Now showing items 1-20 of 65

    • Anatomical Constraints on Attention: Hemifield Independence Is a Signature of Multifocal Spatial Selection 

      Alvarez, George Angelo; Gill, Jonathan; Cavanagh, Patrick (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, 2012)
      Previous studies have shown independent attentional selection of targets in the left and right visual hemifields during attentional tracking (Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2005) but not during a visual search (Luck, Hillyard, Mangun, ...
    • Attention Alters Perceived Attractiveness 

      Störmer, Viola S.; Alvarez, George (SAGE Publications, 2016-03-10)
      Can attention alter the impression of a face? Previous studies showed that attention modulates the appearance of lower-level visual features. For instance, attention can make a simple stimulus appear to have higher contrast ...
    • Attention is fast but volition is slow 

      Wolfe, Jeremy; Alvarez, George; Horowitz, Todd (Springer Nature, 2000-08)
      How swiftly can the object of your attention be changed? Consider two ways to deploy attention: it can be commanded from place to place by a deliberate act of will, or it can run freely without specific instruction. Here ...
    • The Capacity of Visual Short-Term Memory is Set Both by Visual Information Load and by Number of Objects 

      Alvarez, George; Cavanagh, Patrick (SAGE Publications, 2004-02)
      Previous research has suggested that visual short-term memory has a fixed capacity of about four objects. However, we found that capacity varied substantially across the five stimulus classes we examined, ranging from 1.6 ...
    • The compensatory dynamic of inter-hemispheric interactions in visuospatial attention revealed using rTMS and fMRI 

      Plow, Ela B.; Cattaneo, Zaira; Carlson, Thomas A.; Alvarez, George A.; Pascual-Leone, Alvaro; Battelli, Lorella (Frontiers Media S.A., 2014)
      A balance of mutual tonic inhibition between bi-hemispheric posterior parietal cortices is believed to play an important role in bilateral visual attention. However, experimental support for this notion has been mainly ...
    • Compression in visual working memory: Using statistical regularities to form more efficient memory representations. 

      Brady, Timothy F.; Konkle, Talia; Alvarez, George (American Psychological Association (APA), 2009)
      The information that individuals can hold in working memory is quite limited, but researchers have typically studied this capacity using simple objects or letter strings with no associations between them. However, in the ...
    • Conceptual distinctiveness supports detailed visual long-term memory for real-world objects 

      Konkle, Talia A; Brady, Timothy F; Alvarez, George Angelo (American Psychological Association, 2010)
      Humans have a massive capacity to store detailed information in visual long-term memory. The present studies explored the fidelity of these visual long-term memory representations and examined how conceptual and perceptual ...
    • Contextual Effects in Visual Working Memory Reveal Hierarchically Structured Memory Representations 

      Brady, Timothy F.; Alvarez, George (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), 2015-11)
      Influential slot and resource models of visual working memory make the assumption that items are stored in memory as independent units, and that there are no interactions between them. Consequently, these models predict ...
    • Detecting changes in real-world objects: The relationship between visual long-term memory and change blindness 

      Brady, Timothy F.; Konkle, Talia; Oliva, Aude; Alvarez, George Angelo (Landes Bioscience, 2009)
      A large body of literature has shown that observers often fail to notice significant changes in visual scenes, even when these changes happen right in front of their eyes. For instance, people often fail to notice if their ...
    • Do Multielement Visual Tracking and Visual Search Draw Continuously on the Same Visual Attention Resources? 

      Alvarez, George; Horowitz, Todd S.; Arsenio, Helga C.; DiMase, Jennifer S.; Wolfe, Jeremy (American Psychological Association (APA), 2005)
      Multielement visual tracking and visual search are 2 tasks that are held to require visual-spatial attention. The authors used the attentional operating characteristic (AOC) method to determine whether both tasks draw ...
    • Explaining human multiple object tracking as resource-constrained approximate inference in a dynamic probabilistic model 

      Vul, Edward; Frank, Michael C.; Tenenbaum, Joshua B.; Alvarez, George Angelo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2009)
      Multiple object tracking is a task commonly used to investigate the architecture of human visual attention. Human participants show a distinctive pattern of suc- cesses and failures in tracking experiments that is often ...
    • Failure of Working Memory Training to Enhance Cognition or Intelligence 

      Thompson, Todd W.; Waskom, Michael L.; Garel, Keri-Lee Alyson; Cardenas-Iniguez, Carlos; Reynolds, Gretchen O.; Winter, Rebecca; Chang, Patricia; Pollard, Kiersten; Lala, Nupur; Alvarez, George Angelo; Gabrieli, John D.E. (Public Library of Science, 2013)
      Fluid intelligence is important for successful functioning in the modern world, but much evidence suggests that fluid intelligence is largely immutable after childhood. Recently, however, researchers have reported gains ...
    • Feature-based attention elicits surround-suppression in Feature Space 

      Stormer, Viola S.; Alvarez, George (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), 2014-09-08)
      It is known that focusing attention on a particular feature (e.g., the color red) facilitates the processing of all objects in the visual field containing that feature [1-7]. Here, we show that such feature-based attention ...
    • Flexible Cognitive Resources: Competitive Content Maps for Attention and Memory 

      Franconeri, Steven L.; Alvarez, George; Cavanagh, Patrick (Elsevier BV, 2013-03)
      The brain has finite processing resources so that, as tasks become harder, performance degrades. Where do the limits on these resources come from? We focus on a variety of capacity-limited buffers related to attention, ...
    • Global Ensemble Texture Representations Are Critical to Rapid Scene Perception. 

      Brady, Timothy F.; Shafer-Skelton, Anna; Alvarez, George (American Psychological Association (APA), 2017-06)
      Traditionally, recognizing the objects within a scene has been treated as a prerequisite to recognizing the scene itself. However, research now suggests that the ability to rapidly recognize visual scenes could be supported ...
    • Hierarchical Encoding in Visual Working Memory 

      Brady, Timothy; Alvarez, George (SAGE Publications, 2011-02-04)
      Influential models of visual working memory treat each item to be stored as an independent unit and assume that there are no interactions between items. However, real-world displays have structure that provides higher-order ...
    • High-level neural structures constrain visual behavior 

      Cohen, Michael A (2014-06-06)
      Visual cognition is notoriously limited: only a finite amount of information can be fully processed at a given instant. What is the source of these limitations? Here, we suggest that the organization of higher-level visual ...
    • How many locations can be selected at once? 

      Franconeri, Steven L.; Alvarez, George; Enns, James T. (American Psychological Association (APA), 2007)
      The visual system uses several tools to select only the most relevant visual information for further processing, including selection by location. In the present study, the authors explored how many locations can be selected ...
    • How Many Objects Can You Track?: Evidence for a Resource-Limited Attentive Tracking Mechanism 

      Alvarez, George; Franconeri, Steven L. (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), 2007-10-30)
      Much of our interaction with the visual world requires us to isolate some currently important objects from other less important objects. This task becomes more difficult when objects move, or when our field of view moves ...
    • Independent Resources for Attentional Tracking in the Left and Right Visual Hemifields 

      Alvarez, George; Cavanagh, Patrick (SAGE Publications, 2005-08-01)
      The ability to divide attention enables people to keep track of up to four independently moving objects. We now show that this tracking capacity is independently constrained in the left and right visual fields as if separate ...