Number symbols are part of our everyday visual world. Here we show that merely looking at numbers causes a shift in covert attention to the left or right side, depending upon the number's magnitude. This observation implies obligatory activation of number meaning and signals a tight coupling of internal and external representations of space.

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We report evidence that individual-level variation in people's physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations. These findings are consistent with recent evidence that political views are connected to physiological predispositions but are unique in incorporating findings on variation in directed attention that make it possible to understand additional aspects of the link between the physiological and the political.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the influence of task set on the spatial and temporal characteristics of eye movements during scene perception. In previous work, when strong control was exerted over the viewing task via specification of a target object (as in visual search), task set biased spatial, rather than temporal, parameters of eye movements. Here, we find that more participant-directed tasks (in which the task establishes general goals of viewing rather than specific objects to fixate) affect not only spatial (e.g., saccade amplitude) but also temporal parameters (e.g. fixation duration). Further, task set influenced the rate of change in fixation duration over the course of viewing but not saccade amplitude, suggesting independent mechanisms for control of these parameters.

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The spatial working memory system constantly updates spatial representations and many studies have focused on the underlying principles of the encoding and maintenance of visual information. Here we investigated the question of how the production of actions influences spatial working memory. Participants were given a task that required concurrent maintenance of two spatial arrays, one encoded by visual observation accompanied with pointing movements, the other by only visual observation. Across two experiments, movement during encoding was found to facilitate recognition of spatial arrays in a load-dependent manner. The results suggest an action-based encoding principle within the working memory system, and possible underlying action-related mechanisms are discussed.

We report a study that examined whether inhibition of return (IOR) is specific to visual search or a general characteristic of visual behavior. Participants were shown a series of scenes and were asked to (a) search each scene for a target, (b) memorize each scene, (c) rate how pleasant each scene was, or (d) view each scene freely. An examination of saccadic reaction times to probes provided evidence of IOR during search: Participants were slower to look at probes at previously fixated locations than to look at probes at novel locations. For the other three conditions, however, the opposite pattern of results was observed: Participants were faster to look at probes at previously fixated locations than to look at probes at novel locations, a facilitation-of-return effect that has not been reported previously. These results demonstrate that IOR is a search-specific strategy and not a general characteristic of visual attention.