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The automaticity of perceiving animacy: Goal-directed motion in simple shapes influences visuomotor behavior even when task-irrelevant

Visual processing recovers not only simple features, such as color and shape, but also seemingly higher-level properties, such as animacy. Indeed, even abstract geometric shapes are readily perceived as intentional agents when they move in certain …

Seeing the world through target-tinted glasses: Positive mood broadens perceptual tuning

Research shows that positive mood can serve to broaden the scope of attention at both the perceptual and conceptual level (e.g., increasing the size of spatial attentional focus and semantic access to remote associates). We investigated whether this …