, replacing a theoretical dichotomy (top-down vs. bottom-up control) with a trichotomy (biased by current goals, physical salience, and selection history). This third new mechanism of attentional control, selection history, is multifaceted. Some aspects of selection history must be...

In the present study, we assessed whether typicality can influence the visual awareness of objects. Participants tracked moving images of objects and counted how often members of one category bounced off the edges of the display. On the last trial, an unexpected object moved across the display. In our first two experiments, this object could belong...

A large body of research suggests that previously reward-associated stimuli can capture attention. Recent evidence also suggests that value-driven attentional biases can occur for a particular category of objects. However, it is unclear how broadly these category-level attentional biases can generalise. In the present study, we examined whether val...

A growing body of research suggests that observers rely on a variety of suboptimal strategies when searching for objects. However, real-world environments contain a variety of statistical regularities that enable more efficient processing of information. In the present study, we examined whether statistical learning can influence the strategic use...

Many theories of numerical cognition assume that numbers and space share a common representation at the response level. For example, observers are faster to respond to small numbers with their left hand and large numbers with their right hand (the SNARC effect). There is also evidence that viewing numbers can produce spatial shifts of attention, su...

A growing body of research suggests that performing actions can distort the perception of size, distance, and other visual information. These distortions have been observed under a variety of circumstances, and appear to persist in both perception and memory. However, it is unclear whether these distortions persist as observers move to new viewpoin...

A growing number of studies suggest that semantic knowledge can influence the control of gaze in scenes. For example, observers are more likely to look toward objects that are semantically related to the currently fixated object. Recent evidence also suggests that an object’s functional orientation can bias gaze direction. However, it is unknown wh...

When observers adopt a category-level attentional set, objects that belong to the same category as this attentional set are more likely to enter awareness. For example, a driver who is monitoring the road for cars may be more likely to notice an oncoming car than a pedestrian who is crossing the road. Semantic associations between categories are al...

Visual working memory (VWM) has a limited capacity of approximately 3–4 visual objects. Current theories of VWM propose that a limited pool of resources can be flexibly allocated to objects, allowing them to be represented at varying levels of precision. Factors that influence the allocation of these resources, such as the complexity and perceptual...

People often conduct visual searches in which multiple targets are possible (e.g., medi-cal x-rays can contain multiple abnormalities). In this type of search, observers are more likely to miss a second target after having found a first one (a subsequent search miss). Recent evi-dence suggests that this effect may be due to a depletion of cognitive...

Previous work reveals that interacting with all objects in an environment can compress spatial memory for the entire group of objects. To assess the scope and magnitude of this effect, we tested whether interacting with a subset of objects compresses spatial memory for all objects in an environment. Participants inspected objects in one or two unma...

When searching for two or more targets, people are more likely to miss a second target after having found a first one (a subsequent search miss). This may be due to a depletion of cognitive resources from tracking the location of the first target. Given that tracking moving objects is resource-demanding, would finding a moving target further increa...

To guide attention during visual search, observers must maintain a visual working memory (VWM) representation of the search target. Distractors often capture attention when they share features with this representation (or with other items in VWM). However, distractors are less likely to capture attention when they appear frequently across trials, s...

Physically interacting with all objects in an environment leads to underestimation of inter-object distances, as well as the overall size of the environment (Thomas et al., 2013). Here, we assessed whether interacting with a subset of objects could compress the remembered spatial layout of all objects, both in individual and nested environments. In...

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests that visual attention operates in parallel at distinct spatial locations and samples the environment in periodic episodes. This combination of spatial and temporal characteristics raises the question of whether attention samples locations in a phase-locked or temporally independent manner. If at...

Introduction: In 1937, Ernest Wever and Charles Bray proposed the Volley Theory to explain how comparatively sluggish neural firing rates might register high auditory frequencies. The theory posits that distinct neural ensembles synchronize at various temporal phases to increase an organism's temporal precision. This neural-ensemble volleying migh...

Introduction: Extant research indicates that visual attention samples the environment about seven times per second (VanRullen, Carlson & Cavanagh, 2007). Research also suggests that separate neural resources mediate attention to the left and right visual fields (LVF and RVF, respectively; Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2005). Here, we investigated whether the...

Multiple lines of evidence indicate that visual attention's temporal properties differ between the left and right visual fields (LVF and RVF). Notably, recent electroencephalograph recordings indicate that event-related potentials peak earlier for LVF than for RVF targets on bilateral-stream rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) identification ta...