The generality of the critical spacing for crowded optotypes: From Bouma to the 21st century.

It is rare to find a crowding manuscript that fails to mention "Bouma's law," the rule of thumb stating that flankers within a distance of about one half of the target eccentricity will induce crowding. Here we investigate the generality of this rule (even for just optotypes), the factors that modulate the critical spacing, and the evidence for the rule in Bouma's own data. We explore these questions by reanalyzing a variety of studies from the literature, running several new control experiments, and by utilizing a model that unifies flanked identification measurements between psychophysical paradigms. Specifically, with minimal assumptions (equivalent psychometric slopes across conditions, for example), crowded acuity can be predicted for arbitrary target sizes and flanker spacings, revealing a performance "landscape" that delineates the critical spacing. Last, we present a compact quantitative summary of the effects of different types of stimulus manipulations on optotype crowding.

Children's understanding of habitual behaviour.

Research into the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) has shown how children from a very early age infer other people's goals. However, human behaviour is sometimes driven not by plans to achieve goals, but by habits, which are formed over long periods of reinforcement. Habitual and goal-directed behaviours are often aligned with one another but can diverge when the optimal behavioural policy changes without being directly reinforced (thus specifically hobbling the habitual learning strategy). Unlike the flexibility of goal-directed behaviour, rigid habits can cause agents to persist in behaviour that is no longer adaptive. In the current study, all children predict agents will tend to behave consistently with their goals, but between the ages of 5 and 10, children showed an increasing understanding of how habits can cause agents to persistently take suboptimal actions. These findings stand out from the typical way the development of social reasoning is examined, which instead focuses on children's increasing appreciation of how others' beliefs or expectations affect how they will act in service of their goals. The current findings show that children also learn that under certain circumstances, people's actions are suboptimal despite potentially 'knowing better.'

The dynamics of buffered and triggered selection from rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams.

From an incoming stream of visual information, only a limited number of stimuli can be selected for extensive processing. Much of the literature assumes that selection of cued items in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams is a result of attentional sampling being triggered by the cue. We provide evidence for another process-selection from a buffer of stimulus representations. This can yield selection of stimuli presented before the cue, despite the common theoretical claim that such stimuli should be unavailable. Our novel statistical method provides quantitative evidence that stimuli presented before the cue are sometimes selected. This phenomenon occurred when two RSVP streams were presented simultaneously and one was cued at a random time. When the number of streams was increased, evidence for precue reports diminished and selection was delayed. These results indicated that stimuli in RSVP evoke representations that persist long enough to be selected, provided attention is fast enough. The speed and variability of temporal selection of items is affected by endogenous attention and possibly by competition among stimulus representations. In conditions with fewer streams, faster selection and buffering may occur thanks to participants applying endogenous attention before the cue is presented, speeding the response to the cue and leading to more reports of the item before the cue. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).