ABSTRACT
The eight chapters within this section encompass a wide variety of issues and experimental paradigms ranging from the dynamics of motor action to specific issues in visual perception (e.g., visual attention, visual awareness, and pattern recognition). Aschersleben, Gehrke, and Prinz are concerned with the links between perception and action, and they present evidence that the perceived time on an action is strongly determined by the sensory information arising from its execution. Elliott and Müller show that the detection of a visual target (a Kanizsa-type square) among a matrix of distractor items is facilitated by the prior presentation, at the subsequent target location, of four “premask” crosses presented “synchronously” within an oscillating matrix of otherwise asynchronized premask crosses, and they relate this intriguing finding to the well-known neurophysiological hypothesis of a feature-binding neural oscillatory synchronization mechanism. Geissler and Lachmann and van Leeuwen propose the memory-guided inference approach to the recognition process of complex stimuli explaining the representation of seemingly redundant information as a means to achieving economy within a more encompassing representational scheme based on mathematical group structures corresponding to the generation rules of the sets of objects. Müller, Krummenacher, and Heller present an attention-weighting account for the processing of basic stimulus dimensions in visual search and segmentation tasks according to which dimensional information is attentionally modulated according to task relevance and variability across trials.
