Assistant Professor of Psychology Alexandra List co-authored an article that appeared in the November issue of the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics (AP&P). In “Haptic guidance of overt visual attention,” List and her co-authors from Northwestern University “demonstrated a novel crossmodal influence of haptic-shape information on visual attention.”
The article presented the results of a study in which participants visually searched for a target object among a group of items, fixating the target as quickly as possible. While searching for the target, participants held but never viewed an item of a specific shape in their hands.
The researchers determined that “the time for the eyes to reach a target—a measure of overt visual attention—was reduced when the shape of the held item (e.g., a sphere) was consistent with the shape of the visual target (e.g., an orange), relative to when the held shape was unrelated to the target (e.g., a hockey puck) or when no shape was held.”
A journal of the Psychonomic Society, AP&P was founded in 1966 as Perception & Psychophysics. It is published eight times per year.
