fMRI shows persistent brain activity during a delay while the participant tries to remember the spatial position of a visual cue. Clayton Curtis.

Can a neural net categorize like a human? Bob Rehder and Gregory Murphy.

Do intimate partners idealize their loved ones globally or only in certain domains? Gwen Seidman and Patrick Shrout.

Motion reveals depth. Jacqueline Snyder, Jeff Mulligan, and Larry Maloney.

How do babies learn what steepness they can crawl down? Karen Adolph.

How do we decide whether the ground is too slippery to walk on? Amy Joh, Karen Adolph, Margot Campbell, and Marion Eppler.

Could a vast number of people communicating by cell phone simulate a brain? Ned Block.

There are a dozen distinct, retinotopically-organized visual areas in the human brain that can be identified routinely in individual subjects. What are the functions of these brain areas and how is the neural activity in each area correlated with conscious visual experience? David Heeger.

Do extra cues to the illuminant in a scene (e.g., shadows, specularities) affect perceived surface roughness judgments? Xian Ho, Mike Landy, and Larry Maloney.

How does illumination affect perceived roughness? Xian Ho, Mike Landy, and Larry Maloney.

Why do people believe in the American Dream? John Jost, Alison Ledgerwood, and Anesu Mandisodza.

How does attention affect visual processing? We used a peripheral cue to elicit an involuntary orienting of attention, and separated neural responses to the cues (blue areas) and to the stimuli (green areas) in the visual cortex. We find that attention increases neural activity, more at higher stages of visual processing. Taosheng Liu, Franco Pestilli, Marisa Carrasco, Neuron 2005.

How do children learn language? Gary Marcus.

Must vision isolate each object in order to recognize it? Can you identify any letter above without looking directly at it? Denis Pelli.

From understanding words to understanding sentences. MEG studies of natural language meaning. Liina Pylkkanen, Brian McElree, and Gregory Murphy.

What brain activity is sensitive to the internal structure of words? Eytan Zweig and Liina Pylkkanen.

When combining two cues to target location, how should spatial uncertainty of one cue affect the ideal observer's aim? Hadley Tassinari, Todd Hudson, and Mike Landy.

Two examples of incongruent visual stimuli: a word denoting social proximity, "us," located far from the observer. Because spatial distance is associated with social distance, participants are slower to indicate the location of the arrow and to identify the word on it with incongruent stimuli than with congruent stimuli ["us" located near the observer and "them" located far from the observer] Yaacov Trope.

What are the social, cognitive, and motivational bases of liberal-conservative divergences? John Jost, Margarita Krochik, and Erin Hennes.

Does the brain measure distances according to a warped geometry? Nick Gustafson and Nathaniel Daw

When participants see two different images, each presented to a different eye, the images rival for perceptual dominance. Perceivers consciously experience seeing one image and inhibit conscious experience of the other. This happens within a few hundred milliseconds and outside of perceivers' conscious awareness. We predicted which image would dominate perceivers' conscious perceptual experience by associating one image with financial reward and the other with financial cost. Perceivers saw what they wanted to see--that is, they saw the image associated with reward and inhibited the images associated with cost.

Balcetis, E., Dunning, D., & Granot, Y. (2012). Subjective value determines initial dominance in binocular rivalry. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 122-129.

If you are not 100% sure whether this animal is a cat or a dog, how likely do you think it is to meow? Gregory Murphy's lab investigates how we use categories to reason about uncertain objects and events.

The distribution of local orientations in retinal images has an over-representation of the cardinal orientations (vertical and horizontal) in images of both natural and urban scenes. Do humans estimate orientation in a Bayesian fashion, combining noisy sensory data with knowledge of the distribution of orientations in the world? Ahna Girshick, Michael Landy and Eero Simoncelli

Are color and texture cues inextricably linked in solving the figure-ground problem in visual perception? Toni Saarela and Michael Landy

Is speech a special sound for humans? Athena Vouloumanos's lab examines infants' biases for speech and their understanding of communicative interactions.