Search

Postural changes and the maintenance of postural stability have been shown to affect many aspects of cognition. Here we examined the extent to which selective visual attention may differ between standing and seated postures in three tasks: the Stroop color-word task, a task-switching paradigm, and visual search. We found reduced Stroop interference, a reduction in switch costs, and slower search rates in the visual search task when participants stood compared to when they sat while performing the tasks. The results suggest that the postural demands associated with standing enhance cognitive control, revealing broad connections between body posture and cognitive mechanisms.

Three experiments examined the effects of using informative verbal and pictorial cues on participants’ abilities to perform visual search. By providing participants with more time to encode the cues than had been used previously, all three experiments revealed long-lasting pictorially cued search advantages that stabilized over time. Experiments 1 and 3 demonstrated that searching for changing targets with pictorial cues was equivalent to searching for the same target over multiple trials in which target-switching costs would have been minimized. Experiment 3 additionally revealed that earlier evidence of pictorially cued search advantages was not due to inadequately equating the amount of information contained in the cues or uncertainty about when the search display would appear. Together, the data suggest that there are fundamental differences in the ability of participants to engage in visual search when the targets are identified with verbal, as opposed to pictorial, cues even when participants have sufficient time to fully encode the cues.

The present study explored the manner in which hand position may affect visual processing. We studied three classic visual attention tasks (visual search, inhibition of return, and attentional blink) during which the participants held their hands either near the stimulus display, or far from the display. Remarkably, the hands altered visual processing: people shifted their attention between items more slowly when their hands were near the display. The same results were observed for both visible and invisible hands. This enhancement in vision for objects near the hands reveals a mechanism that could facilitate the detailed evaluation of objects for potential manipulation, or the assessment of potentially dangerous objects for a defensive response.