Although lightness perception is clearly influenced by contextual factors, it is not known whether knowledge about the reflectance of specific objects also affects their lightness. Recent research by O. H. MacLin and R. Malpass (2003) suggests that subjects label Black faces as darker than White faces, so in the current experiments, an adjustment methodology was used to test the degree to which expectations about the relative skin tone associated with faces of varying races affect the perceived lightness of those faces. White faces were consistently judged to be relatively lighter than Black faces, even for racially ambiguous faces that were disambiguated by labels. Accordingly, relatively abstract expectations about the relative reflectance of objects can affect their perceived lightness.

Recent research has revealed a series of striking limits to visual perception. One important aspect of these demonstrations is the degree to which they conflict with intuition; people often believe that they will be able to see things that experiments demonstrate they cannot see. This metacognitive error has been explored with reference to a few specific visual limits, but no study has yet explored people’s intuitions about vision more generally. In this article we present the results of a broad survey of these intuitions. Results replicate previous overestimates and underestimates of visual performance and document new misestimates of performance in tasks that assess inattention blindness and visual knowledge. We also completed an initial exploratory factor analysis of the items and found that estimates of visual performance for well-structured information tend to covary. These results represent an important initial step in organizing the intuitions that may prove important in a variety of settings, including performance of complex visual tasks, evaluation of others people’s visual experience, and even the teaching of psychology.

Eye-tracking technology has expanded our ability to quantitatively measure human perception. This rich data source has been widely used to characterize human behavior and cognition. However, eye-tracking analysis has been limited in its applicability, as contextualizing gaze to environmental artifacts is non-trivial. Moreover, the temporal evolution of gaze behavior through open-ended environments where learners are alternating between tasks often remains unclear. In this paper, we propose temporal fully-weighted scanpath graphs as a novel representation of gaze behavior and combine it with a clustering scheme to obtain high-level gaze summaries that can be mapped to cognitive tasks via network metrics and cluster mean graphs. In a case study with nurse simulation-based team training, our approach was able to explain changes in gaze behavior with respect to key events during the simulation. By identifying cognitive tasks via gaze behavior, learners’ strategies can be evaluated to create online performance metrics and personalized feedback.

In a wide range of circumstances, it is important to perceive and represent the sequence of events. For example, sequence perception is necessary to learn statistical contingencies between events, and to generate predictions about events when segmenting actions. However, viewer's awareness of event sequence is rarely tested, and at least some means of encoding event sequence are likely to be resource-intensive. Therefore, previous research may have overestimated the degree to which viewers are aware of specific event sequences. In the experiments reported here, we tested viewers' ability to detect anomalies during visual event sequences. Participants viewed videos containing events that either did or did not contain an out-of-order action. Participants were unable to consistently detect the misordered events, and performance on the task decreased significantly to very low levels when performing a secondary task. In addition, participants almost never detected misorderings in an incidental version of the task, and performance increased when videos ended immediately after the misordering, We argue that these results demonstrate that viewers can effectively perceive the elements of events, but do not consistently test their expectations about the specific sequence of natural events unless bidden to do so by task-specific demands. (PsycINFO Database Record