Are judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political, and social factors influence judicial rulings. We test the common caricature of realism that justice is "what the judge ate for breakfast" in sequential parole decisions made by experienced judges. We record the judges' two daily food breaks, which result in segmenting the deliberations of the day into three distinct "decision sessions." We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break. Our findings suggest that judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should have no bearing on legal decisions.oes the outcome of legal cases depend solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner (1, 2). An alternative view of the law-encapsulated in the highly influential 20th century legal realist movement-is rooted in the observation of US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that "the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience" (3). Realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain judicial decisions and that psychological, political, and social factors influence rulings as well (4). The realist view is commonly caricaturized by the trope that justice is "what the judge ate for breakfast" (5). We empirically test this caricature in the context of sequences of parole decisions made by experienced judges (mean experience = 22.5 y, SD = 2.5) and, in so doing, demonstrate how extraneous factors can sway highly consequential decisions of expert decision makers.Prior research suggests that making repeated judgments or decisions depletes individuals' executive function and mental resources (6), which can, in turn, influence their subsequent decisions. For instance, sequential choices between consumer goods can lead to an increase in intuitive decisionmaking (7) as well as a reduced tolerance for pain in a subsequent task (8). Sequential choices and the apparent mental depletion that they evoke also increase people's tendency to simplify decisions by accepting the status quo. German car buyers, for instance, were more likely to accept the default attribute level offered by a manufacturer later in a sequence of attribute decisions than earlier, particularly when these choices followed decisions between many alternatives that had required more mental resources to evaluate (9). These studies hint that making repeated rulings can increase the likelihood of judges to simplify their decisions. We speculate that as judges advance through the sequence of cases (whose order appears to be exogenously d...

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Conventional wisdom holds that a nonpredictive peripheral cue produces a biphasic response time (RT) pattern: early facilitation at the cued location, followed by an RT delay at that location, The latter effect is called inhibition ofreturn (lOR). In two experiments, we report that lOR occurs at a cued location far earlier than was previously thought, and that it is distinct from attentional orienting. In Experiment 1, lOR was observed early (i.e., within 50 msec) at the cued location, when the cue predicted that a detection target would occur at another location. In Experiment 2, this early lOR effect was demonstrated to occur for target detection, but not for target identification. Weconclude that previous failures to observe early lOR at a cued location may have been due to attention being directed to the cued location and thus "masking" lOR.A central goal ofattention research is to understand how we prepare for and select stimulus information from the environment. Typically, we attend to visual information by executing an overt shift of the head and eyes. However, attention can also be allocated covertly, without any overt movements. The effects of covert orienting on visual performance have been explored with a spatial precuing paradigm in which a response stimulus is preceded by a visual event that summons attention to a particular location

The inhibition of return (IOR) effect refers to a slowing in response time for a target that appears at a previously attended location. Many investigators have speculated that IOR's inherent ecological validity may be to ensure an efficient search of a complex environment by creating a bias against returning to locations that have already been investigated. Unfortunately, this intriguing idea has lacked compelling empirical support. The current study addressed this issue. It was shown that in a novel visual search task, the IOR could dwell at a minimum of 3 spatially noncontiguous locations. These data suggest that IOR may serve as an important mechanism for facilitating visual search in complex environments, by inhibiting attention from returning to previously inspected locations.

We report a patient with unilateral damage to the rostral part of the pulvinar who was impaired in localizing stimuli in the inferior visual field contralateral to the lesion and who made errors in the binding of shape and color in that quadrant. The findings demonstrate the importance of the pulvinar in spatial coding and provide support for the function of the thalamus in binding of features. They also provide evidence for a homology between the visual field maps of the inferior and lateral subdivisions of the pulvinar in monkeys and in humans, such that the inferior visual field is represented in the rostral part of the nucleus.