We studied the ability to localize flashed stimuli, using a relative judgment task. Whenobservers are asked to localize the peripheral position of a probe with respect to the midposition of a spatially extended comparison stimulus, they tend to judge the probe as being more toward the periphery than is the midposition of the comparison stimulus. We report seven experiments in which this novel phenomenon was explored. They reveal that the mislocalization occurs only when the probe and the comparison stimulus are presented in succession, independent of whether the probe or the comparison stimulus comes first (Experiment 1).The size of the mislocalization is dependent on the stimulus onset asynchrony (Experiment 2) and on the eccentricity of presentation (Experiment 3). In addition, the illusion also occurs in an absolute judgment task, which links mislocalization with the general tendency to judge peripherally presented stimuli as being more foveal than they actually are (Experiment 4). The last three experiments reveal that relative mislocalization is affected by the amount of spatial extension of the comparison stimulus (Experiment 5) and by its structure (Experiments 6 and 7). This pattern of results allows us to evaluate possible explanations of the illusion and to relate it to comparable tendencies observed in eye movement behavior. It is concluded that the system in charge of the guidance of saccadic eye movements is also the system that provides the metric in perceived visual space.The visual system processes the location of an object as soon as it appears in the visual field. Spatial acuity, measured with various standard methods, is accepted as being of very high precision. It increases from 5 min of arc at 10 0 retinal periphery to better than I min of arc in the fovea. This extremely high acuity is measured with tasks in which the relative position oftwo spatial features is determined (Badcock & Westheimer, 1985;Westheimer, 1981). However, these tasks assess acuity with long-presented, stationary targets with high contrastthus, under optimal viewing conditions. They require only local comparisons of simultaneously presented spatial features, which may not be the best indicators for direct absolute localizations (for an overview, see Skavenski, 1990).We thank Bruce Bridgeman, Asher Cohen, David Rose, and Steven Yantis for helpful comments and suggestions regarding a previous draft of the paper, Birgitt ABfalgand Sonja Stork for carrying out the experiments, and Marina von Bernhardi and Heidi John for stylistic suggestions. Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to 1. Miisseler,

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A vernier, presented for a short time, shines through a following grating if the grating contains nine and more elements but remains largely invisible for smaller gratings. Therefore, extended grating masks yield, surprisingly, less masking than smaller ones. Here, we show that this mask size effect is not unique to grating masks. Masking diminishes if the size of classical pattern-, noise-, light-, and metacontrast masks increases and if these masks are regular, i.e. highly ordered.

Background: People differ in action vs. state orientation, that is, in the capacity for volitional action control. Prior research has shown that people who are action-rather than state-oriented are better able to perceive and satisfy own motives (e.g., affiliation, achievement, power), which translates into greater psychological well-being (Baumann et al., 2005; Baumann and Quirin, 2006). However, most of the extant literature has been limited to samples from European countries or the US. To address this shortcoming, the present paper investigated the associations between action vs. state orientation, psychological well-being, and anxious style of motive enactment among samples in Germany, New Zealand, and Bangladesh (combined N = 862).Methods: To examine the consistency of our results across countries, a multi-group structural equation model (SEM) was used to examine the associations between action orientation, anxious motive enactment, and well-being. Subsequent mediation analyses assessed whether anxious motive enactment mediated the relationship between action orientation and well-being across each of the three samples.Results: Across all three cultural groups, action orientation was associated with less anxious motive enactment and higher well-being. Moreover, mediation analyses revealed significant indirect paths from action orientation through less anxious motive enactment to well-being that were similar across the three samples.Conclusions: These findings suggest that individual differences in action vs. state orientation have a similar psychological meaning across Western and non-Western cultures.