All EyeLink Eye Tracker Publications
All 13,000+ peer-reviewed EyeLink research publications up until 2024 (with some early 2025s) are listed below by year. You can search the publications library using keywords such as Visual Search, Smooth Pursuit, Parkinson’s, etc. You can also search for individual author names. Eye-tracking studies grouped by research area can be found on the solutions pages. If we missed any EyeLink eye-tracking papers, please email us!
2024 |
Annika Ziereis; Anne Schacht Additive effects of emotional expression and stimulus size on the perception of genuine and artificial facial expressions: An ERP study Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Ziereis2024,Seeing an angry individual in close physical proximity can not only result in a larger retinal representation of that individual and an enhanced resolution of emotional cues, but may also increase motivation for rapid visual processing and action preparation. The present study investigated the effects of stimulus size and emotional expression on the perception of happy, angry, non-expressive, and scrambled faces. We analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral responses of N = 40 participants who performed a naturalness classification task on real and artificially created facial expressions. While the emotion-related effects on accuracy for recognizing authentic expressions were modulated by stimulus size, ERPs showed only additive effects of stimulus size and emotional expression, with no significant interaction with size. This contrasts with previous research on emotional scenes and words. Effects of size were present in all included ERPs, whereas emotional expressions affected the N170, EPN, and LPC, irrespective of size. These results imply that the decoding of emotional valence in faces can occur even for small stimuli. Supra-additive effects in faces may necessitate larger size ranges or dynamic stimuli that increase arousal. |
Corey M. Ziemba; Robbe L. T. Goris; Gabriel M. Stine; Richard K. Perez; Eero P. Simoncelli; J. Anthony Movshon Neuronal and behavioral responses to naturalistic texture images in macaque monkeys Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 42, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Ziemba2024,The visual world is richly adorned with texture, which can serve to delineate important elements of natural scenes. In anesthetized macaque monkeys, selectivity for the statistical features of natural texture is weak in V1, but substantial in V2, suggesting that neuronal activity in V2 might directly support texture perception. To test this, we investigated the relation between single cell activity in macaque V1 and V2 and simultaneously measured behavioral judgments of texture. We generated stimuli along a continuum between naturalistic texture and phase-randomized noise and trained two macaque monkeys to judge whether a sample texture more closely resembled one or the other extreme. Analysis of responses revealed that individual V1 and V2 neurons carried much less information about texture naturalness than behavioral reports. However, the sensitivity of V2 neurons, especially those preferring naturalistic textures, was significantly closer to that of behavior compared with V1. The firing of both V1 and V2 neurons predicted perceptual choices in response to repeated presentations of the same ambiguous stimulus in one monkey, despite low individual neural sensitivity. However, neither population predicted choice in the second monkey. We conclude that neural responses supporting texture perception likely continue to develop downstream of V2. Further, combined with neural data recorded while the same two monkeys performed an orientation discrimination task, our results demonstrate that choice-correlated neural activity in early sensory cortex is unstable across observers and tasks, untethered from neuronal sensitivity, and thus unlikely to reflect a critical aspect of the formation of perceptual decisions. Significance statement As visual signals propagate along the cortical hierarchy, they encode increasingly complex aspects of the sensory environment and likely have a more direct relationship with perceptual experience. We replicate and extend previous results from anesthetized monkeys differentiating the selectivity of neurons along the first step in cortical vision from area V1 to V2. However, our results further complicate efforts to establish neural signatures that reveal the relationship between perception and the neuronal activity of sensory populations. We find that choice-correlated activity in V1 and V2 is unstable across different observers and tasks, and also untethered from neuronal sensitivity and other features of nonsensory response modulation. |
Zikang Zhu; Byounghoon Kim; Raymond Doudlah; Ting Yu Chang; Ari Rosenberg Differential clustering of visual and choice- and saccade-related activity in macaque V3A and CIP Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 131, no. 4, pp. 709–722, 2024. @article{Zhu2024f,Neurons in sensory and motor cortices tend to aggregate in clusters with similar functional properties. Within the primate dorsal ("where") pathway, an important interface between three-dimensional (3-D) visual processing and motor-related functions consists of two hierarchically organized areas: V3A and the caudal intraparietal (CIP) area. In these areas, 3-D visual information, choice-related activity, and saccade-related activity converge, often at the single-neuron level. Characterizing the clustering of functional properties in areas with mixed selectivity, such as these, may help reveal organizational principles that support sensorimotor transformations. Here we quantified the clustering of visual feature selectivity, choice-related activity, and saccaderelated activity by performing correlational and parametric comparisons of the responses of well-isolated, simultaneously recorded neurons in macaque monkeys. Each functional domain showed statistically significant clustering in both areas. However, there were also domain-specific differences in the strength of clustering across the areas. Visual feature selectivity and saccade-related activity were more strongly clustered in V3A than in CIP. In contrast, choice-related activity was more strongly clustered in CIP than in V3A. These differences in clustering may reflect the areas' roles in sensorimotor processing. Stronger clustering of visual and saccade-related activity in V3A may reflect a greater role in within-domain processing, as opposed to cross-domain synthesis. In contrast, stronger clustering of choice-related activity in CIP may reflect a greater role in synthesizing information across functional domains to bridge perception and action. |
Ruomeng Zhu; Mateo Obregón; Hamutal Kreiner; Richard Shillcock Reading left-to-right and right-to-left orthographies: Ocular prevalence, similarities, differences and the reasons for orthographic conventions Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 463–484, 2024. @article{Zhu2024e,Purpose: We compare right-to-left and left-to-right orthographies to test the theory, derived from studying the latter, that small temporal asynchronies between the two eyes at the beginning and end of every fixation favor ocular prevalence for the left eye in the left hemifield and the right eye in the right hemifield. Ocular prevalence is the prioritizing of one eye's input in the conscious, fused binocular percept. Method: We analyze binocular eye-tracking data from the reading of multiline Arabic and Hebrew text by 28 Arabic (M = 28.7 |
Jiating Zhu; Karen J. Tian; Marisa Carrasco; Rachel N. Denison Temporal attention amplifies stimulus information in fronto-cingulate cortex at an intermediate processing stage Journal Article In: PNAS Nexus, vol. 3, no. 12, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Zhu2024d,The human brain faces significant constraints in its ability to process every item in a sequence of stimuli. Voluntary temporal attention can selectively prioritize a task-relevant item over its temporal competitors to alleviate these constraints. However, it remains unclear when and where in the brain selective temporal attention modulates the visual representation of a prioritized item. Here, we manipulated temporal attention to successive stimuli in a two-target temporal cueing task, while controlling for temporal expectation with fully predictable stimulus timing. We used magnetoencephalography and time-resolved decoding to track the spatiotemporal evolution of stimulus representations in human observers. We found that temporal attention enhanced the representation of the first target around 250 ms after target onset, in a contiguous region spanning left frontal cortex and cingulate cortex. The results indicate that voluntary temporal attention recruits cortical regions beyond the ventral stream at an intermediate processing stage to amplify the representation of a target stimulus. This routing of stimulus information to anterior brain regions may provide protection from interference in visual cortex by a subsequent stimulus. Thus, voluntary temporal attention may have distinctive neural mechanisms to support specific demands of the sequential processing of stimuli. |
Jiahui Zhu; Li Zhou; Yuanyuan Zhou; Yunhan Lin; Yumei Cai; Jiayuan Wu; Chuan Shi Diagnosis of schizophrenia by integrated saccade scores and associations with psychiatric symptoms, and functioning Journal Article In: Medicine, vol. 103, no. 41, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Zhu2024c,Eye movement as a neurobiological biomarker of schizophrenia. We aim to estimate diagnostic accuracy of integrated pro/antisaccade eye movement measurements to discriminate between healthy individuals and schizophrenic patients. We compared the eye movement performance of 85 healthy individuals and 116 schizophrenia-stable patients during prosaccade and antisaccade tasks. The difference eye movement measurements were accumulated by stepwise discriminant analysis to produce an integrated score. Finally, the diagnostic value of the integrated score was calculated by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) area under the curve (AUC), and the best sensitivity and specificity were calculated based on the given cutoff values. Using discriminant analysis, an integrated score included the residual gain and latency (step) during the prosaccade test, the error rate, and the corrected error rate during the antisaccade test. We found that the integrated score could well classify schizophrenia patients and healthy individuals with an accuracy of 80.6%. In the ROC, Youden's index was 0.634 (sensitivity = 81.0% |
Jiahui Zhu; Jinhao Li; Li Zhou; Lingzi Xu; Chengcheng Pu; Bingjie Huang; Qi Zhou; Yunhan Lin; Yajing Tang; Liu Yang; Chuan Shi Eye movements as predictor of cognitive improvement after cognitive remediation therapy in patients with schizophrenia Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychiatry, vol. 15, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Zhu2024b,Aim: Baseline cognitive functions of patients predicted the efficacy of cognitive remediation therapy (CRT), but results are mixed. Eye movement is a more objective and advanced assessment of cognitive functions than neuropsychological testing. We aimed to investigate the applicability of eye movements in predicting cognitive improvement after patients with schizophrenia were treated with CRT. Methods: We recruited 79 patients with schizophrenia to complete 8 weeks of CRT and assessed their cognitive improvement outcomes. Eye movements were assessed by prosaccades, antisaccades, and free-viewing tasks at baseline, and neuropsychological tests in four cognitive domains were assessed before and after treatment to calculate treatment outcomes. Predictors of demographic information, clinical characteristics, and eye movement measures at baseline on cognitive improvement outcomes were analyzed using logistic regression analysis. We further compared the predictive performance between eye movement measurements and neuropsychological test regarding the effect of CRT on cognitive improvement, and explored factors that could be affect the treatment outcomes in different cognitive domains. Results: As operationally defined, 33 patients showed improved in cognition (improved group) and 46 patients did not (non-improved group) after CRT. Patients with schizophrenia being employed, lower directional error rate in antisaccade task, and lower the gap effect (i.e., the difference in saccadic latency between the gap condition and overlap condition) in prosaccade task at baseline predicted cognitive improvement in CRT. However, performance in the free-viewing task not associated with cognitive improvement in patients in CRT. Our results show that eye-movement prediction model predicted the effect of CRT on cognitive improvement in patients with schizophrenia better than neuropsychological prediction model in CRT. In addition, baseline eye-movements, cognitive reserve, antipsychotic medication dose, anticholinergic cognitive burden change, and number of training sessions were associated with improvements in four cognitive domains. Conclusion: Eye movements as a non-invasiveness, objective, and sensitive method of evaluating cognitive function, and combined saccadic measurements in pro- and anti-saccades tasks could be more beneficial than free-viewing task in predicting the effect of CRT on cognitive improvement in patients with schizophrenia. |
Fangfang Zhu; Yun Pan; Zhongling Pi; Jiumin Yang In: Active Learning in Higher Education, no. 199, pp. 1–23, 2024. @article{Zhu2024a,Finding effective ways to improve students' learning from video lectures will not only improve online education efficacy, it will also play an important role in the digital transformation of education. Generating written explanations has shown some benefits for learning, and peer presence may be an implementation-related boundary condition. This study tested the impacts of virtual peer presence (presence vs. absence) and generative tasks (generating explanations vs. no generation) on students' learning in a video-based learning context. Students' attention, meta-comprehension accuracy, motivation, cognitive load, learning achievements, and explanation characteristics were measured. Results showed some benefits of having a virtual peer, and of generating written explanations on students' learning. Moreover, mediating analyses revealed the mediating role of motivation between peer presence and learning achievement, and moderated mediating analyses revealed the moderating role of explanation characteristics between peer presence and motivation. Our findings not only extend the understanding of the positive effects of generating written explanations in video-based learning contexts, they also provide implications for improving students' learning from video lectures as well as optimizing online video lectures. |
Dandan Zhu; Kaiwei Zhang; Kun Zhu; Nana Zhang; Weiping Ding; Guangtao Zhai; Xiaokang Yang From discrete representation to continuous modeling: A novel audio-visual saliency prediction model with implicit neural representations Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, vol. 8, no. 6, pp. 4059–4074, 2024. @article{Zhu2024,In the era of deep learning, audio-visual saliency prediction is still in its infancy due to the complexity of video signals and the continuous correlation in the temporal dimension. Most existing approaches treat videos as 3D grids of RGB values and model them using discrete neural networks, leading to issues such as video content-agnostic and sub-optimal feature representation ability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel dynamic-aware audio-visual saliency (DAVS) model based on implicit neural representations (INRs). The core of our proposed DAVS model is to build an effective mapping by exploiting a parametric neural network that maps space-time coordinates to the corresponding saliency values. Specifically, our model incorporates an INR-based video generator that decomposes videos into image, motion, and audio feature vectors, learning video content-adaptive features via a parametric neural network. This generator efficiently encodes videos, naturally models continuous temporal dynamics, and enhances feature representation capability. Furthermore, we introduce a parametric audio-visual feature fusion strategy in the saliency prediction procedure, enabling intrinsic interactions between modalities and adaptively integrating visual and audio cues. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, our proposed DAVS model demonstrates promising performance and intriguing properties in audio-visual saliency prediction. |
Yan Bang Zhou; Shun Jie Ruan; Kun Zhang; Qing Bao; Hong Zhi Liu Time pressure effects on decision-making in intertemporal loss scenarios: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Zhou2024b,This study utilized eye-tracking techniques to investigate decision-making behavior in intertemporal loss scenarios under both time pressure and no time pressure conditions. Results revealed shorter decision-making times and decreased large later (LL) option selection frequency under time pressure. Participants under time pressure exhibited reduced Mean Fixation Duration (MFD) and Search Measure (SM) values, indicating altered information processing. Mediation analyses confirmed that task choice outcomes were influenced by SM and MFD, suggesting a shift towards heuristic decision-making under time pressure. |
Li Zhou; Fuyi Yang; Valerie Benson In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 635–644, 2024. @article{Zhou2024a,Studies from free-viewing tasks report that children with autism spectrum condition (ASC) exhibit an attentional bias for circumscribed interest (CI) objects (e.g., vehicles) over non-CI objects (e.g., furniture). This atypical preference has led researchers to hypothesise that ASC children would be more distracted by CI-related objects than non-CI-related objects. The current study aimed to explore this issue using a remote distractor paradigm. We found longer saccade latencies for centrally presented distractors in ASC, suggesting delayed endogenous disengagement. Additionally, higher error rates and fewer corrective saccades in ASC indicated poorer attentional control. Neither latencies nor errors were modulated by stimulus types but increased dwell time for CI-related objects over non-CI-related objects in ASC, demonstrated some support for the CI attentional bias reported in previous free-viewing studies. The findings are discussed in relation to how task demands in basic orienting paradigms might mask any CI-related preference bias in children with ASC. |
Junyi Zhou; Min Lin; Wenxin Xu In: Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 1084–1095, 2024. @article{Zhou2024,The relationship among baseline pupil size, fixation stability, and inhibitory control were examined in this study. Participants performed a baseline eye measure in which they were instructed to stare at a fixation dot on screen for 2 min. Following the baseline eye measure, participants completed an antisaccade task to measure inhibitory control ability. We found a correlation between baseline pupil size variability and inhibitory control, as well as between fixation stability and inhibitory control. We showed that participants with better inhibitory control exhibited larger variability in pupil size, and those with better fixation stability showed superior inhibitory control ability. Overall, our results indicate that there are significant correlations between inhibitory control and baseline pupil size, as well as between inhibitory control and fixation stability. |
Hong Zhou; Luhua Wei; Yanyan Jiang; Xia Wang; Yunchuang Sun; Fan Li; Jing Chen; Wei Sun; Lin Zhang; Guiping Zhao; Zhaoxia Wang Abnormal ocular movement in the early stage of multiple-system atrophy with predominant parkinsonism distinct from Parkinson's disease Journal Article In: Journal of Clinical Neurology, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 37–45, 2024. @article{Zhou2024c,Background and Purpose The eye-movement examination can be applied as a noninvasive method to identify multiple-system atrophy (MSA). Few studies have investigated eye movements during the early stage of MSA with predominant parkinsonism (MSA-P). We aimed to determine the characteristic oculomotor changes in the early stage of MSA-P. Methods We retrospectively selected 17 patients with MSA-P and 40 with Parkinson's disease (PD) with disease durations of less than 2 years, and 40 age-matched healthy controls (HCs). Oculomotor performance in the horizontal direction was measured in detail using videonystagmography. Results We found that the proportions of patients with MSA-P and PD exhibiting abnormal eye movements were 82.4% and 77.5%, respectively, which were significantly higher than that in the HCs (47.5%, p<0.05). Compared with HCs, patients with MSA-P presented significantly higher abnormal proportions of fixation and gaze-holding (17.6% vs. 0%), without-fixation (47.1% vs. 0%), prolonged latency in reflexive saccades (29.4% vs. 5.0%), memory-guided saccades (93.3% vs. 10.0%), and catch-up saccades in smooth-pursuit movement (SPM, 41.2% vs. 0) (all p<0.05). Compared with those with PD, patients with MSA-P presented a signifi- cantly higher proportion of catch-up saccades in SPM (41.2% vs. 2.5%, p<0.001). Conclusions MSA-P presented the characteristic of catch-up saccades in SPM in the early stage, which may provide some value in differentiating MSA-P from PD. |
Xiaole Z Zhong; Jonathan R. Polimenic; J. Jean Chen Predicting the macrovascular contribution to resting-state fMRI functional connectivity at 3 Tesla: A model-informed approach Journal Article In: Imaging Neuroscience, vol. 2, pp. 1–22, 2024. @article{Zhong2024a,Macrovascular biases have been a long-standing challenge for fMRI, limiting its ability to detect spatially specific neural activity. Recent experimental studies, including our own (Huck et al., 2023; Zhong et al., 2023), found substantial resting-state macrovascular BOLD fMRI contributions from large veins and arteries, extending into the perivascular tissue at 3 T and 7 T. The objective of this study is to demonstrate the feasibility of predicting, using a biophysical model, the experimental resting-state BOLD fluctuation amplitude (RSFA) and associated functional connectivity (FC) values at 3 Tesla. We investigated the feasibility of both 2D and 3D infinite-cylinder models as well as macrovascular anatomical networks (mVANs) derived from angiograms. Our results demonstrate that: 1) with the availability of mVANs, it is feasible to model macrovascular BOLD FC using both the mVAN-based model and 3D infinite-cylinder models, though the former performed better; 2) biophysical modelling can accurately predict the BOLD pairwise correlation near to large veins (with R 2 ranging from 0.53 to 0.93 across different subjects), but not near to large arteries; 3) compared with FC, biophysical modelling provided less accurate predictions for RSFA; 4) modelling of perivascular BOLD connectivity was feasible at close distances from veins (with R 2 ranging from 0.08 to 0.57), but not arteries, with performance deteriorating with increasing distance. While our current study demonstrates the feasibility of simulating macrovascular BOLD in the resting state, our methodology may also apply to understanding task-based BOLD. Furthermore, these results suggest the possibility of correcting for macrovascular bias in resting-state fMRI and other types of fMRI using biophysical modelling based on vascular anatomy. |
Xiaole Z. Zhong; Yunjie Tong; J. Jean Chen; Xiaole Z. Zhonga; Yunjie Tong; J. Jean Chen Assessment of the macrovascular contribution to resting-state fMRI functional connectivity at 3 Tesla Journal Article In: Imaging Neuroscience, vol. 2, pp. 1–23, 2024. @article{Zhong2024,In resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) functional connectivity (FC) mapping, temporal correlation is widely assumed to reflect synchronized neural-related activity. Although a large number of studies have demonstrated the potential vascular effects on FC, little research has been conducted on FC resulting from macrovascular signal fluctuations. Previously, our study found (Tong, Yao, et al., 2019) a robust anti-correlation between the fMRI signals in the internal carotid artery and the internal jugular vein (and the sagittal sinus). The present study extends the previous study to include all detectable major veins and arteries in the brain in a systematic analysis of the macrovascular contribution to the functional connectivity of the whole-gray matter (GM). This study demonstrates that: (1) The macrovasculature consistently exhibited strong correlational connectivity among itself, with the sign of the correlations varying between arterial and venous connectivity; (2) GM connectivity was found to have a strong macrovascular contribution, stronger from veins than arteries; (3) FC originating from the macrovasculature displayed disproportionately high spatial variability compared to that associated with all GM voxels; and (4) macrovascular contributions to connectivity were still evident well beyond the confines of the macrovascular space. These findings highlight the extensive contribution to rs-fMRI blood-oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) and FC predominantly by large veins, but also by large arteries. These findings pave the way for future studies aimed at more comprehensively modeling and thereby removing these macrovascular contributions. |
Weixi Zheng; Jie Zhang; Anbang Chendu; Yan Wang; Xiaoyi Wang; Hongwei Sun; Liping Jia; Dexiang Zhang Effect of cognitive style on text topic structure processing: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Current Psychology, pp. 27216–27224, 2024. @article{Zheng2024b,This study employed an eye-tracking methodology to explore the impact of cognitive style on the processing of text topic structure among colleges, achieved by manipulating cognitive style and sentence type. Readers' cognitive styles were divided into field-dependent and field-independent categories using the Embedded Figure Test. The dependent variables include first-pass and second-pass fixation duration, corresponding fixation counts, and verification scores after reading each text. The results of the study indicate that participants devoted longer fixation duration and made more fixation counts on headings during the first-pass reading, devoted longer fixation duration, and made more fixation counts on topic sentences during the second-pass readings. The results also show that field-dependent readers exhibited longer fixation duration and more fixation count during the first-pass reading, but they obtained lower verification scores than field-independent readers. These findings imply that their reading outcomes differ, while field-dependent and field-independent readers allocate considerable attention to text topic structure. |
Lei Zheng; Nico Marek; Natalia Melnik; Stefan Pollmann Contextual cueing—Eye movements in rotated and recombined displays Journal Article In: Frontiers in Cognition, vol. 3, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Zheng2024a,Contextual cueing leads to improved efficiency in visual search resulting from the extraction of spatial regularities in repeated visual stimuli. Previous research has demonstrated the independent contributions of global configuration and spatial position to contextual cueing. The present study aimed to investigate whether learned spatial configuration or individual locations would elicit fixation patterns resembling those observed in the original displays. We found that search guidance based on either local or global spatial context, by combining distractor locations from two learned displays or rotating displays, kept not only search time facilitation intact, in agreement with previous studies, but also enabled search with less fixations and more direct scan paths to the target. Fixation distribution maps of recombined or rotated displays were more similar to the original displays than random new displays. However, for rotated displays this was only true when the rotation angle was taken into account. Overall, this shows an astonishingly flexible use of the oculomotor system for search in incompletely repeated displays. |
Haohua Zheng; Man Luo; Yihan Wang; Yangyang Wei Multi-sensory interaction and spatial perception in urban microgreen spaces: A focus on vision, auditory, and olfaction Journal Article In: Sustainability, vol. 16, no. 20, pp. 1–33, 2024. @article{Zheng2024,As important recreational spaces for urban residents, urban microgreen parks enhance the urban living environment and alleviate psychological pressure on residents. The visual, auditory, and olfactory senses are crucial forms of perception in human interaction with nature, and the sustainable perceptual design of miniature green parks under their interaction has become a recent research hotspot. This study aimed to investigate the effects of the visual, acoustic, and olfactory environments (e.g., aromatic green vegetation) on human perception in miniature green parks. Participants were evenly divided into eight groups, including single-sensory groups, multi-sensory interaction groups, and a control group. Eye-tracking technology, blood pressure monitoring, and the Semantic Differential (SD) scales and Profile of Mood State (POMS) were used to assess the effectiveness of physical and mental perception recovery in each group. The results revealed that in an urban microgreen space environment with relatively low ambient noise, visual–auditory, visual–olfactory, and visual–auditory–olfactory interactive stimuli were more effective in promoting the recovery of visual attention than single visual stimuli. Additionally, visual–auditory–olfactory interactive stimuli were able to optimize the quality of spatial perception by using positive sensory inputs to effectively mask negative experiences. Simultaneously, environments with a high proportion of natural sounds had the strongest stimuli, and in the visual–auditory group, systolic blood pressure at S7 and heart rate at S9 significantly decreased (p < 0.05), with reductions of 18.60 mmHg and 20.15 BPM, respectively. Aromatic olfactory sources were more effective in promoting physical and mental relaxation compared to other olfactory sources, with systolic blood pressure reductions of 24.40 mmHg (p < 0.01) for marigolds, 23.35 mmHg (p < 0.01) for small-leaved boxwood, and 27.25 mmHg (p < 0.05) for camphor trees. Specific auditory and olfactory conditions could guide visual focus, such as birdsong directing attention to trees, insect sounds drawing attention to herbaceous plants, floral scents attracting focus to flowers, and leaf scents prompting observation of a wider range of natural vegetation. In summary, significant differences exist between single-sensory experiences and multi-sensory modes of spatial perception and interaction in urban microgreen parks. Compared to a silent and odorless environment, the integration of acoustic and olfactory elements broadened the scope of visual attention, and In the visual–auditory–olfactory interactive perception, the combination of natural sounds and aromatic camphor tree scents had the best effect on attention recovery, thereby improving the quality of spatial perception in urban microgreen parks. |
Ziyi Zhao; Chunxiao Zhao; Lizu Lai; Congrong Shi; Xu Li; Shan Lu; Siyuan Guo; Zhihong Ren In: Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 1044–1054, 2024. @article{Zhao2024e,Objective: Both theoretical and empirical studies suggest that negative cognitive biases significantly influence the onset and persistence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. However, the interplay among these cognitive biases and their conjoint contribution to the long-term trajectory of posttraumatic stress symptoms remains underexplored. This study delves into the interplay among attention, appraisal, and memory biases within a provisional PTSD population and evaluates the predictive effects of two integrative models (weakest link, additive approach) on posttraumatic stress symptoms reported 2 months later. Method: Sixty Chinese participants (Mage = 20.17 |
Zitong Zhao; Jinfeng Ding; Jiayu Wang; Yiya Chen; Xiaoqing Li The flexibility and representational nature of phonological prediction in listening comprehension: Evidence from the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Language and Cognition, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 481–504, 2024. @article{Zhao2024f,Using the visual world paradigmwith printed words, this study investigated the flexibility and representational nature of phonological prediction in real-time speech processing. Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese listened to spoken sentences containing highly predictable target words and viewed a visual array with a critical word and a distractor word on the screen. The critical word was manipulated in four ways: a highly predictable target word, a homophone competitor, a tonal competitor, or an unrelated word. Participants showed a preference for fixating on the homophone competitors before hearing the highly predictable target word. The predicted phonological information waned shortly but was re-activated later around the acoustic onset of the target word. Importantly, this homophone bias was observed only when participants were completing a 'pronunciation judgement' task, but not when they were completing a 'word judgement' task. No effect was found for the tonal competitors. The task modulation effect, combined with the temporal pattern of phonological pre-activation, indicates that phonological prediction can be flexibly generated by top-down mechanisms. The lack of tonal competitor effect suggests that phonological features such as lexical tone are not independently predicted for anticipatory speech processing. |
Xing-Nan Zhao; Xing-Si Dong; Dan-Qing Jiang; Si Wu; Shi-Ming Tang; Cong Yu Population coding for figure-ground texture segregation in macaque V1 and V4 Journal Article In: Progress in Neurobiology, vol. 240, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Zhao2024d,Object recognition often involves the brain segregating objects from their surroundings. Neurophysiological studies of figure-ground texture segregation have yielded inconsistent results, particularly on whether V1 neurons can perform figure-ground texture segregation or just detect texture borders. To address this issue from a population perspective, we utilized two-photon calcium imaging to simultaneously record the responses of large samples of V1 and V4 neurons to figure-ground texture stimuli in awake, fixating macaques. The average response changes indicate that V1 neurons mainly detect texture borders, while V4 neurons are involved in figure-ground segregation. However, population analysis (SVM decoding of PCA-transformed neuronal responses) reveal that V1 neurons not only detect figure-ground borders, but also contribute to figure-ground texture segregation, although requiring substantially more principal components than V4 neurons to reach a 75 % decoding accuracy. Individually, V1/V4 neurons showing larger (negative/positive) figure-ground response differences contribute more to figure-ground segregation. But for V1 neurons, the contribution becomes significant only when many principal components are considered. We conclude that V1 neurons participate in figure-ground segregation primarily by defining the figure borders, and the poorly structured figure-ground information V1 neurons carry could be further utilized by V4 neurons to accomplish figure-ground segregation. |
Sijia Zhao; Claudia Contadini-Wright; Maria Chait Cross-modal interactions between auditory attention and oculomotor control Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 11, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Zhao2024c,Microsaccades are small, involuntary eye movements that occur during fixation. Their role is debated with recent hypotheses proposing a contribution to automatic scene sampling. Microsaccadic inhibition (MSI) refers to the abrupt suppression of microsaccades, typically evoked within 0.1 s after new stimulus onset. The functional significance and neural underpinnings of MSI are subjects of ongoing research. It has been suggested that MSI is a component of the brain's attentional re-orienting network which facilitates the allocation of attention to new environmental occurrences by reducing disruptions or shifts in gaze that could interfere with processing. The extent to which MSI is reflexive or influenced by top–down mechanisms remains debated. We developed a task that examines the impact of auditory top–down attention on MSI, allowing us to disentangle ocular dynamics from visual sensory processing. Participants (N = 24 and 27; both sexes) listened to two simultaneous streams of tones and were instructed to attend to one stream while detecting specific task “targets.” We quantified MSI in response to occasional task-irrelevant events presented in both the attended and unattended streams (frequency steps in Experiment 1, omissions in Experiment 2). The results show that initial stages of MSI are not affected by auditory attention. However, later stages (∼0.25 s postevent onset), affecting the extent and duration of the inhibition, are enhanced for sounds in the attended stream compared to the unattended stream. These findings provide converging evidence for the reflexive nature of early MSI stages and robustly demonstrate the involvement of auditory attention in modulating the later stages. |
Qingbai Zhao; Fang Guo; Xuemei Chen; Yan Chen; Zheng Liang; Quanlei Yu; Zhijin Zhou The advantage of novel solutions on subsequent memory in insight problems Journal Article In: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Zhao2024b,Insight during problem solving is beneficial to long-term memory formation. It has been shown to promote later memory for the solution; however, the reason for this memory effect is unclear.We used eye tracking to test the memory effect of insight on delayed recall (Experiment 1) and immediate recall (Experiment 2) when participants selected novel or normal answers to riddles. Both experiments adopted the learning-test paradigm of answer selection. In the learning phase, four alternative answers to a riddlewere presented on screen. Eye tracking recorded the fixation duration time on each alternative answer to evaluate the competition of thoughts in the process of problem solving. Delayed and immediate recall were assessed by asking the participants to provide the same answers to the riddles as they had in the learning phase. The results showed that (a) Whether in immediate or delayed recall tasks, the accuracy was higher after selecting novel answers than normal answers, confirming the memory advantage of insight. This effect was more obvious in the delayed recall task. (b) There was a longer total fixation duration time when selecting a novel answer than a normal answer. This suggests that novel answers have an advantage in the competition of thoughts. (c) Compared with selecting normal answers, selecting novel answers involved significantly longer fixation on the target region of interest, and significantly less attention on the main interference region. The results of this research suggest that the competitive advantage of novel thinking in problem solving may be an important reason why insight promotes memory. |
Hui Zhao; Linjieqiong Huang; Xingshan Li Readers may not integrate words strictly in the order in which they appear in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Zhao2024a,The current study investigated whether word integration follows a strictly sequential order during natural Chinese reading. Chinese readers' eye movements were recorded when they read sentences containing a three-character string (ABC), where BC was always a two-character word and AB was also a two-character word in the overlapping condition but not a word in the non-overlapping condition. We manipulated the extent to which word BC was plausible as an immediate continuation following prior context (cross-word plausibility); the string AB was always implausible given the prior context, and the sentence continued in a manner that was compatible with A-BC. The results showed that there were longer second-pass reading times on the string ABC region in the cross-word plausible condition than those in the cross-word implausible condition in both the overlapping condition and the non-overlapping condition. These results imply that readers do not always integrate words strictly in the order in which they appear in Chinese reading. |
Chenyang Zhao; Janet H. Hsiao; Antoni B. Chan Gradient-based instance-specific visual explanations for object specification and object discrimination Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 46, no. 9, pp. 5967–5985, 2024. @article{Zhao2024,We propose the gradient-weighted Object Detector Activation Maps (ODAM), a visual explanation technique for interpreting the predictions of object detectors. Utilizing the gradients of detector targets flowing into the intermediate feature maps, ODAM produces heat maps that show the influence of regions on the detector's decision for each predicted attribute. Compared to previous works on classification activation maps (CAM), ODAM generates instance-specific explanations rather than class-specific ones. We show that ODAM is applicable to one-stage, two-stage, and transformer-based detectors with different types of detector backbones and heads, and produces higher-quality visual explanations than the state-of-the-art in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. We discuss two explanation tasks for object detection: 1) object specification: what is the important region for the prediction? 2) object discrimination: which object is detected? Aiming at these two aspects, we present a detailed analysis of the visual explanations of detectors and carry out extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed ODAM. Furthermore, we investigate user trust on the explanation maps, how well the visual explanations of object detectors agrees with human explanations, as measured through human eye gaze, and whether this agreement is related with user trust. Finally, we also propose two applications, ODAM-KD and ODAM-NMS, based on these two abilities of ODAM. ODAM-KD utilizes the object specification of ODAM to generate top-down attention for key predictions and instruct the knowledge distillation of object detection. ODAM-NMS considers the location of the model's explanation for each prediction to distinguish the duplicate detected objects. A training scheme, ODAM-Train, is proposed to improve the quality on object discrimination, and help with ODAM-NMS. |
Zhihan Zhang; Chuhan Wu; Hongyi Chen; Hongyang Chen CogAware: Cognition-Aware framework for sentiment analysis with textual representations Journal Article In: Knowledge-Based Systems, vol. 299, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Zhang2024r,Sentiment analysis has become an important research area in artificial intelligence. Recently, the integration of sentiment analysis with cognitive neuroscience in natural language processing (NLP) tasks has attracted widespread attention. Cognitive signals and textual signals (i.e. word embeddings) both contain distinctive information for sentiment analysis tasks. However, most previous studies cannot effectively capture the specific features and cross-domain features while integrating cognitive signals acquired from brain activity and textual signals obtained from natural language processing (NLP). To address this issue, we propose CogAware, which learns to obtain a deep representation that combines purified specific features with cross-domain features from textual and cognitive signals. CogAware employs four private encoders to extract specific or cross-domain features from textual and cognitive signals alternately. It also employs feature reinforcement and orthogonality regularization to separate specific and cross-domain features from each modality. Moreover, a shared encoder and a modality discriminator are used to further capture cross-domain features from different modalities. Our designed architecture utilizes cognitive signals and word embeddings during model training, yet relies solely on word embeddings for model inference. Experiments on a public dataset show that CogAware achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the sentiment analysis task compared with other existing models. The source code of CogAware is available at: https://github.com/zhejiangzhuque/CogAware. |
Yuhong Zhang; Qin Li; Sujal Nahata; Tasnia Jamal; Shih Cheng; Gert Cauwenberghs; Tzyy Ping Jung Integrating large language model, eeg, and eye-tracking for word-level neural state classification in reading comprehension Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, vol. 32, pp. 3465–3475, 2024. @article{Zhang2024q,With the recent proliferation of large language models (LLMs), such as Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), there has been a significant shift in exploring human and machine comprehension of semantic language meaning. This shift calls for interdisciplinary research that bridges cognitive science and natural language processing (NLP). This pilot study aims to provide insights into individuals’ neural states during a semantic inference reading-comprehension task. We propose jointly analyzing LLMs, eye-gaze, and electroencephalographic (EEG) data to study how the brain processes words with varying degrees of relevance to a keyword during reading. We also use feature engineering to improve the fixation-related EEG data classification while participants read words with high versus low relevance to the keyword. The best validation accuracy in this word-level classification is over 60% across 12 subjects. Words highly relevant to the inference keyword received significantly more eye fixations per word: 1.0584 compared to 0.6576, including words with no fixations. This study represents the first attempt to classify brain states at a word level using LLM-generated labels. It provides valuable insights into human cognitive abilities and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and offers guidance for developing potential reading-assisted technologies. |
Yue Zhang; Yeyingzi Guo; Peixing Wei; Zhengbin He; Songlin Yi; Guangjie Zhao Effect of changes in surface visual properties of heat-treated wood on the psychological preference Miscellaneous 2024. @misc{Zhang2024p,Heat treatment of wood is an attractive, environmentally friendly modification, which can change surface visual properties of wood including color and grain, but it is unclear how heat-treated wood is perceived and evaluated compared with untreated wood. In this paper, Chinese fir was heat-treated at 160, 180, 200, or 220 °C for 2 or 4 h. The changes of wood surface color and grain contrast were measured. A subjective questionnaire and eye-tracking technology were used for psychological evaluation. The results showed that changes in the visual properties of heat-treated wood had a significant effect on psychological preference— heat-treated wood was generally more preferred than the untreated, particularly at 200 °C for 4 h. Grain contrast and hue played an important role in the preference for heat-treated wood. The preference gave people the positive psychological impression of warmth, weight, cost, prevalence, and comfort. Eye-tracking analysis showed that Chinese fir heat-treated at about 200 °C with high hue value and clear grain contrast was easier to gain more visual attention. The results would have a high technical reference value for the heat-treated wood in product visual design. |
Yue Zhang; Nicholas Gaspelin Salience effects on attentional selection are enabled by task relevance Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 50, no. 11, pp. 1131–1142, 2024. @article{Zhang2024o,Attention is a limited resource that must be carefully controlled to prevent distraction. Much research has demonstrated that distraction can be prevented by proactively suppressing salient stimuli to prevent them from capturing attention. It has been suggested, however, that prior studies showing evidence of suppression may have used stimuli that were not truly salient. This claim has been difficult to test because there are currently no agreed-upon methods to demonstrate that an object is salient. The current study aims to help resolve this by introducing a new technique to test the role of salience in attentional capture. Low- and high-salience singletons were generated via a manipulation of color contrast. An initial experiment then verified the manipulation of salience using a search task where the color singleton was the target and could only be found via its bottom-up popout. High-salience singletons were found much more easily than low-salience singletons, suggesting that salience powerfully influenced attention when task relevant. A following experiment then used the same stimulus displays but adapted the task so that the singletons were task-irrelevant distractors. Both low- and high-salience singletons were suppressed, suggesting neither was able to capture attention. These results challenge purely stimulus-driven accounts by showing that improving salience only enhances attentional allocation in situations where the object is also task relevant. The results are instead consistent with the signal suppression hypothesis, which predicts that task-irrelevant singletons can be suppressed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved). |
Yuan Zhang; Matteo Valsecchi; Karl R. Gegenfurtner; Jing Chen The execution of saccadic eye movements suppresses visual processing of both color and luminance in the early visual cortex of humans Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 131, no. 6, pp. 1156–1167, 2024. @article{Zhang2024n,Our eyes execute rapid, directional movements known as saccades, occurring several times per second, to focus on objects of interest in our environment. During these movements, visual sensitivity is temporarily reduced. Despite numerous studies on this topic, the underlying mechanism remains elusive, including a lingering debate on whether saccadic suppression affects the parvocellular visual pathway. To address this issue, we conducted a study employing steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) elicited by chromatic and luminance stimuli while observers performed saccadic eye movements. We also employed an innovative analysis pipeline to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio, yielding superior results compared to the previous method. Our findings revealed a clear suppression effect on SSVEP signals during saccades compared to fixation periods. Notably, this suppression effect was comparable for both chromatic and luminance stimuli. We went further to measure the suppression effect across various contrast levels, which enabled us to model SSVEP responses with contrast response functions. The results suggest that saccades primarily reduce response gain without significantly affecting contrast gain and that this reduction applies uniformly to both chromatic and luminance pathways. In summary, our study provides robust evidence that saccades similarly suppress visual processing in both the parvocellular and magnocellular pathways within the human early visual cortex, as indicated by SSVEP responses. The observation that saccadic eye movements impact response gain rather than contrast gain implies that they influence visual processing through a multiplicative mechanism. |
Yu Zhang; Chao Ma; Haiming Li; Leonardo Assumpção; Yi Liu Sophisticated perspective-takers are distinctive: Neural idiosyncrasy of functional connectivity in the mentalizing network Journal Article In: iScience, vol. 27, no. 12, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Zhang2024m,Naive perspective-takers often perceive the social world in a simplistic and uniform way, whereas sophisticated ones recognize the diversity and complexity of others' minds. This commonly accepted distinction points to a possibility of greater inter-individual variability in mentalizing for sophisticated than naive perspective-takers, a difference previously overlooked in research. In the current study, participants were asked to watch a mentalizing-related movie and their neural responses, interpretations of the characters' mental states, and eye-gaze trajectories were recorded. The results provide robust and converging evidence that the neural connectomic features within the mentalizing network, eye-gaze trajectories, and interpretations of others' mental states exhibit greater inter-individual variability among sophisticated perspective-takers compared to naive ones, supporting that sophisticated perspective-takers are more distinctive while naive ones are more similar. These findings deepen our understanding of mentalizing by highlighting the idiosyncrasy and homogeneity of neural collaboration and behavioral manifestations across varying levels of perspective-taking sophistication. |
Yili Zhang; Tengfei Wang; Menglei Chen; Hai Lou; Jiangchuan Ye; Jiahui Shi; Xu Wen Effects of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise on cognitive fatigue relief: A randomised self-controlled study Journal Article In: International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 1419–1437, 2024. @article{Zhang2024t,Although it was reported both rest and physical activity can alleviate cognitive fatigue to some extent, there is no direct scientific evidence determining which approach is more effective. This study aimed to investigate the effect of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise on the alleviation of cognitive fatigue. A 30-min TloadDback task was used to induce cognitive fatigue in 20 healthy adults, and 12-min quiet rest and moderate-intensity aerobic exercise were performed in random order. During the cognitive task, standard deviation of the NN interval (SDNN), total frequency (TP, 0–0.4 Hz) and very low frequency (VLF, 0–0.15 Hz) of heart rate variability increased significantly. The blink duration and number, fixation number, saccade amplitude and number increased significantly with time, while fixation duration and pupil size decreased significantly. After 12-min intervention protocols, the participants' feeling of fatigue, vigour and boredom recovered significantly. The recovery of fixation duration was better after quiet rest, while the pupil size was significantly larger after aerobic exercise. It was found that both quiet rest and aerobic exercise can alleviate cognitive fatigue, but aerobic exercise may be more effective in the recovery of arousal levels. |
Yi Zhang; Zhongling Pi; Ke Xu; Yun Pan; Jiumin Yang The interactive effects of drawing task, prompt format, and visual aids on video-based learning: Attention and drawing accuracy as mediators Journal Article In: Active Learning in Higher Education, no. 199, pp. 1–21, 2024. @article{Zhang2024l,This study investigated the effects of open- and closed-book learning conditions either accompanied by visual aids or without on learners' attention, drawing accuracy, and learning performance. Participants were 127 undergraduate learners randomly assigned to view either an open- or closed-book prompt, who then watched either a video lecture accompanied by visual aids or one without (i.e. visuals provided vs. no visuals). The results showed that for learners who were provided with visual aids, compared to the open-book condition, those in the closed-book condition demonstrated higher eye blink rate as well as improved immediate and delayed test scores. However, this advantage was not observed in the condition with no visual materials. Mediation analysis showed that increased immediate test scores in the visuals provided condition was due partly to improved drawing accuracy. Multiple mediation analyses showed that the open-book with visuals provided condition led to lower eye blink rate, increased fixation count, and improved drawing accuracy, which collectively resulted in decreased immediate test performance. These findings have implications for educators and instructional designers regarding how to tailor effective learning strategies; specifically, educators could consider using closed-book learning conditions with visual aids to enhance learners' attention and improve their learning performance. |
Yi Zhang; Caixia Liu; Yana Xing; Zhongling Pi; Jiumin Yang How does drawing influence the effectiveness of oral self-explanation versus instructional explanation in video learning? Journal Article In: British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 1189–1208, 2024. @article{Zhang2024s,This study investigated the effects of two types of oral explanations (ie, self-explanation vs. instructional explanation) and drawing activity (no drawing vs. drawing) on video learning outcomes. These outcomes were measured by visual attention to the video (indexed by fixation time on text and diagram areas), explanation quality (indexed by personal references, concepts, and elaborations), drawing quality, behaviour patterns and overall learning performance gain. A total of 116 undergraduate and graduate students watched a 4-min video on the human body's respiratory system. They were randomly assigned to one of four conditions (explanation generation: self-explanation vs. instructional explanation × drawing activity: no drawing vs. drawing). Results indicated that without a drawing requirement, students in the self-explanation condition displayed fewer personal references and exhibited a lower learning performance gain than those in the instructional explanation condition. Conversely, when drawing was required, self-explanation students demonstrated higher drawing quality and better learning performance gain. Additionally, students in the drawing condition directed more attention to the diagram area than those in the no drawing condition. These findings suggest that in video learning (1) educators should encourage students to produce oral instructional explanations and (2) if the goal is for students to generate self-explanations, they should also be prompted to draw to bolster their self-explanation efforts. |
Xinyong Zhang Evaluating target expansion for eye pointing tasks Journal Article In: Interacting with Computers, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 209–223, 2024. @article{Zhang2024k,The idea of target expansion was proposed two decades ago for manual target acquisition, but it is not feasible to implement this idea in traditional user interfaces as the interactive system cannot know exactly which target is the desired one and should be expanded among several candidates. With the increasing maturity of eye tracking technology, gaze input has moved from an academically promising technique to an input method with built-in support in Windows 10; and target expansion has already become very feasible in the context of gaze input, as the user's eye gaze is inherently an indicator of the desired target due to the natural eye-hand coordination in everyday tasks. However, a comprehensive evaluation is still lacking. In this study, two experiments were conducted, each with a different group of subjects, to investigate the effects of target expansion under different expansion feedback styles (visible vs. invisible), expansion factors, as well as different target appearances (i.e., circular vs. rectangular). The experimental results indicated that (1) the index of difficulty in eye pointing tasks (IDeye) does not depend on the initial size of the target, but on its final size, and that the corresponding human performance can be accurately predicted using the IDeye model instead of Fitts' law; and that (2) the visible expansion style could disrupt the user's fixations, making the measured human performance less efficient to some extent, but overall the theoretical predictions using the IDeye model were almost the same as the baselines. Following the experimental results, this study also provided some practical suggestions for UI design. |
Xiaomeng Zhang; Jason A. Aimone; Abdelaziz Alsharawy; Flora Li; Sheryl Ball; Alec Smith The effects of task difficulty and presentation format on eye movements in risky choice Journal Article In: Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, vol. 3, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Zhang2024j,This study investigates the process of risky choice using eye tracking. We manipulate the complexity and presentation of lottery choices while measuring eye movements. In particular, we measure the frequencies of information collection procedures associated with established theories of risky choice, namely, expected utility theory and component comparison theory. These choice process patterns are sensitive to the difficulty of calculations and the presentation format of lotteries. Participants appear to transition between decision-making procedures depending on how lottery choices are presented and their complexity. They also attend to payoffs as the primary feature considered during component comparisons. Our findings emphasize the influence of information presentation on decision-making processes and decisions. |
Sheng Hui Zhang; Xing Nan Zhao; Dan Qing Jiang; Shi Ming Tang; Cong Yu Ocular dominance-dependent binocular combination of monocular neuronal responses in macaque V1 Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 13, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Zhang2024i,Primates rely on two eyes to perceive depth, while maintaining stable vision when either one eye or both eyes are open. Although psychophysical and modeling studies have investigated how monocular signals are combined to form binocular vision, the underlying neuronal mechanisms, particularly in V1 where most neurons exhibit binocularity with varying eye preferences, remain poorly understood. Here, we used two-photon calcium imaging to compare the monocular and binocular responses of thousands of simultaneously recorded V1 superficial-layer neurons in three awake macaques. During monocular stimulation, neurons preferring the stimulated eye exhibited significantly stronger responses compared to those preferring both eyes. However, during binocular stimulation, the responses of neurons preferring either eye were suppressed on the average, while those preferring both eyes were enhanced, resulting in similar neuronal responses irrespective of their eye preferences, and an overall response level similar to that with monocular viewing. A neuronally realistic model of binocular combination, which incorporates ocular dominance-dependent divisive interocular inhibition and binocular summation, is proposed to account for these findings. |
Sheng Hui Zhang; Shi Ming Tang; Cong Yu Testing Hubel and Wiesel's "ice-cube" model of functional maps at cellular resolution in macaque V1 Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 34, no. 12, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Zhang2024h,Hubel and Wiesel's ice-cube model proposed that V1 orientation and ocular dominance functional maps intersect orthogonally to optimize wiring efficiency. Here, we revisited this model and additional arrangements at both cellular and pixel levels in awake macaques using two-photon calcium imaging. The recorded response fields of view were similar in size to hypercolumns, each containing up to 2,000 identified neurons and representing full periods of orientation preferences and ocular dominance. We estimated each neuron/pixel's orientation, ocular dominance, and spatial frequency preferences, constructed respective functional maps, computed geometric gradients of feature preferences, and calculated intersection angles among these gradients. At the cellular level, the intersection angles among functional maps were nearly evenly distributed. Nonetheless, pixel-based maps after Gaussian smoothing displayed orientation-ocular dominance and orientation-spatial frequency orthogonality, as well as ocular dominance-spatial frequency parallelism, in alignment with previous results, even though the trends were weak and highly variable. However, these Gaussian smoothing effects were not observed in cellular maps, indicating that the pixel-based trends may not accurately represent the relationships among feature-tuning properties of V1 neurons. We suggest that the widely distributed intersections among cellular maps can ensure that multiple stimulus features are represented within a hypercolumn, and no pair of features is represented with the least economical wiring (e.g. parallel intersections). |
Qian Zhang; Jinfeng Ding; Zhenyu Zhang; Xiaohong Yang; Yufang Yang The effect of congruent emotional context in emotional word processing during discourse comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Neurolinguistics, pp. 1–18, 2024. @article{Zhang2024g,This study examined the effect of emotional context on the semantic memory of subsequent emotional words during discourse comprehension in two eye-tracking experiments. Four-sentence discourses were used as experimental materials. The first three sentences established an emotional or neutral context, while the fourth contained an emotional target word consistent with the preceding emotional context's valence. The discourses were presented twice using the text change paradigm, where the target words were replaced with strongly - or weakly-related words during the second presentation. Thus, four conditions were included in the present study: Emotional-strongly-related, Emotional-weakly-related, Neutral- strongly-related and Neutral-weakly-related. In Experiment 1, negative contexts and negative target words were used, whereas in Experiment 2, positive contexts and positive target words were used. The results revealed a semantic relatedness effect, whereby the strongly-related words have lower change detection accuracy, longer reading times and more fixations in both Experiments 1 and 2. Furthermore, across both experiments, the magnitude of the semantic relatedness effect was greater in the emotionally congruent contexts than in the neutral contexts. These results suggest that emotional context could increase efforts to change the discrimination of subsequent words and demonstrate an important role of emotional context on semantic memory during discourse processing. |
Qi Zhang; Yun Sun; Lei Zheng; Yuhan Xu; Lingnuo Wang Food attention bias and Delboeuf illusion: Joint effect of calorie content and plate size on visual attention Journal Article In: Food Quality and Preference, vol. 120, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Zhang2024f,Plate size causes the Delboeuf illusion, and impacts food craving and food consumption. However, the underlying cognitive mechanism of the Delboeuf illusion remains unknown. This research adopted the food attention processing theory to gain an in-depth understanding of how the Delboeuf illusion impacts attention orientation, and to examine whether this effect varies between high- and low-calorie foods. Forty women completed a food-house task with eye-tracking, and evaluated the palatability and healthiness attributes of each food. The results showed that high-calorie (versus low-calorie) foods and small (versus large) plates were more capable of capturing attention. Notably, there was a joint effect of calorie content and plate size on food attention bias, suggesting that the Delboeuf illusion's effect on food attentional bias differs according to calorie content. Interestingly, there was a moderated mediation effect of plate size, with the mediating effect of perceived healthiness on the relationship between calorie content and food attention bias when foods were placed on a small plate, but not on a large plate. However, we observed an attention bias towards high- versus low-calorie foods through the mediating effect of perceived palatability, irrespective of plate size. Our findings suggest that high-calorie foods, whether placed on a small or large plate, automatically attract attention due to their palatability. However, low-calorie foods are more capable of attracting attention when placed on a small plate, indicating that the Delboeuf illusion caused by plate size enhances the perceived healthiness of low-calorie foods. |
Li Zhang; Li Zhou; Lichao Kang; Yuening Xu; Hong Jiang; Valerie Benson Attentional processing of preserved face and scrambled face distractors in preschool children with autism spectrum condition Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 617–634, 2024. @article{Zhang2024e,The current study investigated attentional processing of preserved neutral face and scrambled neutral face distractors at both involuntary and voluntary orienting levels in children with and without autism spectrum condition (ASC). The findings suggest similar influences of face configuration on reflexive orienting in both groups but reveal group differences in voluntary disengagement from face-related distractors. The ASC group exhibited difficulties in disengaging from the central neutral faces, and the TD group showed longer latencies for scrambled faces. These group differences suggest inefficiency in adopting a global face processing strategy at the voluntary attentional level in ASC. We discuss how the observed effects might impact upon the development of social communication skills in ASC. |
Lei Zhang; Liangyue Kang; Wanying Chen; Fang Xie; Kayleigh L. Warrington Parafoveal processing of orthography, phonology, and semantics during Chinese reading: Effects of foveal load Journal Article In: Brain Sciences, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 1–19, 2024. @article{Zhang2024d,The foveal load hypothesis assumes that the ease (or difficulty) of processing the currently fixated word in a sentence can influence processing of the upcoming word(s), such that parafoveal preview is reduced when foveal load is high. Recent investigations using pseudo-character previews reported an absence of foveal load effects in Chinese reading. Substantial Chinese studies to date provide some evidence to show that parafoveal words may be processed orthographically, phonologically, or semantically. However, it has not yet been established whether parafoveal processing is equivalent in terms of the type of parafoveal information extracted (orthographic, phonological, semantic) under different foveal load conditions. Accordingly, the present study investigated this issue with two experiments. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences in which foveal load was manipulated by placing a low- or high-frequency word N preceding a critical word. The preview validity of the upcoming word N + 1 was manipulated in Experiment 1, and word N + 2 in Experiment 2. The parafoveal preview was either identical to word N + 1(or word N + 2); orthographically related; phonologically related; semantically related; or an unrelated pseudo-character. The results showed robust main effects of frequency and preview type on both N + 1 and N + 2. Crucially, however, interactions between foveal load and preview type were absent, indicating that foveal load does not modulate the types of parafoveal information processed during Chinese reading. |
Hui Zhang; Feng Liang; Fen Wang; Na Feng; Congcong Yan; Cathrine N. Hewwett; Hui Chen Re-examining our evolutionary propensities toward snakes: Insights from children's inattentional blindness Journal Article In: Perception, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Zhang2024c,The purpose of this study was to investigate the divergent viewpoints regarding fearful stimuli in young children by analyzing variations in eye movement tracking and detection rates when confronted with the sudden appearance of either snakes or lizards. A total of 137 five to six-year-old Chinese children (43.8% male) participated in the study, which utilized the inattentional blindness paradigm. The results indicated that young children did not display any attentional bias toward snakes when compared with lizards, as evidenced by their detection rates and eye movement tracking. Interestingly, the children fixated on lizards earlier than snakes. These findings suggest that the notion of an evolution bias toward ancestral threats may not be as credible as previously believed. |
Han Zhang; Kevin F. Miller; John Jonides How does mind-wandering affect distractor suppression? Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, pp. 1–18, 2024. @article{Zhang2024b,The current study examined whether the suppression of overt attention to a salient distractor requires attentional resources. In a feature-search task, participants searched for a constant shape among different shapes while ignoring a uniquely coloured distractor. Trial-by-trial fluctuations in attentional resources were assessed via thought probes that elicited mind-wandering reports and via pre-trial pupil sizes. The results show that initial eye movements to the distractor were suppressed regardless of the availability of attentional resources. However, when mind-wandering, the presence of the distractor prolonged target looking time. Thus, the initial deployment of overt attention in this task does not require attentional resources and can proceed automatically, presumably due to strong selection history. Nonetheless, the distractor might still disrupt later processing stages, an effect exacerbated by mind-wandering. These results also suggest that initial eye movements do not fully reflect the extent of distractor interference during the entire course of visual search. |
Han Zhang; Tessa R. Abagis; Clara J. Steeby; John Jonides Lingering on distraction: Examining distractor rejection in adults with ADHD Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Zhang2024a,Effective visual search relies on reactively disengaging from distractors when the features of the distractors are unpredictable. Does this ability differ between adults with and without Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)?. Participants (36 with ADHD, 46 non-ADHD) completed the additional-singleton task, in which they searched for a unique shape while a uniquely coloured distractor unpredictably appeared on half of the trials. The distractor delayed manual response times in both groups, with no significant group difference. Both groups also demonstrated similar oculomotor capture effects, as indicated by the landing position of initial fixations. However, when initial fixations did land on the distractor, participants with ADHD tended to “linger” on the distractor with additional fixations and longer duration before disengaging from it, compared to those without ADHD. These results suggest that ADHD is associated with deficits in reactively disengaging from distractions rather than deficits in avoiding being captured in the first place. |
Dan Zhang; Lihua Xu; Xu Liu; Huiru Cui; Yanyan Wei; Wensi Zheng; Yawen Hong; Zhenying Qian; Yegang Hu; Yingying Tang; Chunbo Li; Zhi Liu; Tao Chen; Haichun Liu; Tianhong Zhang; Jijun Wang Eye movement characteristics for predicting a transition to psychosis: Longitudinal changes and implications Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Bulletin, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Zhang2024,BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: Substantive inquiry into the predictive power of eye movement (EM) features for clinical high-risk (CHR) conversion and their longitudinal trajectories is currently sparse. This study aimed to investigate the efficiency of machine learning predictive models relying on EM indices and examine the longitudinal alterations of these indices across the temporal continuum. STUDY DESIGN: EM assessments (fixation stability, free-viewing, and smooth pursuit tasks) were performed on 140 CHR and 98 healthy control participants at baseline, followed by a 1-year longitudinal observational study. We adopted Cox regression analysis and constructed random forest prediction models. We also employed linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) to analyze longitudinal changes of indices while stratifying by group and time. STUDY RESULTS: Of the 123 CHR participants who underwent a 1-year clinical follow-up, 25 progressed to full-blown psychosis, while 98 remained non-converters. Compared with the non-converters, the converters exhibited prolonged fixation durations, decreased saccade amplitudes during the free-viewing task; larger saccades, and reduced velocity gain during the smooth pursuit task. Furthermore, based on 4 baseline EM measures, a random forest model classified converters and non-converters with an accuracy of 0.776 (95% CI: 0.633, 0.882). Finally, LMMs demonstrated no significant longitudinal alterations in the aforementioned indices among converters after 1 year. CONCLUSIONS: Aberrant EMs may precede psychosis onset and remain stable after 1 year, and applying eye-tracking technology combined with a modeling approach could potentially aid in predicting CHRs evolution into overt psychosis. |
Mengdie Zhai; Hongxiao Wu; Yajie Wang; Yu Liao; Wenfeng Feng Sound reduces saccadic chronostasis illusion Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 215, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Zhai2024,The saccadic chronostasis illusion refers to the duration overestimation of the first visual stimulation after saccadic eye movement, which is also known as “stopped clock illusion.” The present study investigated whether saccadic chronostasis would be observed in the auditory modality and whether the saccade-induced time dilation in the visual modality would be reduced by a synchronously presented sound. In each trial, a unisensory visual stimulus, unisensory sound, or bimodal audio-visual stimulus with a duration of 200–800 ms (probe stimulus) was presented at the saccade target location and temporally around the offset of the saccade, followed by a unisensory visual or auditory standard stimulus for a fixed 500 ms. Participants were required to identify which of the two stimuli (probe or standard) presented in the target modality (visual or auditory) was perceived as longer. The results showed that no saccadic chronostasis was observed in the auditory modality, regardless of whether the sound was presented alone or synchronously accompanied by a visual stimulus. Interestingly, the magnitude of the saccadic chronostasis illusion was reduced by the synchronously presented sound. Moreover, the combined effect of the saccade and sound on visual time perception fits well with the standard scalar model, and the weight of the cross-modal effect was higher than that of saccadic visual time dilation. These results suggest that sound dominates vision in time processing during saccades and linearly modulates saccadic chronostasis, which follows the Scalar Expectancy Theory. |
Kristina Zeljic; Joshua A. Solomon; Michael J. Morgan Individual differences in direction-selective motion adaptation revealed by change-detection performance Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 225, pp. 1–7, 2024. @article{Zeljic2024,The motion aftereffect (MAE) and motion adaptation in general are usually considered to be universal phenomena. However, in a preliminary study using a bias-free measure of the MAE we found some individuals who showed at best a weak effect of adaptation. These same individuals also performed poorly in a “change detection“ test of motion adaptation based on visual search, leading to the conjecture that there is a bimodality in the population with respect to motion adaptation. The present study tested this possibility by screening 102 participants on two versions of the change-detection task while also considering potential confounding factors including eye movements, practice-based improvements, and deficits in visual search ability. The 5 strongest and the 5 weakest change detectors were selected for further testing of motion detection and contrast detection after adaptation. Data showed an inverse association between change-detection ability and performance in the motion-detection task. We extend previous findings by also showing i) the weakest change detectors exhibit less direction selectivity in their contrast thresholds after adapting to drifting gratings and ii) the ability to detect change in motion direction correlates with the ability to detect change in spatial orientation. Group differences between the strongest and weakest change detectors cannot be attributed to a lack of practice, nor can they be explained by poor fixation ability. Our results suggest genuine individual differences in the degree to which adaptation is specific to stimulus orientation and direction of motion. |
Chuanli Zang; Shuangshuang Wang; Yu Guan; Zhu Meng; Manman Zhang; Simon P. Liversedge Does meaningful background speech modulate predictability effects during Chinese reading? Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Zang2024a,Previous research indicates that background speech disrupts reading comprehension processes, but it remains unclear whether the disruption derives from semantic or phonological speech properties, and whether it affects early lexical processing or later sentence integration. Native Chinese speaking participants read sentences containing high- or low-predictability words under meaningful Chinese speech, meaningless Uyghur speech or silence conditions. Results showed that Chinese but not Uyghur speech produced increased total fixations compared to reading in silence, suggesting disruption was semantic in nature. While a standard predictability effect was comparable across background speech conditions in target word analyses, this effect disappeared in the Chinese speech condition in later measures and regions. The findings suggest that Chinese background speech may delay higher order (post-lexical) processing associated with sentence integration during reading, with implications for the Interference-by-Process hypothesis. |
Chuanli Zang; Shuangshuang Wang; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Simon P. Liversedge Parafoveal processing of Chinese four-character idioms and phrases in reading: Evidence for multi-constituent unit hypothesis Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 136, pp. 1–26, 2024. @article{Zang2024,The perceptual span in Chinese reading extends one character to the left and three to the right of the point of fixation. Thus, four-character idioms and phrases often extend rightward beyond these limits during reading. We investigated whether such idioms, frequent phrases and equibiased strings are processed parafoveally as Multi-Constituent Units (MCUs). Using the boundary paradigm in Experiments 1 and 2, we separately manipulated preview (identities or pseudocharacters) of the first two and the last two characters of idioms and frequently used phrases. In Experiment 3, we examined processing of strings judged to be a single lexical unit, equi-biased ambiguous strings and matched unambiguous multi-word strings. Experiments 1 and 2 produced greater preview benefit for the final two characters when the first two characters were presented after identity rather than pseudocharacter previews. In Experiment 3, preview effects were largest for single units, reduced for equi-biased strings and smallest for multi-word strings. Together the results demonstrate that four-character idioms and frequently used phrases are processed as MCUs. |
Chuanli Zang; Ying Fu; Hong Du; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Simon P. Liversedge Processing multiconstituent units: Preview effects during reading of Chinese words, idioms, and phrases Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 169–188, 2024. @article{Zang2024b,Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not straightforward. We investigated Chinese readers' processing of frequently occurring multiconstituent units (MCUs), that is, linguistic units composed of more than a single word, that might be represented lexically as a single representation. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the linguistic category of a two-constituent Chinese string (word, MCU, or phrase) and the preview of its second constituent (identical or pseudocharacter) using the boundary paradigm with the boundary located before the twoconstituent string. A robust preview effect was obtained when the second constituent, alongside the first, formed a word or MCU, but not a phrase, suggesting that frequently occurring MCUs are lexicalized and processed parafoveally as single units during reading. In Experiment 2, we further manipulated the phrase type of a two-constituent but three-character Chinese string (idiom with a one-character modifier and a twocharacter noun, or matched phrase) and the preview of the second constituent noun (identity or pseudocharacter). A greater preview effect was obtained for idioms than phrases, indicating that idioms are processed to a greater extent in the parafovea than matched phrases. Together, the results of these two experiments suggest that lexical identification processes in Chinese can be operationalized over linguistic units that are larger than an individual word. |
Yordanka Zafirova; Anna Bognár; Rufin Vogels Configuration-sensitive face-body interactions in primate visual cortex Journal Article In: Progress in Neurobiology, vol. 232, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Zafirova2024,Traditionally, the neural processing of faces and bodies is studied separately, although they are encountered together, as parts of an agent. Despite its social importance, it is poorly understood how faces and bodies interact, particularly at the single-neuron level. Here, we examined the interaction between faces and bodies in the macaque inferior temporal (IT) cortex, targeting an fMRI-defined patch. We recorded responses of neurons to monkey images in which the face was in its natural location (natural face-body configuration), or in which the face was mislocated with respect to the upper body (unnatural face-body configuration). On average, the neurons did not respond stronger to the natural face-body configurations compared to the summed responses to their faces and bodies, presented in isolation. However, the neurons responded stronger to the natural compared to the unnatural face-body configurations. This configuration effect was present for face- and monkey-centered images, did not depend on local feature differences between configurations, and was present when the face was replaced by a small object. The face-body interaction rules differed between natural and unnatural configurations. In sum, we show for the first time that single IT neurons process faces and bodies in a configuration-specific manner, preferring natural face-body configurations. |
Nadira Yusif Rodriguez; Aarit Ahuja; Debaleena Basu; Theresa H. McKim; Theresa M. Desrochers Different subregions of monkey lateral prefrontal cortex respond to abstract sequences and their components Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 47, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{YusifRodriguez2024,Sequential information permeates daily activities, such as when watching for the correct series of buildings to determine when to get off the bus or train. These sequences include periodicity (the spacing of the buildings), the identity of the stimuli (the kind of house), and higher-order more abstract rules that may not depend on the exact stimulus (e.g., house, house, house, business). Previously, we found that the posterior fundus of area 46 in the monkey lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) responds to rule changes in such abstract visual sequences. However, it is unknown if this region responds to other components of the sequence, i.e., image periodicity and identity, in isolation. Further, it is unknown if this region dissociates from other, more ventral LPFC subregions that have been associated with sequences and their components. To address these questions, we used awake functional magnetic resonance imaging in three male macaque monkeys during two no-report visual tasks. One task contained abstract visual sequences, and the other contained no visual sequences but maintained the same image periodicity and identities. We found the fundus of area 46 responded only to abstract sequence rule violations. In contrast, the ventral bank of area 46 responded to changes in image periodicity and identity, but not changes in the abstract sequence. These results suggest a functional specialization within anatomical substructures of LPFC to signal different kinds of stimulus regularities. This specialization may provide key scaffolding to identify abstract patterns and construct complex models of the world for daily living. |
Sophie C. Yue; Gokce B. Cakir; Aasef Shaikh; Fatema F. Ghasia Assessing inter-ocular fixational eye movements throughout the lifespan Journal Article In: Experimental Brain Research, vol. 24, pp. 2749–2763, 2024. @article{Yue2024,This study aims to assess fixational eye movements (FEMs) obtained under binocular and monocular viewing in normal individuals across different age groups. We recruited 68 healthy participants divided into Group 1 (children, 3–9 years |
Lei Yuan; Miriam Novack; David Uttal; Steven Franconeri Language systematizes attention: How relational language enhances relational representation by guiding attention Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 243, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Yuan2024,Language can affect cognition, but through what mechanism? Substantial past research has focused on how labeling can elicit categorical representation during online processing. We focus here on a particularly powerful type of language-relational language-and show that relational language can enhance relational representation in children through an embodied attention mechanism. Four-year-old children were given a color-location conjunction task, in which they were asked to encode a two-color square, split either vertically or horizontally (e.g., red on the left, blue on the right), and later recall the same configuration from its mirror reflection. During the encoding phase, children in the experimental condition heard relational language (e.g., "Red is on the left of blue"), while those in the control condition heard generic non-relational language (e.g., "Look at this one, look at it closely"). At recall, children in the experimental condition were more successful at choosing the correct relational representation between the two colors compared to the control group. Moreover, they exhibited different attention patterns as predicted by the attention shift account of relational representation (Franconeri et al., 2012). To test the sustained effect of language and the role of attention, during the second half of the study, the experimental condition was given generic non-relational language. There was a sustained advantage in the experimental condition for both behavioral accuracies and signature attention patterns. Overall, our findings suggest that relational language enhances relational representation by guiding learners' attention, and this facilitative effect persists over time even in the absence of language. Implications for the mechanism of how relational language can enhance the learning of relational systems (e.g., mathematics, spatial cognition) by guiding attention will be discussed. |
Qiuchen Yu; Jiangfeng Gou; Yan Li; Zhongling Pi; Jiumin Yang Introducing support for learner control: Temporal and organizational cues in instructional videos Journal Article In: British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 933–956, 2024. @article{Yu2024b,Instructional videos risk overloading learners' limited working memory resources due to the transient information effect. Learner control is one way to mitigate this concern, but has shown almost zero overall effect and considerable heterogeneity. Consequently, it is essential to identify when learner control is most beneficial. The present study examined the influence of cues on learners' behaviour, cognitive process, metacognition and learning performance in an interactive learning environment. Employing a 2 (temporal cues: without vs. with) × 2 (organizational cues: without vs. with) between-subject design, 117 participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: no cues, temporal cues, organizational cues and temporal cues + organizational cues. Among these, temporal cues (ie, progress bar) serve as time-related signals designed to regulate pacing, and organizational cues (ie, table of contents) provide a structural framework for the content. Significant cueing effects were observed for both cue types at germane cognitive load and transfer. Notably, our results indicate that organizational cues effectively guide learners' attention towards the underlying structure, thus promoting cognitive processing. These unique benefits are evident in improved topic recall, retention and monitoring accuracy. Importantly, combined temporal cues and organizational cues were seen to not only allow learners to exhibit more engagement behaviours (ie, skimming) but also assist learners in accurately judging their learning. These findings strongly support the recommendation to use cues to enhance the effectiveness of learner control. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Instructional videos may overload limited working memory resources due to the transient information effect. The overall effect of including learner control within educational technology was almost zero (g = 0.05) but showed higher heterogeneity. It is unclear whether embedding various cues in an instructional video improves the effectiveness of learner control. What this paper adds Both temporal and organizational cues aided in increasing learners' germane cognitive load and enhancing their transfer. Organizational cues helped learners understand the underlying structure, thus facilitating deeper cognitive processing, improved metacognition and ultimately boosted learning performance. Combined temporal and organizational cues lead to engagement behaviours and accurate self-monitoring. Implications for practice and/or policy Providing instructional support is important in assisting learners with the complexities of learner-controlled instruction. Embedding cues help learners process the content deeply by giving learners control over the instructional video. |
Kairui Yu; Junzhen Guo; Zhenjie Xu; Feiyang Shi; Xiaoqian Yu; Fang Fang; Yingying Wang Processing of fearful faces exhibits characteristics of subcortical functions Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 153, no. 5, pp. 1374–1387, 2024. @article{Yu2024a,A subcortical pathway is thought to have evolved to facilitate fear information transmission, but direct evidence for its existence in humans is lacking. In recent years, rapid, preattentive, and preconscious fear processing has been demonstrated, providing indirect support for the existence of the subcortical pathway by challenging the necessity of canonical cortical pathways in fear processing. However, direct support also requires evidence for the involvement of subcortical regions in fear processing. To address this issue, here we investigate whether fear processing reflects the characteristics of the subcortical structures in the hypothesized subcortical pathway. Using a monocular/dichoptic paradigm, Experiment 1 demonstrated a same-eye advantage for fearful but not neutral face processing, suggesting that fear processing relied on monocular neurons existing mainly in the subcortex. Experiments 2 and 3 further showed insensitivity to short-wavelength stimuli and a nasal–temporal hemifield asymmetry in fear processing, both of which were functional characteristics of the superior colliculus, a key hub of the subcortical pathway. Furthermore, all three experiments revealed a low spatial frequency selectivity of fear processing, consistent with magnocellular input via subcortical neurons. These results suggest a selective involvement of subcortical structures in fear processing, which, together with the indirect evidence for automatic fear processing, provides a more complete picture of the existence of a subcortical pathway for fear processing in humans. |
Gongchen Yu; Leor N. Katz; Christian Quaia; Adam Messinger; Richard J. Krauzlis Short-latency preference for faces in primate superior colliculus depends on visual cortex Journal Article In: Neuron, vol. 112, no. 16, pp. 2814–2822, 2024. @article{Yu2024,Face processing is fundamental to primates and has been extensively studied in higher-order visual cortex. Here, we report that visual neurons in the midbrain superior colliculus (SC) of macaque monkeys display a preference for images of faces. This preference emerges within 40 ms of stimulus onset—well before “face patches” in visual cortex—and, at the population level, can be used to distinguish faces from other visual objects with accuracies of ∼80%. This short-latency face preference in SC depends on signals routed through early visual cortex because inactivating the lateral geniculate nucleus, the key relay from retina to cortex, virtually eliminates visual responses in SC, including face-related activity. These results reveal an unexpected circuit in the primate visual system for rapidly detecting faces in the periphery, complementing the higher-order areas needed for recognizing individual faces. |
Masatoshi Yoshida; Kenichiro Miura; Michiko Fujimoto; Hidenaga Yamamori; Yuka Yasuda; Masao Iwase; Ryota Hashimoto Visual salience is affected in participants with schizophrenia during free-viewing Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Yoshida2024a,Abnormalities in visual exploration affect the daily lives of patients with schizophrenia. For example, scanpath length during free-viewing is shorter in schizophrenia. However, its origin and its relevance to symptoms are unknown. Here we investigate the possibility that abnormalities in eye movements result from abnormalities in visual or visuo-cognitive processing. More specifically, we examined whether such abnormalities reflect visual salience in schizophrenia. Eye movements of 82 patients and 252 healthy individuals viewing natural and/or complex images were examined using saliency maps for static images to determine the contributions of low-level visual features to salience-guided eye movements. The results showed that the mean value for orientation salience at the gazes of the participants with schizophrenia were higher than that of the healthy control subjects. Further analyses revealed that orientation salience defined by the L + M channel of the DKL color space is specifically affected in schizophrenia, suggesting abnormalities in the magnocellular visual pathway. By looking into the computational stages of the visual salience, we found that the difference between schizophrenia and healthy control emerges at the earlier stage, suggesting functional decline in early visual processing. These results suggest that visual salience is affected in schizophrenia, thereby expanding the concept of the aberrant salience hypothesis of psychosis to the visual domain. |
Atsushi Yoshida; Okihide Hikosaka Involvement of neurons in the nonhuman primate anterior striatum in proactive inhibition Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 49, pp. 1–20, 2024. @article{Yoshida2024,Behaving as desired requires selecting the appropriate behavior and inhibiting the selection of inappropriate behavior. This inhibitory function involves multiple processes, such as reactive and proactive inhibition, instead of a single process. In this study, two male macaque monkeys were required to perform a task in which they had to sequentially select (accept) or refuse (reject) a choice. Neural activity was recorded from the anterior striatum, which is considered to be involved in behavioral inhibition, focusing on the distinction between proactive and reactive inhibitions. We identified neurons with significant activity changes during the rejection of bad objects. Cluster analysis revealed three distinct groups, of which only one showed increased activity during object rejection, suggesting its involvement in proactive inhibition. This activity pattern was consistent irrespective of the rejection method, indicating a role beyond saccadic suppression. Furthermore, minimal activity changes during the fixation task indicated that these neurons were not primarily involved in reactive inhibition. In conclusion, these findings suggest that the anterior striatum plays a crucial role in cognitive control and orchestrates goal-directed behavior through proactive inhibition, which may be critical in understanding the mechanisms of behavioral inhibition dysfunction that occur in patients with basal ganglia disease. |
Si On Yoon; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Partner-specific adaptation in disfluency processing Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 48, no. 8, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Yoon2024,Speakers tend to produce disfluencies when naming unexpected or complex items; in turn, when perceiving disfluency, listeners tend to expect upcoming reference to items that are unexpected or complex to name. In two experiments, we examined if these disfluency-based expectations are routine, or instead, if they adapt to the way the speaker uses disfluency in the current context in a talker-specific manner. Participants listened to instructions to look at objects in contexts with several images, some of which lacked conventional names. We manipulated the co-occurrence of disfluency and reference to novel versus familiar objects in a single talker situation (Experiment 1) and in a multi-talker situation (Experiment 2). In the predictive condition, disfluent expressions referred to novel objects, and fluent expressions referred to familiar objects. In the nonpredictive condition, fluent and disfluent trials referred to either familiar or novel objects. Participants' gaze revealed that listeners more readily predicted familiar images for fluent trials and novel images for disfluent trials in the predictive condition than in the nonpredictive condition. In sum, listeners adapted their expectations about upcoming words based on recent experience with disfluency. Disfluency is not invariably processed, but instead a cue that is flexibly interpreted depending on the local context even in a multi-talker setting. |
Jane Yook; Hinze Hogendoorn; Gereon R. Fink; Simone Vossel; Ralph Weidner When visual attention is divided in the flash-lag effect Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 24, no. 9, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Yook2024,The flash-lag effect (FLE) occurs when a flash's position seems to be delayed relative to a continuously moving object, even though both are physically aligned. Although several studies have demonstrated that reduced attention increases FLE magnitude, the precise mechanism underlying these attention-dependent effects remains elusive. In this study, we investigated the influence of visual attention on the FLE by manipulating the level of attention allocated to multiple stimuli moving simultaneously in different locations. Participants were cued to either focus on one moving stimulus or split their attention among two, three, or four moving stimuli presented in different quadrants. We measured trial-wise FLE to explore potential changes in the magnitude of perceived displacement and its trial-to-trial variability under different attention conditions. Our results reveal that FLE magnitudes were significantly greater when attention was divided among multiple stimuli compared with when attention was focused on a single stimulus, suggesting that divided attention considerably augments the perceptual illusion. However, FLE variability, measured as the coefficient of variation, did not differ between conditions, indicating that the consistency of the illusion is unaffected by divided attention. We discuss the interpretations and implications of our findings in the context of widely accepted explanations of the FLE within a dynamic environment. |
Artturi Ylinen; Minna Hannula-Sormunen; Jake McMullen; Erno Lehtinen; Patrik Wikman; Kimmo Alho Attenuated processing of task-irrelevant speech and other auditory stimuli: fMRI evidence from arithmetic tasks Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 60, pp. 7124–7147, 2024. @article{Ylinen2024,When performing cognitive tasks in noisy conditions, the brain needs to maintain task performance while additionally controlling the processing of task-irrelevant and potentially distracting auditory stimuli. Previous research indicates that a fundamental mechanism by which this control is achieved is the attenuation of task-irrelevant processing, especially in conditions with high task demands. However, it remains unclear whether the processing of complex naturalistic sounds can be modulated as easily as that of simpler ones. To address this issue, the present fMRI study examined whether activity related to task-irrelevant meaningful speech is attenuated similarly as that related to meaningless control sounds (nonsense speech and noise-vocoded, unintelligible sounds). The sounds were presented concurrently with three numerical tasks varying in difficulty: an easy control task requiring no calculation, a ‘routine' arithmetic calculation task and a more demanding ‘creative' arithmetic task, where solutions are generated to reach a given answer. Consistent with their differing difficulty, the tasks activated fronto-parieto-temporal regions parametrically (creative > routine > control). In bilateral auditory regions, activity related to the speech stimuli decreased as task demands increased. Importantly, however, the attenuation was more pronounced for meaningful than nonsense speech, demonstrating that distractor type can strongly modulate the extent of the attenuation. This also suggests that semantic processing may be especially susceptible to attenuation under conditions with increased task demands. Finally, as this is the first study to utilize the ‘creative' arithmetic task, we conducted exploratory analyses to examine its potential in assessing neural processes involved in mathematical problem-solving beyond routine arithmetic. |
Michael C. W. Yip Tracking the time-course of spoken word recognition of Cantonese Chinese in sentence context: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Yip2024,In this study, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment to investigate the effects of sentence context and tonal information on spoken word recognition processes in Cantonese Chinese. We recruited 60 native Cantonese listeners to participate in the eye-tracking experiment. The target words (phonologically similar words) were manipulated to either (1) a congruent context or (2) an incongruent context in the experiment. The resulting eye-movement patterns in the incongruent context condition clearly revealed that (1) sentence context produced a garden-path effect in the initial stage of the spoken word recognition processes and then (2) the lexical tone of the word (bottom-up information) overrode the contextual effects to help listeners to discriminate between different similar-sounding words during lexical access. In conclusion, the patterns of eye-tracking data show the interactive processes between the lexical tone (an acoustic cue within a Cantonese word) and sentence context played in different phases to the spoken word recognition of Cantonese Chinese. |
Yang Yiling; Johanna Klon Lipok; Katharine Shapcott; Andreea Lazar; Wolf Singer Dynamic fading memory and expectancy effects in the monkey primary visual cortex Journal Article In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 121, no. 8, pp. 2024, 2024. @article{Yiling2024,In order to investigate the involvement of the primary visual cortex (V1) in working memory (WM), parallel, multisite recordings of multi-unit activity were obtained from monkey V1 while the animals performed a delayed match-to-sample (DMS) task. During the delay period, V1 population firing rate vectors maintained a lingering trace of the sample stimulus that could be reactivated by intervening impulse stimuli that enhanced neuronal firing. This fading trace of the sample did not require active engagement of the monkeys in the DMS task and likely reflects the intrinsic dynamics of recurrent cortical networks in lower visual areas. This renders an active, attention-dependent involvement of V1 in the maintenance of WM contents unlikely. By contrast, population responses to the test stimulus depended on the probabilistic contingencies between sample and test stimuli. Responses to tests that matched expectations were reduced which agrees with concepts of predictive coding. |
Yang Yiling; Johanna Klon-Lipok; Wolf Singer Joint encoding of stimulus and decision in monkey primary visual cortex Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 1–6, 2024. @article{Yiling2024a,We investigated whether neurons in monkey primary visual cortex (V1) exhibit mixed selectivity for sensory input and behavioral choice. Parallel multisite spiking activity was recorded from area V1 of awake monkeys performing a delayed match-to-sample task. The monkeys had to make a forced choice decision of whether the test stimulus matched the preceding sample stimulus. The population responses evoked by the test stimulus contained information about both the identity of the stimulus and with some delay but before the onset of the motor response the forthcoming choice. The results of subspace identification analysis indicate that stimulus-specific and decision-related information coexists in separate subspaces of the high-dimensional population activity, and latency considerations suggest that the decision-related information is conveyed by top-down projections. |
Jianqiang Ye; Yubin Zheng; Min Zhan; Yiling Zhou; Long Li; Dimei Chen Characteristics of pre-service chemistry teachers' mechanistic reasoning in organic chemistry tasks: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Research in Science Education, pp. 1–20, 2024. @article{Ye2024,Organic chemistry is challenging for novices as it involves a large quantity of organic reactions. Effective learning requires not only profound theoretical knowledge but also the ability to reason about causal mechanisms. This study investigated pre-service chemistry teachers' mechanistic reasoning and the implicit cognitive process. Participants (N = 33) were asked to complete three tasks, which required them to explain chemical phenomena or analyze chemical reactions. This work analyzed the components involved in participants' explanations based on the discourse analysis framework and evaluated the mechanistic reasoning by identifying the causal relationship between different components. An eye-tracking method was employed to recognize the mental activity underlying participants' performance. Four parameters, percentage of dwell time, percentage of fixation count, heat maps, and average pupil size, were used to conduct quantitative analyses on the data collected from the eye-tracker. Each parameter on predefined areas of interest was compared to identify the information that participants paid more attention to and bore more cognitive load while reasoning. The results revealed that pre-service chemistry teachers demonstrate four different types of reasoning in organic chemistry tasks: descriptive, relational, simple causal, and mechanistic reasoning. Pre-service chemistry teachers were more concerned with key information and symbolic representations. It was symbolic representations that increased cognitive load. |
Amit Yashar; Marisa Carrasco When periphery rules: Enhanced sampling weights of the visual periphery in crowding across dimensions Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Yashar2024,Crowding, our inability to identify a feature or object – the target – due to its proximity to adjacent features or objects – flankers – exhibits a notable inner-outer asymmetry. This asymmetry is characterized by the outer flanker – more peripheral – creating stronger interference than the inner one – closer to the fovea. But crowding is not uniform across different feature dimensions. For example, in the case of orientation, this asymmetry reflects misreport errors: observers are more likely to misidentify the outer flanker as the target than the inner one. However, for spatial frequency (SF), observers tend to average the features of the target and flankers (Yashar et al., 2019). Here, we investigated whether and how the inner-outer asymmetry manifests across various feature dimensions: Gabor orientation and SF, as well as T-shape tilt and color. We reanalyzed continuous estimation reports data published by Yashar et al. (2019), focusing on a previously unanalyzed factor: the relative position of each flanker (inner vs. outer). We fit probabilistic models that assign variable weights to each flanker. Our analysis revealed that observers predominantly misreport the outer flanker as the target with Gabor orientation and T-shape tilt stimuli, and slightly so with color stimuli, whereas with Gabor SF, observers perform a weighted average of all features but also with a bias towards the outer flanker over the inner one. These findings suggest that an increased weighting on the more peripheral items is a general characteristic of crowding in peripheral vision. |
Panpan Yao; David Hall; Hagit Borer; Linnaea Stockall Dutch–Mandarin learners' online use of syntactic cues to anticipate mass vs. count interpretations Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 803 –831, 2024. @article{Yao2024c,It remains unclear whether late second language learners (L2ers) can acquire sufficient knowledge about unique-to-L2 constructions through implicit learning to build anticipations during real-time processing. To tackle this question, we conducted a visual world paradigm experiment to investigate high-proficiency late first-language Dutch second-language Mandarin Chinese learners' online processing of syntactic cues to count vs. mass interpretations in Chinese which are unique-to-L2 and never explicitly taught. The results showed that late Dutch–Mandarin learners were sensitive to a mass-biased syntactic cue in real-time processing, and exhibited some native-like anticipatory behaviour. These findings indicate that late L2ers can acquire unique-to-L2 constructions through implicit learning, and can automatically use this knowledge to make predictions. |
Fangshu Yao; Xiaoyue Chang; Bin Zhou; Wen Zhou Olfaction modulates cortical arousal independent of perceived odor intensity and pleasantness Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 299, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Yao2024a,Throughout history, various odors have been harnessed to invigorate or relax the mind. The mechanisms underlying odors' diverse arousal effects remain poorly understood. We conducted five experiments (184 participants) to investigate this issue, using pupillometry, electroencephalography, and the attentional blink paradigm, which exemplifies the limit in attentional capacity. Results demonstrated that exposure to citral, compared to vanillin, enlarged pupil size, reduced resting-state alpha oscillations and alpha network efficiency, augmented beta-gamma oscillations, and enhanced the coordination between parietal alpha and frontal beta-gamma activities. In parallel, it attenuated the attentional blink effect. These effects were observed despite citral and vanillin being comparable in perceived odor intensity, pleasantness, and nasal pungency, and were unlikely driven by semantic biases. Our findings reveal that odors differentially alter the small-worldness of brain network architecture, and thereby brain state and arousal. Furthermore, they establish arousal as a unique dimension in olfactory space, distinct from intensity and pleasantness. |
Bo Yao; Graham G. Scott; Gillian Bruce; Ewa Monteith-Hodge; Sara C. Sereno Emotion processing in concrete and abstract words: Evidence from eye fixations during reading Journal Article In: Cognition and Emotion, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Yao2024,We replicated and extended the findings of Yao et al. [(2018). Differential emotional processing in concrete and abstract words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(7), 1064–1074] regarding the interaction of emotionality, concreteness, and imageability in word processing by measuring eye fixation times on target words during normal reading. A 3 (Emotion: negative, neutral, positive) × 2 (Concreteness: abstract, concrete) design was used with 22 items per condition, with each set of six target words matched across conditions in terms of word length and frequency. Abstract (e.g. shocking, reserved, fabulous) and concrete (e.g. massacre, calendar, treasure) target words appeared (separately) within contextually neutral, plausible sentences. Sixty-three participants each read all 132 experimental sentences while their eye movements were recorded. Analyses using Gamma generalised linear mixed models revealed significant effects of both Emotion and Concreteness on all fixation measures, indicating faster processing for emotional and concrete words. Additionally, there was a significant Emotion × Concreteness interaction which, critically, was modulated by Imageability in early fixation time measures. Emotion effects were significantly larger in higher-imageability abstract words than in lower-imageability ones, but remained unaffected by imageability in concrete words. These findings support the multimodal induction hypothesis and highlight the intricate interplay of these factors in the immediate stages of word processing during fluent reading. |
Beier Yao; Martin Rolfs; Rachael Slate; Dominic Roberts; Jessica Fattal; Eric D. Achtyes; Ivy F. Tso; Vaibhav A. Diwadkar; Deborah Kashy; Jacqueline Bao; Katharine N. Thakkar Abnormal oculomotor corollary discharge signaling as a trans-diagnostic mechanism of psychosis Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 631–641, 2024. @article{Yao2024b,Background and Hypothesis: Corollary discharge (CD) signals are “copies” of motor signals sent to sensory areas to predict the corresponding input. They are a posited mechanism enabling one to distinguish actions generated by oneself vs external forces. Consequently, altered CD is a hypothesized mechanism for agency disturbances in psychosis. Previous studies have shown a decreased influence of CD signals on visual perception in individuals with schizophrenia—particularly in xthose with more severe positive symptoms. We therefore hypothesized that altered CD may beatrans-diagnosticmechanismof psychosis. StudyDesign: We examined oculomotor CD (using the blanking task) in 49 participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (SZ), 36 bipolar participants with psychosis (BPP), and 40 healthy controls (HC). Participants made a saccade to a visual target. Upon saccade initiation, the target disappeared and reappeared at a horizontally displaced position. Participants indicated the direction of displacement. With intact CD, participants can make accurate perceptual judgements. Otherwise, participants may use saccade landing site as a proxy of pre-saccadic target to inform perception. Thus, multi-level modeling was used to examine the influence of target displacement and saccade landing site on displacement judgements. Study Results: SZ and BPP were equally less sensitive to target displacement than HC. Moreover, regardless of diagnosis, SZ and BPP with more severe positive symptoms were more likely to rely on saccade landing site. Conclusions: These results suggest that altered CD may be a trans-diagnostic mechanism of psychosis. |
Zhou Yang; Jia Wen Zhu; Lin Su; Ming Jie Xiong; Todd Jackson The gaze biases towards pain-related information during the late stages predict the persistence of chronic pain: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica Sinica, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 44–60, 2024. @article{Yang2024d,Pain-related attention biases have a crucial role in the development and maintenance of chronic pain. Previous meta-analyses have demonstrated that individuals with chronic pain exhibit a sustained attentional biases toward pain-related stimuli. Several studies have also highlighted associations between the maintenance of pain-related attention biases and poorer long-term chronic pain outcomes. However, traditional measures used in previous studies including total fixation or duration indexes, cannot capture the dynamic nature of attention or variability in attentional processes between individuals. Some researchers have suggested that the attentional biases associated with chronic pain may exist at different stages of attention processing. Therefore, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamic nature of visual attention biases toward pain-related stimuli and their potential predictive effects on responses to chronic pain, this study employed a time window segmentation analysis of eye movement data. Additionally, real pain stimuli were utilized in the visual task to elicit more authentic responses. GPower3.1 was utilized to estimate the required sample size for this study; 49 participants were needed to detect an effect size (f) of 0.17 with a significance level (α) of 0.05 and a power of 95%. A total of 94 participants (69 women) experiencing chronic musculoskeletal pain (e.g., neck pain, shoulder pain, or low back pain), were recruited for this study. During the experiment, participants completed two tasks while their eye movements were recorded using an Eyelink 1000 eye tracker. The eye tracker had a sampling rate of 500 Hz, a spatial accuracy greater than 0.5°, and a resolution of 0.01° in the pupil-tracking mode. After receiving instructions, participants began the first task comprising 16 pairs of pain-neutral pictures and 16 pairs of neutral-neutral pictures, each measuring 11 cm × 10 cm. The viewing angle of each picture was 8.99° × 8.17°. In this task, picture pairs were displayed for 2000 ms, during which participants were instructed to freely view the pictures. Following the disappearance of the stimuli, a detection point appeared at the location of one of the pictures, and participants had to quickly and accurately judge the location of the detection point. Task 2 was identical to Task 1, exception that, no detection point was presented following the offset of picture pairs; instead, there was a possibility that an actual somatosensory pain stimulus would be delivered. Specifically, participants had a 25% chance of receiving a painful stimulus after each pain-neutral picture pair appeared while there was no chance a painful stimulus delivery after neutral-neutral picture pairs appeared. Participants were instructed to quickly and accurately determine whether or not they experienced a painful stimulus. At the start of the experiment, baseline data was collected, including the participants' chronic pain grade, pain catastrophizing scale scores, center for epidemiologic studies depression scores, and demographic information. Additionally, after a period of 6 months, the experimenters followed up with the participants to gather information on their chronic pain intensity and interference. Task 1 results revealed patients with chronic pain displayed attentional biases toward pain-related stimuli during the first three epochs (0~500 ms, 500~1000 ms, and 1000~1500 ms). In Task 2, which incorporated real pain stimuli, participants exhibited attentional biases toward pain cues during all four epochs (0~500 ms, 500~1000 ms, 1000~1500 ms, and 1500~2000 ms). By examining the magnitude of attentional biases across the four time windows in the two tasks, it was evident that attentional biases toward pain-related stimuli in patients with chronic pain were imbalanced. Attention was engaged in the first epoch of stimulus presentation (0~500 ms), reached its peak during the second epoch (500~1000 ms), and then gradually decreased during the third and fourth epochs (1000~1500 ms and 1500~2000 ms). Further analysis revealed that attentional biases toward pain-related stimuli during the third and fourth epochs (1000~1500 ms and 1500~2000 ms) of both tasks independently predicted the maintenance of chronic pain intensity and interference levels at a six month follow-up. These effects were maintained even after controlling for baseline levels of pain intensity and interference and other baseline correlates of follow-up outcomes. The present study represents the first attempt to examine the impact of attentional bias towards pain-related stimuli on the maintenance of dysfunctional chronic pain outcomes from a dynamic perspective. These findings offer an explanation and valuable insights into attentional training, which holds significant importance in enhancing chronic pain management. Moving forward, training individuals to redirect their attention away from pain and associated cues during the later stages of attention may prove to be an effective approach for alleviating suffering due to chronic pain. |
Xiaozhi Yang; Chris Retzler; Ian Krajbich; Roger Ratcliff; Marios G. Philiastides Attention to brand labels affects, and is affected by, evaluations of product attractiveness Journal Article In: Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, vol. 2, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Yang2024c,When considering whether to purchase consumer products, people consider both the items' attractiveness and their brand labels. Brands may affect the decision process through various mechanisms. For example, brand labels may provide direct support for their paired products, or they may indirectly affect choice outcomes by changing the way that people evaluate and compare their options. To examine these possibilities, we combined computational modeling with an eye-tracking experiment in which subjects made clothing choices with brand labels either present or absent. Subjects' choices were consistent with both the attractiveness of the clothing items and, to a smaller extent, the appeal of the brands. In line with the direct support mechanism, subjects who spent more time looking at the brands were more likely to choose the options with the preferred brands. When a clothing item was more attractive, subjects were more likely to look longer at the associated brand label, but not vice versa. In line with indirect mechanisms, in the presence of brand labels subjects exerted more caution and showed marginally less attentional bias in their choices. This research sheds light on the interplay between gaze and choice in decisions involving brand information, indicating that brands have both direct and indirect influences on choice. |
Tianqi Yang; Yaning Guo; Xianyang Xiuchao Wang; Shengjun Wu; Xianyang Xiuchao Wang; Hui Wang; Xufeng Liu The influence of representational gravity on spatial orientation: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Current Psychology, vol. 43, no. 16, pp. 14485–14493, 2024. @article{Yang2024f,Spatial orientation is a fundamental subject in aviation psychology. The influence of representational gravity can lead to systematic errors during uniform linear motion. However, it remains unclear whether representational gravity during motion can affect spatial orientation. In this study, college students from Xi'an, China were recruited to participate in an experiment based on the Spatial Visualization Dynamic Test. We compared the accuracy of spatial orientation estimation and eye movement indices when the main direction of spatial orientation was in the lower right versus when it was in the upper right. The results revealed that individuals were prone to overestimate the adjustment angle when the main direction of spatial orientation was in the lower right, and underestimate the adjustment angle when the main direction of spatial orientation was in the upper right; the average pupil size was significantly larger when the main direction of spatial orientation was in the lower right than that when the main direction of spatial orientation was in the upper right. In conclusion, spatial orientation in motion was influenced by representational gravity, and when representational gravity aligned with the main direction of spatial orientation, it led to increased cognitive resource consumption. |
Ruyi Yang; Peng Zhao; Liyang Wang; Chenli Feng; Chen Peng; Zhexuan Wang; Yingying Zhang; Minqian Shen; Kaiwen Shi; Shijun Weng; Chunqiong Dong; Fu Zeng; Tianyun Zhang; Xingdong Chen; Shuiyuan Wang; Yiheng Wang; Yuanyuan Luo; Qingyuan Chen; Yuqing Chen; Chunhui Chengyong Jiang; Shanshan Jia; Zhaofei Yu; Jian Liu; Fei Wang; Su Jiang; Wendong Xu; Liang Li; Gang Wang; Xiaofen Mo; Gengfeng Zheng; Aihua Chen; Xingtao Zhou; Chunhui Chengyong Jiang; Yuanzhi Yuan; Biao Yan; Jiayi Zhang Assessment of visual function in blind mice and monkeys with subretinally implanted nanowire arrays as artificial photoreceptors Journal Article In: Nature Biomedical Engineering, vol. 8, no. 8, pp. 1018–1039, 2024. @article{Yang2024e,Retinal prostheses could restore image-forming vision in conditions of photoreceptor degeneration. However, contrast sensitivity and visual acuity are often insufficient. Here we report the performance, in mice and monkeys with induced photoreceptor degeneration, of subretinally implanted gold-nanoparticle-coated titania nanowire arrays providing a spatial resolution of 77.5 μm and a temporal resolution of 3.92 Hz in ex vivo retinas (as determined by patch-clamp recording of retinal ganglion cells). In blind mice, the arrays allowed for the detection of drifting gratings and flashing objects at light-intensity thresholds of 15.70–18.09 μW mm–2, and offered visual acuities of 0.3–0.4 cycles per degree, as determined by recordings of visually evoked potentials and optomotor-response tests. In monkeys, the arrays were stable for 54 weeks, allowed for the detection of a 10-μW mm–2 beam of light (0.5° in beam angle) in visually guided saccade experiments, and induced plastic changes in the primary visual cortex, as indicated by long-term in vivo calcium imaging. Nanomaterials as artificial photoreceptors may ameliorate visual deficits in patients with photoreceptor degeneration. |
Kaihui Yang; Junwei Han; Guangyu Guo; Chaowei Fang; Yingzi Fan; Lechao Cheng; Dingwen Zhang Progressive adapting and pruning: Domain-incremental learning for saliency prediction Journal Article In: ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, vol. 20, no. 8, pp. 1–19, 2024. @article{Yang2024b,Saliency prediction (SAP) plays a crucial role in simulating the visual perception function of human beings. In practical situations, humans can quickly grasp saliency extraction in new image domains. However, current SAP methods mainly concentrate on training models in single domains, which do not effectively handle diverse content and styles present in real-world images. As a result, it would be of great significance if SAP models could efficiently adjust to new image domains. To this end, this article aims to design SAP models that can imitate the incremental learning ability of human beings on multiple image domains and name domain-incremental saliency prediction (DISAP). To make a tradeoff between preventing the forgetting of historical domains and achieving high performance on new domains, we propose a progressively updated domain incremental encoder. This encoder consists of a domain-sharing branch and a domain-specific branch. The domain-sharing branch includes a feature selection mechanism to preserve crucial parameters after fine-tuning the model on each current domain. The remaining parameters are reserved to absorb knowledge from future domains. Furthermore, to capture the unique characteristics of each domain with relatively low computational overhead, we introduce a lightweight design to construct the domain-specific branch, enabling effective adaptation to new domains. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple domain-incremental learning settings formed by four saliency prediction datasets, including Salicon, MIT1003, the art subset of CAT2000, and WebSal. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods significantly. The code is available at https://github.com/KaIi-github/DIL4SAP. |
Jingyi Yang; Elizabeth L. Saionz; Matthew R. Cavanaugh; Berkeley K. Fahrenthold; Michael D. Melnick; Duje Tadin; Farran Briggs; Marisa Carrasco; Krystel R. Huxlin Limited restoration of contrast sensitivity with training after v1 damage in humans Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Yang2024a,Stroke damage to the primary visual cortex (V1) causes severe visual deficits, which benefit from perceptual retraining. However, whereas training with high-contrast stimuli can locally restore orientation and motion direction discrimination abilities at trained locations, it only partially restores luminance contrast sensitivity (CS). Recent work revealed that high-contrast discrimination abilities may be preserved in the blind field of some patients early after stroke. Here, we asked if CS for orientation and direction discrimination is similarly preserved inside the blind field, to what extent, and whether it could benefit from a visual training intervention. Thirteen subacute patients (<3 months post-V1 stroke) and 12 chronic patients (>6 months post-V1 stroke) were pretested and then trained to discriminate either orientation or motion direction of Gabor patches of progressively lower contrasts as their performance improved. At baseline, more subacute than chronic participants could correctly discriminate the orientation of high-contrast Gabors in their blind field, but all failed to perform this task at lower contrasts, even when 10 Hz flicker or motion direction were added. Training improved CS in a greater portion of subacute than that of chronic participants, but no one attained normal CS, even when stimuli contained flicker or motion. We conclude that, unlike the near-complete training-induced restoration of high-contrast visual discrimination abilities, V1 damage in adulthood may severely limit the residual visual system's ability to regain normal CS. Our results support the notion that CS involves different neural substrates and computations than those required for orientation and direction discrimination in V1-damaged visual systems. |
Haojun Yang; Xiaojie Wei; Kailing Huang; Zhongling Wu; Qiong Zhang; Shirui Wen; Quan Wang; Li Feng Features of attention network impairment in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy: Evidence from eye-tracking and electroencephalogram Journal Article In: Epilepsy and Behavior, vol. 157, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Yang2024,Aim: To explore multiple features of attention impairments in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Methods: A total of 93 patients diagnosed with TLE at Xiangya Hospital during May 2022 and December 2022 and 85 healthy controls were included in this study. Participants were asked to complete neuropsychological scales and attention network test (ANT) with recording of eye-tracking and electroencephalogram. Results: All means of evaluation showed impaired attention functions in TLE patients. ANT results showed impaired orienting (p < 0.001) and executive control (p = 0.041) networks. Longer mean first saccade time (p = 0.046) and more total saccadic counts (p = 0.035) were found in eye-tracking results, indicating abnormal alerting and orienting networks. Both alerting, orienting and executive control networks were abnormal, manifesting as decreased amplitudes (N1 & P3, p < 0.001) and extended latency (P3 |
Ming Yan; Yiu-Kei Tsang; Jinger Pan Phonological recovery during Chinese sentence reading: Effects of rime and tone Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 501–512, 2024. @article{Yan2024a,The present study tested the activation of different phonological units of Chinese characters during silent sentence reading. Fifty-five participants were tested in an eye-tracking experiment. A highly predictable target character in each experimental sentence was replaced by four types of substitutes (i.e. no-violation, tone-violation, rime-violation, and double-violation). The participants exhibited a shorter total reading time in the no-violation and tone-violation conditions than in the double-violation baseline condition, whereas the rime-violation condition did not differ from the baseline. Moreover, the participants did not benefit from tonal information in addition to syllable-level phonological overlap. Our findings are consistent with a notion of late phonological activation in Chinese, and therefore suggest a direct route of lexical activation bypassing phonological mediation during visual word recognition. |
Ming Yan; Reinhold Kliegl; Jinger Pan Direction-specific reading experience shapes perceptual span Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 50, no. 11, pp. 1740–1748, 2024. @article{Yan2024,Perceptual span in reading, the spatial extent for effective information extraction during a single fixation, provides a critical foundation to all studies for sentence reading. However, it is not understood fully how the perceptual span is influenced by direction-specific reading experience. Traditional Chinese sentences can be written horizontally from left to right or vertically downward, offering the best opportunity to explore readers' perceptual span in different text directions, free of possible confounding with language proficiency and cross-participant differences. Using a within-item and within-subject design, eye movements of tradi- tional Chinese readers were recorded during their reading of horizontally and vertically presented sentences. Additionally, regardless of text direction, a gaze-contingent moving-window technique was adopted to restrict visible texts within a virtual window that moved in synchrony with the reader's eye gaze, while char- acters outside the window were masked. Among several critical results, most importantly, asymptotic read- ing performance was observed in a smaller window condition for vertical reading than for horizontal reading, suggesting an overall smaller perceptual span in the former case. In addition, the size of the vertical perceptual span increased as a function of the readers' familiarity with vertical text. We conclude that factors beyond orthographic complexity and readers' language proficiency can influence the way in which humans read. Readers' direction-specific perceptual experiences can influence their perceptual span. |
Jumpei Yamashita; Hiroki Terashima; Makoto Yoneya; Kazushi Maruya; Haruo Oishi; Takatsune Kumada Pupil trend reflects suboptimal alertness maintenance over 10 s in vigilance and working memory performance: An exploratory study Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 11, no. 12, pp. 1–17, 2024. @article{Yamashita2024,Maintaining concentration on demanding cognitive tasks, such as vigilance (VG) and working memory (WM) tasks, is crucial for successful task completion. Previous research suggests that internal concentration maintenance fluctuates, potentially declining to suboptimal states, which can influence trial-by-trial performance in these tasks. However, the timescale of such alertness maintenance, as indicated by slow changes in pupil diameter, has not been thoroughly investigated. This study explored whether "pupil trends"-which selectively signal suboptimal tonic alertness maintenance at various timescales-negatively correlate with trial-by-trial performance in VG and WM tasks. Using the psychomotor vigilance task (VG) and the visual-spatial two-back task (WM), we found that human pupil trends lasting over 10 s were significantly higher in trials with longer reaction times, indicating poorer performance, compared with shorter reaction time trials, which indicated better performance. The attention network test further validated that these slow trends reflect suboptimal states related to (tonic) alertness maintenance rather than suboptimal performance specific to VG and WM tasks, which is more associated with (phasic) responses to instantaneous interference. These findings highlight the potential role of detecting and compensating for nonoptimal states in VG and WM performance, significantly beyond the 10 s timescale. Additionally, the findings suggest the possibility of estimating human concentration during various visual tasks, even when rapid pupil changes occur due to luminance fluctuations. |
Leyla Yahyaie; Reza Ebrahimpour; Abbas Koochari Pupil size variations reveal information about hierarchical decision-making processes Journal Article In: Cognitive Computation, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 1049–1060, 2024. @article{Yahyaie2024,Introduction: Pupil size is a well-known indicator of low-level decision-making processes. However, it is unclear whether these involuntary eye data can represent information about the interwoven processes of hierarchical decision-making. In hierarchical decisions, high-level decision-making depends on the process of making low-level decisions, and the result of these interwoven processes is determined by feedback. Therefore, the exact cause of negative feedback is unclear, as it may be the result of low-level, high-level, or both low- and high-level incorrect decisions. In this study, we investigated the characteristics of eye data (pupil diameter) in the interwoven processes of hierarchical decision-making. Methods: We designed a hierarchical psychophysical experiment in which participants were asked to report their low- and high-level decisions and their confidence simultaneously on one of the colored bars. Participants received correct feedback in a trial when reporting both decisions correctly. During the experiment, the eye data of the participants were recorded by an eye-tracking device. Results: Our findings suggest that pupil size conveys information about high-level decisions as well. Furthermore, this study shows that three parameters (introduced in previous studies), negative feedback in successive trials, stimulus strength (uniformity with confidence), and decision urgency, are all represented in pupil size. Conclusion: The findings support the idea that involuntary eye data are influenced by decision-making-related brain activity in decision-making processes and not just visual stimulus features. |
Xiaojuan Xue; Gilles Pourtois Modulatory effects of goal relevance on emotional attention reveal that fear has a distinct value Journal Article In: Cognition and Emotion, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Xue2024a,Threat-related stimuli can capture attention. However, it remains debated whether this capture is automatic or not. To address this question, we compared attentional biases to emotional faces using a dot-probe task (DPT) where emotion was never goal-relevant (Experiment 1) or made directly task-relevant by means of induction trials (Experiments 2–3). Moreover, the contingency between the DPT and induction trials was either partial (Experiment 2) or full (Experiment 3). Eye-tracking was used to ascertain that the emotional cue and the subsequent target were processed with peripheral vision. Experiments 1 and 2 both showed that negative faces captured attention, with faster target processing when it appeared on the same side as the preceding fearful face (i.e. fear-valid trials) compared to the opposite side where the neutral face was shown (i.e. fear-invalid trials), but also when it appeared on the side of the preceding neutral face (i.e. happy-invalid trials) compared to the happy face (i.e. happy-valid trials). Importantly, this preferential spatial orienting to negative emotion was not observed in Experiment 3, where the goal relevance of emotion was high. However, in that experiment, fearful faces produced a specific attentional bias during the DPT, which was mostly driven by the induction trials themselves. |
Shutian Xue; Antonio Fernández; Marisa Carrasco Featural representation and internal noise underlie the eccentricity effect in contrast sensitivity Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 13, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Xue2024,Human visual performance for basic visual dimensions (e.g., contrast sensitivity and acuity) peaks at the fovea and decreases with eccentricity. The eccentricity effect is related to the larger visual cortical surface area corresponding to the fovea, but it is unknown if differential feature tuning contributes to this eccentricity effect. Here, we investigated two system-level computations underlying the eccentricity effect: featural representation (tuning) and internal noise. Observers (both sexes) detected a Gabor embedded in filtered white noise which appeared at the fovea or one of four perifoveal locations. We used psychophysical reverse correlation to estimate the weights assigned by the visual system to a range of orientations and spatial frequencies (SFs) in noisy stimuli, which are conventionally interpreted as perceptual sensitivity to the corresponding features. We found higher sensitivity to task-relevant orientations and SFs at the fovea than that at the perifovea, and no difference in selectivity for either orientation or SF. Concurrently, we measured response consistency using a double-pass method, which allowed us to infer the level of internal noise by implementing a noisy observer model. We found lower internal noise at the fovea than that at the perifovea. Finally, individual variability in contrast sensitivity correlated with sensitivity to and selectivity for task-relevant features as well as with internal noise. Moreover, the behavioral eccentricity effect mainly reflects the foveal advantage in orientation sensitivity compared with other computations. These findings suggest that the eccentricity effect stems from a better representation of task-relevant features and lower internal noise at the fovea than that at the perifovea. |
Suyun Xu; Hua Zhang; Juan Fan; Xiaoming Jiang; Minyue Zhang; Jingjing Guan; Hongwei Ding; Yang Zhang Auditory challenges and listening effort in school-age children with autism: Insights from pupillary dynamics during speech-in-noise perception Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 67, no. 7, pp. 2410–2453, 2024. @article{Xu2024,Purpose: This study aimed to investigate challenges in speech-in-noise (SiN) processing faced by school-age children with autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) and their impact on listening effort. Method: Participants, including 23 Mandarin-speaking children with ASCs and 19 age-matched neurotypical (NT) peers, underwent sentence recognition tests in both quiet and noisy conditions, with a speech-shaped steady-state noise masker presented at 0-dB signal-to-noise ratio in the noisy condition. Recognition accuracy rates and task-evoked pupil responses were compared to assess behavioral performance and listening effort during auditory tasks. Results: No main effect of group was found on accuracy rates. Instead, significant effects emerged for autistic trait scores, listening conditions, and their interaction, indicating that higher trait scores were associated with poorer performance in noise. Pupillometric data revealed significantly larger and earlier peak dilations, along with more varied pupillary dynamics in the ASC group relative to the NT group, especially under noisy conditions. Importantly, the ASC group's peak dilation in quiet mirrored that of the NT group in noise. However, the ASC group consistently exhibited reduced mean dilations than the NT group. Conclusions: Pupillary responses suggest a different resource allocation pattern in ASCs: An initial sharper and larger dilation may signal an intense, narrowed resource allocation, likely linked to heightened arousal, engagement, and cognitive load, whereas a subsequent faster tail-off may indicate a greater decrease in resource availability and engagement, or a quicker release of arousal and cognitive load. The presence of noise further accentuates this pattern. This highlights the unique SiN processing challenges children with ASCs may face, underscoring the importance of a nuanced, individual-centric approach for interventions and support. |
Kunyu Xu; Yu-Min Ku; Chenlu Ma; Chien-Hui Lin; Wan-Chen Chang Development of comprehension monitoring skill in Chinese children: Evidence from eye movement and probe interviews Journal Article In: Metacognition and Learning, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 103–121, 2024. @article{Xu2024a,As an important construct in the cognitive process, comprehension monitoring has received much scholarly attention. Researchers have recognized comprehension monitoring as an ability closely linked with children's reading comprehension ability and working memory capacity. Evidence is also abundant to prove that comprehension monitoring skill develops with age. It remains unclear, however, how these factors interact during reading, particularly in low-grade children. Many previous empirical studies have only employed online or offline measurements to examine children's monitoring performance, which might lead to unsolid conclusions. In this study, we utilized both online eye-tracking measures and offline probe interviews to quantify the developmental features (i.e., evaluation and regulation) of comprehension monitoring skills among Chinese beginning readers. The results indicated that the comprehension monitoring performance, as quantified by eye-tracking measures, was positively related to their reading comprehension ability and working memory capacity. Moreover, the first-graders' performances lacked online regulation skills during the error-detecting tasks, while second-graders had relatively developed online monitoring performance. Additionally, the eye-tracking measures were found as a predictor for children's performances in probe interviews, as the readers with high comprehension ability and working memory capacity successfully reported more errors embedded in the self-designed reading materials. Therefore, the findings support the claim that children's comprehension monitoring is a developing skill associated with reading comprehension and working memory capacity and further question the existence of comprehension monitoring skills in beginning readers, especially first-graders. |
Jinli Xiong; Xianmin Gong; Quan Yang; Shufei Yin Age-differential role of gaze reinstatement in recognition memory for negative visual stimuli Journal Article In: The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, vol. 79, no. 5, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Xiong2024,Objectives: Although research has shown that the replay of encoding-specific gaze patterns during retrieval, known as gaze reinstatement, facilitates memory retrieval, little is known about whether it differentially associates with the negativity preference in memory (defined as enhanced memory for negative stimuli relative to neutral stimuli in this study) among younger and older adults. The present study aims to address this research gap. Methods: A total of 33 older adults (16 women; aged 58–69 years |
Songqiao Xie; Chunyan He An empirical study on native Mandarin-speaking children's metonymy comprehension development Journal Article In: Journal of Child Language, pp. 1–28, 2024. @article{Xie2024,This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children's (age 3–7) comprehension development of novel and conventional metonymy, combining online and offline methods. Both online and offline data show significantly better performances from the oldest group (6-to-7-year-old) and a delayed acquisition of conventional metonymy compared with novel metonymy. However, part of offline data shows no significant difference between adjacent age groups, while the eye-tracking data show a chronological development from age 3–7. Furthermore, in offline tasks, the three-year-old group features a high choice randomness and the four-to-five-year-olds show the longest reaction time. Therefore, we argue that, not only age but also metonymy type can influence metonymy acquisition, and that a lack of socio-cultural experience can be a source of acquisition difficulty for children under six. Methodologically speaking, we believe that online methods should not be considered superior to offline ones as they investigate different aspects of implicit and explicit language comprehension. |
Will Xiao; Saloni Sharma; Gabriel Kreiman; Margaret S. Livingstone Feature-selective responses in macaque visual cortex follow eye movements during natural vision Journal Article In: Nature Neuroscience, vol. 27, no. 6, pp. 1157–1166, 2024. @article{Xiao2024a,In natural vision, primates actively move their eyes several times per second via saccades. It remains unclear whether, during this active looking, visual neurons exhibit classical retinotopic properties, anticipate gaze shifts or mirror the stable quality of perception, especially in complex natural scenes. Here, we let 13 monkeys freely view thousands of natural images across 4.6 million fixations, recorded 883 h of neuronal responses in six areas spanning primary visual to anterior inferior temporal cortex and analyzed spatial, temporal and featural selectivity in these responses. Face neurons tracked their receptive field contents, indicated by category-selective responses. Self-consistency analysis showed that general feature-selective responses also followed eye movements and remained gaze-dependent over seconds of viewing the same image. Computational models of feature-selective responses located retinotopic receptive fields during free viewing. We found limited evidence for feature-selective predictive remapping and no viewing-history integration. Thus, ventral visual neurons represent the world in a predominantly eye-centered reference frame during natural vision. |
Naiqi G. Xiao; Hila Ghersin; Natasha D. Dombrowski; Alexandra M. Boldin; Lauren L. Emberson Infants' top-down perceptual modulation is specific to own-race faces Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 242, pp. 1–17, 2024. @article{Xiao2024,Recent studies have revealed the influence of higher-level cognitive systems in modulating perceptual processing (top-down perceptual modulation) in infancy. However, more research is needed to understand how top-down processes in infant perception contribute to early perceptual development. To this end, this study examined infants' top-down perception of own- and other-race faces to reveal whether top-down modulation is linked to the emergence of perceptual specialization. Infants first learned an association between a sound and faces, with the race of the faces manipulated between groups (own race vs. other race). We then tested infants' face perception across various levels of perceptual difficulty (manipulated by presentation duration) and indexed top-down perception by the change in perception when infants heard the sound previously associated with the face (predictive sound) versus an irrelevant sound. Infants exhibited top-down face perception for own-race faces (Experiment 1). However, we present new evidence that infants did not show evidence of top-down modulation for other-race faces (Experiment 2), suggesting an experience-based specificity of this capacity with more effective top-down modulation in familiar perceptual contexts. In addition, we ruled out the possibility that this face race effect was due to differences in infants' associative learning of the sound and faces between the two groups. This work has important implications for understanding the mechanisms supporting perceptual development and how they relate to top-down perception in infancy. |
Xinyi Xia; Qin Liu; Erik D. Reichle; Yanping Liu Saccadic targeting in the Landolt-C task: Implications for Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 50, no. 11, pp. 1749–1771, 2024. @article{Xia2024a,Participants in an eye-movement experiment performed a modified version of the Landolt-C paradigm (Williams & Pollatsek, 2007) to determine if there are preferred viewing locations when they searched for target squares embedded in linear arrays of spatially contiguous clusters of squares (i.e., sequences of one to four squares having missing segments of variable size and orientation). The results of this experiment indicate that, although the peaks of the single- and first-of-multiple-fixation landing-site distributions were respectively located near the centers and beginnings of the clusters, thereby replicating previous patterns that have been interpreted as evidence for the default saccadic-targeting hypothesis, the same dissociation was evident on nonclusters (i.e., arbitrarily defined regions of analysis). Furthermore, properties of the clusters (e.g., character number and gap size) influenced fixation durations and forward saccade length, suggesting that ongoing stimulus processing affects decisions about when and where (i.e., how far) to move the eyes. Finally, results of simulations using simple oculomotor-based, default-targeting, and dynamic-adjustment models indicated that the latter performed better than the other two, suggesting that the dynamic-adjustment strategy likely reflects the basic perceptual and motor constraints shared by a variety of visual tasks, rather than being specific to Chinese reading. The theoretical implications of these results for existing and future accounts of eye-movement control are discussed. |
Tiansheng Xia; Yingqi Yan; Jiayue Guo Color in web-advertising: The effect of color hue contrast on web satisfaction and advertising memory Journal Article In: Current Psychology, vol. 43, no. 16, pp. 14645–14658, 2024. @article{Xia2024b,There has been a growth in e-commerce, presenting consumers with varied forms of advertising. A key goal of web advertising is to leave a lasting impression on the user, and web satisfaction is an important measure of the quality and usability of a web page after an ad is placed on it. This experiment manipulated participants' purpose in web browsing (free browsing versus goal oriented) and the color combination of the web background and the vertical-ad background (high or low hue contrast) to predict users' satisfaction with the web page and the degree of ad recall. The psychological mechanisms of this effect were also explored using an eye-tracking device to record and analyze eye movements. The participants were 120 university students, 64.2% of whom were female and 35.8% of whom were male. During free browsing, participants could simulate the daily use of a browser to browse the web and were given 120 s to do so, and in the task-oriented browsing condition, participants were told in advance that they had to summarize the headlines of each news item one at a time within 120 s. The results showed that, in the free-viewing task, the hue contrast between the ad–web background colors negatively affected web satisfaction and ad memory whereas there was no significant difference in this effect in the goal-oriented task. Furthermore, in the free-viewing task, the level of attentional intrusion mediated the effect of ad–web hue contrast on the degree of ad recall; color harmony mediated the effect of hue contrast on the user's evaluation of web satisfaction. These results can act as a new reference for web design research and marketing practice. |
Lin Xia; Yanming Wang; Sha Luo; Yong Zhang; Bensheng Qiu; Xiaoxiao Wang; Lixia Feng Abnormal occipital and frontal activity during voluntary convergence in intermittent exotropia: A task-fMRI study Journal Article In: Heliyon, vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 1–7, 2024. @article{Xia2024,Intermittent exotropia (IXT) is characterized by intermittently outward deviation of the eye and involved with vergence dysfunction. This study aimed to investigate the brain areas related to voluntary convergence and cortical activation changes between IXT patients and normal subjects. A total of 21 subjects, including 11 IXT patients and 10 age- and sex-matched normal subjects, were recruited for this study. A voluntary convergence task was employed, with changes in brain function measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Correlations between cortical activation and clinical measurements were conducted by Pearson's correlation analysis. fMRI results showed that during voluntary convergence, the medial frontal gyrus (MFG) and bilateral occipital cortex were activated in the normal group, whereas only activation of the occipital cortex in IXT patients. Compared with the normal, IXT patients showed hypo-activation of both the MFG and cuneus during the task. The activation of MFG was negatively correlated to the duration of IXT. This study demonstrates that both MFG and occipital cortex may participate in voluntary convergence in normal subjects, while IXT patients have an aberrant cortical function of the MFG and cuneus, and the duration of IXT likely influences the severity of MFG. These findings may provide valuable insights for understanding the relationship between convergence and IXT. |
Jordana S. Wynn; Daniel L. Schacter Eye movements reinstate remembered locations during episodic simulation Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 248, pp. 1–6, 2024. @article{Wynn2024,Imagining the future, like recalling the past, relies on the ability to retrieve and imagine a spatial context. Research suggests that eye movements support this process by reactivating spatial contextual details from memory, a process termed gaze reinstatement. While gaze reinstatement has been linked to successful memory retrieval, it remains unclear whether it supports the related process of future simulation. In the present study, we recorded both eye movements and audio while participants described familiar locations from memory and subsequently imagined future events occurring in those locations while either freely moving their eyes or maintaining central fixation. Restricting viewing during simulation significantly reduced self-reported vividness ratings, supporting a critical role for eye movements in simulation. When viewing was unrestricted, participants spontaneously reinstated gaze patterns specific to the simulated location, replicating findings of gaze reinstatement during memory retrieval. Finally, gaze-based location reinstatement was predictive of simulation success, indexed by the number of internal (episodic) details produced, with both measures peaking early and co-varying over time. Together, these findings suggest that the same oculomotor processes that support episodic memory retrieval – that is, gaze-based reinstatement of spatial context – also support episodic simulation. |
Nicholas J. Wyche; Mark Edwards; Stephanie C. Goodhew An updating-based working memory load alters the dynamics of eye movements but not their spatial extent during free viewing of natural scenes Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 86, no. 2, pp. 503–524, 2024. @article{Wyche2024,The relationship between spatial deployments of attention and working memory load is an important topic of study, with clear implications for real-world tasks such as driving. Previous research has generally shown that attentional breadth broadens under higher load, while exploratory eye-movement behaviour also appears to change with increasing load. However, relatively little research has compared the effects of working memory load on different kinds of spatial deployment, especially in conditions that require updating of the contents of working memory rather than simple retrieval. The present study undertook such a comparison by measuring participants' attentional breadth (via an undirected Navon task) and their exploratory eye-movement behaviour (a free-viewing recall task) under low and high updating working memory loads. While spatial aspects of task performance (attentional breadth, and peripheral extent of image exploration in the free-viewing task) were unaffected by the load manipulation, the exploratory dynamics of the free-viewing task (including fixation durations and scan-path lengths) changed under increasing load. These findings suggest that temporal dynamics, rather than the spatial extent of exploration, are the primary mechanism affected by working memory load during the spatial deployment of attention. Further, individual differences in exploratory behaviour were observed on the free-viewing task: all metrics were highly correlated across working memory load blocks. These findings suggest a need for further investigation of individual differences in eye-movement behaviour; potential factors associated with these individual differences, including working memory capacity and persistence versus flexibility orientations, are discussed. |
Jimin Wu; Yuzhi Chen; Ashok Veeraraghavan; Eyal Seidemann; Jacob T. Robinson Mesoscopic calcium imaging in a head-unrestrained male non-human primate using a lensless microscope Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Wu2024b,Mesoscopic calcium imaging enables studies of cell-type specific neural activity over large areas. A growing body of literature suggests that neural activity can be different when animals are free to move compared to when they are restrained. Unfortunately, existing systems for imaging calcium dynamics over large areas in non-human primates (NHPs) are table-top devices that require restraint of the animal's head. Here, we demonstrate an imaging device capable of imaging mesoscale calcium activity in a head-unrestrained male non-human primate. We successfully miniaturize our system by replacing lenses with an optical mask and computational algorithms. The resulting lensless microscope can fit comfortably on an NHP, allowing its head to move freely while imaging. We are able to measure orientation columns maps over a 20 mm2 field-of-view in a head-unrestrained macaque. Our work establishes mesoscopic imaging using a lensless microscope as a powerful approach for studying neural activity under more naturalistic conditions. |
Hao Wu; Yuding Zhang; Qiong Luo; Zhengzhou Zhu The magnitude representations of fractions of Chinese students: Evidence from behavioral experiment and eye-tracking Journal Article In: Current Psychology, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 4113–4128, 2024. @article{Wu2024d,Early knowledge of fractions can largely predict later mathematical performance, and a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of fractions is fundamental to learning more advanced mathematics. The study aimed to explore the influencing factors and age characteristics of magnitude representations of fractions by a fraction comparison task, using subjects' eye-movement measures as direct evidence and the results of linear regression analyses as indirect evidence. The results found that the number of digits of fractions' components and types of fraction pairs jointly influence the magnitude representations of fractions. For one-digit fraction pairs with and without common components, componential representation is favored; for two-digit fraction pairs with common components, componential representation is preferred, while for two-digit fraction pairs without common components, holistic representation is selected. The representation styles are consistent across university students, junior high school students and primary school students, and there are significant age differences in representation levels, with university students being more flexible in their use of representation strategies of fractions than the other two ages, and junior high school students showing the same level with the primary school students. These results suggest that not only Chinese university students, but also Chinese primary and junior high school students can select and adapt representation strategies of fractions according to the characteristics and complexity of fraction processing tasks. The eye-movement technique can largely compensate for the shortcomings of the regression analysis paradigm and better reveal the critical cognitive processes involved in the processing of fractions. |
Di Wu; Yan Zhu; Yifan Wang; Na Liu; Pan Zhang Transcranial direct current stimulation of the prefrontal and visual cortices diversely affects early and late perceptual learning Journal Article In: Brain and Behavior, vol. 14, no. 7, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Wu2024a,Background: Research has shown that visual perceptual learning (VPL) is related to modifying neural activity in higher level decision-making regions. However, the causal roles of the prefrontal and visual cortexes in VPL are still unclear. Here, we investigated how anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the prefrontal and visual cortices modulates VPL in the early and later phases and the role of multiple brain regions. Methods: Perceptual learning on the coherent motion direction identification task included early and later stages. After early training, participants needed to continuously train to reach a plateau; once the plateau was reached, participants entered a later stage. Sixty participants were randomly divided into five groups. Regardless of the training at the early and later stages, four groups received multitarget tDCS over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) and right middle temporal area (rMT), single-target tDCS over the rDLPFC, and single-target tDCS over the rMT or sham stimulation, and one group was stimulated at the ipsilateral brain region (i.e., left MT). Results: Compared with sham stimulation, multitarget and two single-target tDCS over the rDLPFC or rMT improved posttest performance and accelerated learning during the early period. However, multitarget tDCS and two single-target tDCS led to equivalent benefits for VPL. Additionally, these beneficial effects were absent when anodal tDCS was applied to the ipsilateral brain region. For the later period, the above facilitating effects on VPL induced by multitarget or single-target tDCS disappeared. Conclusions: This study suggested the causal role of the prefrontal and visual cortices in visual motion perceptual learning by anodal tDCS but failed to find greater beneficial effects by simultaneously stimulating the prefrontal and visual cortices. Future research should investigate the functional associations between multiple brain regions to further promote VPL. |
Chenjing Wu; Hongyan Zhu; Yameng Zhang; Wei Zhang; Xianyou He Sensitivity to moral goodness under different aesthetic contexts Journal Article In: Ethics and Behavior, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 279–293, 2024. @article{Wu2024c,Does context influence our appreciation of beauty? To answer this question, two experiments were conducted to determine the effect of contextual aesthetics on the recognition of moral behavior. Experiment 1 demonstrated that individuals in a high-aesthetic context had a quicker recognition time for moral behavior than those in a low-aesthetic context. In a low-aesthetic context, individuals recognize immoral behavior more quickly than in a high aesthetic context. Individuals showed greater recognition rates for moral behavior in a high aesthetic context and higher recognition for immoral behaviors in a low aesthetic context for behavior with unclear information. Experiment 2 revealed that individual fixation counts were smaller under the conditions of high aesthetic context and moral behavior than under the conditions of low aesthetic context and moral behavior, indicating a correlation between low aesthetic context and immoral behavior. This study shows that high aesthetic context facilitates the recognition of moral behavior, which has implications for moral education. |