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!
2015 |
Donghyun Ryu; Bruce Abernethy; David L. Mann; Jamie M. Poolton The contributions of central and peripheral vision to expertise in basketball: How blur helps to provide a clearer picture Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 167–183, 2015. @article{Ryu2015,The main purpose of this study was to examine the relative roles of central and peripheral vision when performing a dynamic forced-choice task. We did so by using a gaze-contingent display with different levels of blur in an effort to (a) test the limit of visual resolution necessary for information pick-up in each of these sectors of the visual field and, as a result, to (b) develop a more natural means of gaze-contingent display using a blurred central or peripheral visual field. The expert advantage seen in usual whole field visual presentation persists despite surprisingly high levels of impairment to central or peripheral vision. Consistent with the well-established central/peripheral differences in sensitivity to spatial frequency, high levels of blur did not prevent better-than-chance performance by skilled players when peripheral information was blurred, but they did affect response accuracy when impairing central vision. Blur was found to always alter the pattern of eye movements before it decreased task performance. The evidence accumulated across the 4 experi- ments provides new insights into several key questions surrounding the role that different sectors of the visual field play in expertise in dynamic, time-constrained tasks. |
Ran Manor; Amir B. Geva Convolutional neural network for multi-category rapid serial visual presentation BCI Journal Article In: Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, vol. 9, pp. 146, 2015. @article{Manor2015,Brain computer interfaces rely on machine learning (ML) algorithms to decode the brain's electrical activity into decisions. For example, in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) tasks, the subject is presented with a continuous stream of images containing rare target images among standard images, while the algorithm has to detect brain activity associated with target images. Here, we continue our previous work, presenting a deep neural network model for the use of single trial EEG classification in RSVP tasks. Deep neural networks have shown state of the art performance in computer vision and speech recognition and thus have great promise for other learning tasks, like classification of EEG samples. In our model, we introduce a novel spatio-temporal regularization for EEG data to reduce overfitting. We show improved classification performance compared to our earlier work on a five categories RSVP experiment. In addition, we compare performance on data from different sessions and validate the model on a public benchmark data set of a P300 speller task. Finally, we discuss the advantages of using neural network models compared to manually designing feature extraction algorithms. |
Chengyao Shen; Xun Huang; Qi Zhao Predicting eye fixations on webpage with an ensemble of early features and high-level representations from deep network Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, vol. 17, no. 11, pp. 2084–2093, 2015. @article{Shen2015a,In recent decades, webpage is becoming an increasingly important visual information source for us. Compared with natural images, webpages are different in many ways. For example, webpages are usually rich in semantically- meaningful visual media (text, pictures, logos and animations) which make the direct application of some traditional low-level saliency models ineffective. Besides, distinct web-viewing patterns such as top-left bias and banner blindness suggest different ways for predicting attention deployment on webpage. In this study, we utilize a new scheme of low-level feature extraction pipeline and combine it with high-level representations from Deep Neural Networks. The proposed model is evaluated on a newly published webpage saliency dataset with three popular evaluation metrics. Results show that our model outperforms other existing saliency models by a large margin and both low- and high-level features play an important role in predicting fixations on webpage. Index |
Joanna R. Wares; David X. Cifu; Kathy W. Hoke; Paul A. Wetzel; George T. Gitchel; William Carne Differential eye movements in mild traumatic brain injury versus normal controls Journal Article In: Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 21–28, 2015. @article{Wares2015,Objectives: Objective measures to diagnose and to monitor improvement of symptoms following mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) are lacking. Computerized eye tracking has been advocated as a rapid, user friendly, and field-ready technique to meet this need. Design: Eye-tracking data collected via a head-mounted, video-based binocular eye tracker was used to examine saccades, fixations, and smooth pursuit movement in military Service Members with postconcussive syndrome (PCS) and asymptomatic control subjects in an effort to determine if eye movement differences could be found and quantified. Participants: Sixty Military Service Members with PCS and 26 asymptomatic controls. Outcome measures: The diagnosis of mTBI was confirmed by the study physiatrist's history, physical examination, and a review of any medical records. Various features of saccades, fixation and smooth pursuit eye movements were analyzed. Results: Subjects with symptomatic mTBI had statistically larger position errors, smaller saccadic amplitudes, smaller predicted peak velocities, smaller peak accelerations, and longer durations. Subjects with symptomatic mTBI were also less likely to follow a target movement (less primary saccades). In general, symptomatic mTBI tracked the stepwise moving targets less accurately, revealing possible brain dysfunction. Conclusions: A reliable, standardized protocol that appears to differentiate mTBI from normals was developed for use in future research. This investigation represents a step toward objective identification of those with PCS. Future studies focused on increasing the specificity of eye movement differences in those with PCS are needed. |
Justine Cléry; Olivier Guipponi; Soline Odouard; Claire Wardak; Suliann Ben Hamed Impact prediction by looming visual stimuli enhances tactile detection Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 10, pp. 4179–4189, 2015. @article{Clery2015,From an ecological point of view, approaching objects are potentially more harmful than receding objects. A predator, a dominant conspecific, or a mere branch coming up at high speed can all be dangerous if one does not detect them and produce the appropriate escape behavior fast enough. And indeed, looming stimuli trigger stereotyped defensive responses in both monkeys and human infants. However, while the heteromodal somatosensory consequences of visual looming stimuli can be fully predicted by their spatiotemporal dynamics, few studies if any have explored whether visual stimuli looming toward the face predictively enhance heteromodal tactile sensitivity around the expected time of impact and at its expected location on the body. In the present study, we report that, in addition to triggering a defensive motor repertoire, looming stimuli toward the face provide the nervous system with predictive cues that enhance tactile sensitivity on the face. Specifically, we describe an enhancement of tactile processes at the expected time and location of impact of the stimulus on the face. We additionally show that a looming stimulus that brushes past the face also enhances tactile sensitivity on the nearby cheek, suggesting that the space close to the face is incorporated into the subjects' body schema. We propose that this cross-modal predictive facilitation involves multisensory convergence areas subserving the representation of a peripersonal space and a safety boundary of self. |
Tobias Schoeberl; Isabella Fuchs; Jan Theeuwes; Ulrich Ansorge Stimulus-driven attentional capture by subliminal onset cues Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 3, pp. 737–748, 2015. @article{Schoeberl2015,In two experiments, we tested whether subliminal abrupt onset cues capture attention in a stimulus-driven way. An onset cue was presented 16 ms prior to the stimulus display that consisted of clearly visible color targets. The onset cue was presented either at the same side as the target (the valid cue condition) or on the opposite side of the target (the invalid cue condition). Because the onset cue was presented 16 ms before other placeholders were presented, the cue was subliminal to the participant. To ensure that this subliminal cue captured attention in a stimulus-driven way, the cue's features did not match the top-down attentional control settings of the participants: (1) The color of the cue was always different than the color of the non-singleton targets ensuring that a top-down set for a specific color or for a singleton would not match the cue, and (2) colored targets and distractors had the same objective luminance (measured by the colorimeter) and subjective lightness (measured by flicker photometry), preventing a match between the top-down set for target and cue contrast. Even though a match between the cues and top-down settings was prevented, in both experiments, the cues captured attention, with faster response times in valid than invalid cue conditions (Experiments 1 and 2) and faster response times in valid than the neutral conditions (Experiment 2). The results support the conclusion that subliminal cues capture attention in a stimulus-driven way. |
Chengyao Shen; Xun Huang; Qi Zhao Predicting eye fixations in webpages with multi-scale features and high-level representations from deep networks Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, vol. 17, no. 11, pp. 2084–2093, 2015. @article{Shen2015,In recent decades, webpages are becoming an increasingly important visual information source. Compared with natural images, webpages are different in many ways. For example, webpages are usually rich in semantically meaningful visual media (text, pictures, logos, and animations), which make the direct application of some traditional low-level saliency models ineffective. Besides, distinct web-viewing patterns such as top-left bias and banner blindness suggest different ways for predicting attention deployment on a webpage. In this study, we utilize a new scheme of low-level feature extraction pipeline and combine it with high-level representations from deep neural networks. The proposed model is evaluated on a newly published webpage saliency dataset with three popular evaluation metrics. Results show that our model outperforms other existing saliency models by a large margin and both low-and high-level features play an important role in predicting fixations on webpage. |
Ryszard Auksztulewicz; Karl J. Friston Attentional enhancement of auditory mismatch responses: A DCM/MEG study Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 25, no. 11, pp. 4273–4283, 2015. @article{Auksztulewicz2015,Despite similar behavioral effects, attention and expectation influence evoked responses differently: Attention typically enhances event-related responses, whereas expectation reduces them. This dissociation has been reconciled under predictive coding, where prediction errors are weighted by precision associated with attentional modulation. Here, we tested the predictive coding account of attention and expectation using magnetoencephalography and modeling. Temporal attention and sensory expectation were orthogonally manipulated in an auditory mismatch paradigm, revealing opposing effects on evoked response amplitude. Mismatch negativity (MMN) was enhanced by attention, speaking against its supposedly pre-attentive nature. This interaction effect was modeled in a canonical microcircuit using dynamic causal modeling, comparing models with modulation of extrinsic and intrinsic connectivity at different levels of the auditory hierarchy. While MMN was explained by recursive interplay of sensory predictions and prediction errors, attention was linked to the gain of inhibitory interneurons, consistent with its modulation of sensory precision. |
Stefania Vito; Antimo Buonocore; Jean François Bonnefon; Sergio Della Sala Eye movements disrupt episodic future thinking Journal Article In: Memory, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 796–805, 2015. @article{Vito2015,Remembering the past and imagining the future both rely on complex mental imagery. We considered the possibility that constructing a future scene might tap a component of mental imagery that is not as critical for remembering past scenes. Whereas visual imagery plays an important role in remembering the past, we predicted that spatial imagery plays a crucial role in imagining the future. For the purpose of teasing apart the different components underpinning scene construction in the two experiences of recalling episodic memories and shaping novel future events, we used a paradigm that might selectively affect one of these components (i.e., the spatial). Participants performed concurrent eye movements while remembering the past and imagining the future. These concurrent eye movements selectively interfere with spatial imagery, while sparing visual imagery. Eye movements prevented participants from imagining complex and detailed future scenes, but had no comparable effect on the recollection of past scenes. Similarities between remembering the past and imagining the future are coupled with some differences. The present findings uncover another fundamental divergence between the two processes. |
Simone Vossel; Christoph Mathys; Klaas E. Stephan; Karl J. Friston Cortical coupling reflects Bayesian belief updating in the deployment of spatial attention Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 33, pp. 11532–11542, 2015. @article{Vossel2015,The deployment of visuospatial attention and the programming of saccades are governed by the inferred likelihood of events. In the present study, we combined computational modeling of psychophysical data with fMRI to characterize the computational and neural mechanisms underlying this flexible attentional control. Sixteen healthy human subjects performed a modified version of Posner's location-cueing paradigm in which the percentage of cue validity varied in time and the targets required saccadic responses. Trialwise estimates of the certainty (precision) of the prediction that the target would appear at the cued location were derived from a hierarchical Bayesian model fitted to individual trialwise saccadic response speeds. Trial-specific model parameters then entered analyses of fMRI data as parametric regressors. Moreover, dynamic causal modeling (DCM) was performed to identify the most likely functional architecture of the attentional reorienting network and its modulation by (Bayes-optimal) precision-dependent attention. While the frontal eye fields (FEFs), intraparietal sulcus, and temporoparietal junction (TPJ) of both hemispheres showed higher activity on invalid relative to valid trials, reorienting responses in right FEF, TPJ, and the putamen were significantly modulated by precision-dependent attention. Our DCM results suggested that the precision of predictability underlies the attentional modulation of the coupling of TPJ with FEF and the putamen. Our results shed new light on the computational architecture and neuronal network dynamics underlying the context-sensitive deployment of visuospatial attention.$backslash$n$backslash$nSIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: Spatial attention and its neural correlates in the human brain have been studied extensively with the help of fMRI and cueing paradigms in which the location of targets is pre-cued on a trial-by-trial basis. One aspect that has so far been neglected concerns the question of how the brain forms attentional expectancies when no a priori probability information is available but needs to be inferred from observations. This study elucidates the computational and neural mechanisms under which probabilistic inference governs attentional deployment. Our results show that Bayesian belief updating explains changes in cortical connectivity; in that directional influences from the temporoparietal junction on the frontal eye fields and the putamen were modulated by (Bayes-optimal) updates. |
Magdalena Chechlacz; Glyn W. Humphreys; Stamatios N. Sotiropoulos; Christopher Kennard; Dario Cazzoli Structural organization of the corpus callosum predicts attentional shifts after continuous theta burst stimulation Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 46, pp. 15353–15368, 2015. @article{Chechlacz2015,Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) applied over the right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) in healthy participants has been shown to trigger a significant rightward shift in the spatial allocation of visual attention, temporarily mimicking spatial deficits observed in neglect. In contrast, rTMS applied over the left PPC triggers a weaker or null attentional shift. However, large interindividual differences in responses to rTMS have been reported. Studies measuring changes in brain activation suggest that the effects of rTMS may depend on both interhemispheric and intrahemispheric interactions between cortical loci controlling visual attention. Here, we investigated whether variability in the structural organization of human white matter pathways subserving visual attention, as assessed by diffusion magnetic resonance imaging and tractography, could explain interindividual differences in the effects of rTMS. Most participants showed a rightward shift in the allocation of spatial attention after rTMS over the right intraparietal sulcus (IPS), but the size of this effect varied largely across participants. Conversely, rTMS over the left IPS resulted in strikingly opposed individual responses, with some participants responding with rightward and some with leftward attentional shifts. We demonstrate that microstructural and macrostructural variability within the corpus callosum, consistent with differential effects on cross-hemispheric interactions, predicts both the extent and the direction of the response to rTMS. Together, our findings suggest that the corpus callosum may have a dual inhibitory and excitatory function in maintaining the interhemispheric dynamics that underlie the allocation of spatial attention. |
Makoto Kobayashi Unidirectional ocular flutter: Report of a case with abnormal saccadic characteristics Journal Article In: Neurological Sciences, vol. 36, no. 7, pp. 1273–1276, 2015. @article{Kobayashi2015,Presents a case report of a unique case of unidirectional ocular flutter (OF) with event frequency much lower than in the previous unidirectional OF case, displacement magnitudes larger than observed in double saccadic pulses (another involuntary saccade syndrome), and saccadic peak velocities substantially slower than visually guided saccades (VGSs). The 38 year old male was referred to our department because of a 2-month history of involuntary eye movements. His medical history included depression, for which he was prescribed duloxetine hydrochloride, bromazepam, olanzapine, and zolpidem tartrate. The termed saccadic intrusions, usually occur horizontally with directional predominance in each normal individual. Perhaps, saccadic intrusions observed in normal subjects and unidirectional OF may share a common directional predominance mechanism. |
Sam Ling; Michael S. Pratte; Frank Tong Attention alters orientation processing in the human lateral geniculate nucleus Journal Article In: Nature Neuroscience, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 496–498, 2015. @article{Ling2015,Orientation selectivity is a cornerstone property of vision, commonly believed to emerge in the primary visual cortex. We found that reliable orientation information could be detected even earlier, in the human lateral geniculate nucleus, and that attentional feedback selectively altered these orientation responses. This attentional modulation may allow the visual system to modify incoming feature-specific signals at the earliest possible processing site. |
Maryam Soleimannejad; Mehdi Tehrani-Doost; Anahita Khorrami; Mohammad Taghi Joghataei; Ebrahim Pishyareh Evaluation of attention bias in morphine and methamphetamine abusers towards emotional scenes during early abstinence: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Basic and Clinical Neuroscience, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 223–230, 2015. @article{Soleimannejad2015,INTRODUCTION: We hypothesized that inappropriate attention during the period of abstinence in individuals with substance use disorder can result in an inadequate perception of emotion and unsuitable reaction to emotional scenes. The main aim of this research was to evaluate the attentional bias towards emotional images in former substance abusers and compare it to healthy adults. METHODS: Paired images of general scenes consisting of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral images were presented to subjects for 3 s while their attentional bias and eye movements were measured by eye tracking. The participants were 72 male adults consisting of 23 healthy control, 24 morphine former abusers, and 25 methamphetamine former abusers. The former abusers were recruited from a private addiction quitting center and addiction rehabilitation campus. The healthy individuals were selected from general population. Number and duration of first fixation, duration of first gaze, and sustained attention towards emotional scenes were measured as the main variables and the data were analyzed using the repeated measures ANOVA. RESULTS: A significant difference was observed between former morphine abusers and healthy control in terms of number and duration of first fixations and first gaze duration towards pleasant images. DISCUSSION: Individuals with morphine use disorder have more problems with attending to emotional images compared to methamphetamine abusers and healthy people. |
Brett C. Bays; Kristina M. Visscher; Christophe C. Le Dantec; Aaron R. Seitz Alpha-band EEG activity in perceptual learning Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 15, no. 10, pp. 1–12, 2015. @article{Bays2015,In studies of perceptual learning (PL), subjects are typically highly trained across many sessions to achieve perceptual benefits on the stimuli in those tasks. There is currently significant debate regarding what sources of brain plasticity underlie these PL-based learning improvements. Here we investigate the hypothesis that PL, among other mechanisms, leads to task automaticity, especially in the presence of the trained stimuli. To investigate this hypothesis, we trained participants for eight sessions to find an oriented target in a field of near-oriented distractors and examined alpha-band activity, which modulates with attention to visual stimuli, as a possible measure of automaticity. Alpha-band activity was acquired via electroencephalogram (EEG), before and after training, as participants performed the task with trained and untrained stimuli. Results show that participants underwent significant learning in this task (as assessed by threshold, accuracy, and reaction time improvements) and that alpha power increased during the pre-stimulus period and then underwent greater desynchronization at the time of stimulus presentation following training. However, these changes in alpha-band activity were not specific to the trained stimuli, with similar patterns of posttraining alpha power for trained and untrained stimuli. These data are consistent with the view that participants were more efficient at focusing resources at the time of stimulus presentation and are consistent with a greater automaticity of task performance. These findings have implications for PL, as transfer effects from trained to untrained stimuli may partially depend on differential effort of the individual at the time of stimulus processing. |
Chris Scholes; Paul V. McGraw; Marcus Nyström; Neil W. Roach Fixational eye movements predict visual sensitivity Journal Article In: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 282, pp. 1–10, 2015. @article{Scholes2015,During steady fixation, observers make small fixational saccades at a rate of around 1–2 per second. Presentation of a visual stimulus triggers a biphasic modulation in fixational saccade rate—an initial inhibition followed by a period of elevated rate and a subsequent return to baseline. Here we show that, during passive viewing, this rate signature is highly sensitive to small changes in stimulus contrast. By training a linear support vector machine to classify trials in which a stimulus is either present or absent,we directly com- pared the contrast sensitivity of fixational eye movements with individuals' psychophysical judgements. Classification accuracy closely matched psycho- physical performance, and predicted individuals' threshold estimates with less bias and overall error than those obtained using specific features of the sig- nature. Performance of the classifier was robust to changes in the training set (novel subjects and/or contrasts) and good prediction accuracy was obtained with a practicable number of trials. Our results indicate a tight coupling between the sensitivity of visual perceptual judgements and fixational eye con- trol mechanisms. This raises the possibility that fixational saccades could provide a novel and objective means of estimating visual contrast sensitivity without the need for observers to make any explicit judgement. |
Hayward J. Godwin; Simon P. Liversedge; Julie A. Kirkby; Michael Boardman; Katherine Cornes; Nick Donnelly The influence of experience upon information-sampling and decision-making behaviour during risk assessment in military personnel Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 415–431, 2015. @article{Godwin2015,We examined the influence of experience upon information-sampling and decision-making behaviour in a group of military personnel as they conducted risk assessments of scenes photographed from patrol routes during the recent conflict in Afghanistan. Their risk assessment was based on an evaluation of Potential Risk Indicators (PRIs) during examination of each scene. We found that both participant groups were equally likely to fixate PRIs, demonstrating similarity in the selectivity of their information-sampling. However, the inexperienced participants made more revisits to PRIs, had longer response times, and were more likely to decide that the scenes contained a high level of risk. Together, these results suggest that experience primarily modulates decision-making behaviour. We discuss potential routes to train personnel to conduct risk assessments in a more similar manner to experienced participants. |
Hani Alers; Judith A. Redi; Ingrid Heynderickx Quantifying the importance of preserving video quality in visually important regions at the expense of background content Journal Article In: Signal Processing: Image Communication, vol. 32, pp. 69–80, 2015. @article{Alers2015,Advances in digital technology have allowed us to embed significant processing power in everyday video consumption devices. At the same time, we have placed high demands on the video content itself by continuing to increase spatial resolution while trying to limit the allocated file size and bandwidth as much as possible. The result is typically a trade-off between perceptual quality and fulfillment of technological limitations. To bring this trade-off to its optimum, it is necessary to understand better how people perceive video quality. In this work, we particularly focus on understanding how the spatial location of compression artifacts impacts visual quality perception, and specifically in relation with visual attention. In particular we investigate how changing the quality of the region of interest of a video affects its overall perceived quality, and we quantify the importance of the visual quality of the region of interest to the overall quality judgment. A three stage experiment was conducted where viewers were shown videos with different quality levels in different parts of the scene. By asking them to score the overall quality we found that the quality of the region of interest has 10 times more impact than the quality of the rest of the scene. These results are in line with similar effects observed in still images, yet in videos the relevance of the visual quality of the region of interest is twice as high than in images. The latter finding is directly relevant for the design of more accurate objective quality metrics for videos, that are based on the estimation of local distortion visibility. |
Hayward J. Godwin; Tamaryn Menneer; Kyle R. Cave; Michael Thaibsyah; Nick Donnelly The effects of increasing target prevalence on information processing during visual search Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 469–475, 2015. @article{Godwin2015a,The proportion of trials on which a target is presented (referred to as the target prevalence) during visual search influences the probability that the target will be detected. As prevalence increases, participants become biased toward reporting that the target is present. This bias results in an increase in detection rates for the target, coupled with an increased likelihood of making a false alarm. Previous work has demonstrated that, as prevalence increases, participants spend an increasing period of time searching on target-absent trials. The goal of the present study was to determine the information processing during the additional time spent searching on target-absent trials as prevalence increased. We recorded participants' eye movement behavior as they were engaged in low-prevalence (25% target-present trials), medium-prevalence (50%), or high-prevalence (75%) search. Increased prevalence primarily influenced search by increasing the time spent examining objects in the display, rather than by increasing the proportion of objects examined in each display. In addition, the additional time spent examining objects in high-prevalence target-absent trials was the result of revisiting objects. We discuss the implications of these results in relation to current models of search as well as ongoing efforts to alleviate the prevalence effect. |
Gonçalo Padrão; Borja Rodriguez-Herreros; Laura Pérez Zapata; Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells Exogenous capture of medial-frontal oscillatory mechanisms by unattended conflicting information Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 75, pp. 458–468, 2015. @article{Padrao2015,A long-standing debate in psychology and cognitive neuroscience concerns the way in which unattended information is processed and influences goal-directed behavior. Although selective attention allows us to filter out task-irrelevant information, there is a substantial number of unattended, yet relevant, events that must be evaluated in a flexible manner so that appropriate behaviors can succeed. Here we inspected the extent to which unattended conflicting visual information, which cannot be consciously identified, influences behavior and activates medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) mechanisms of action-monitoring and regulation, traditionally associated with conscious control processes.To that end, we performed two experiments using a novel variant of the Eriksen flanker task in which spatial attention was manipulated, preventing the conscious identification of unattended visual events. The first behavioral experiment was conducted to validate the efficacy of the novel paradigm. In the second experiment, we evaluated electrophysiological correlates of mPFC activity (a frontocentral negative ERP component and medial-frontal theta oscillations) in response to attended and unattended conflicting events. The results of both experiments demonstrated that attended and unattended conflicting stimuli altered subjects' behavior in a similar fashion, i.e. slowing down their reaction times and increasing their error rates. Importantly, the results of the EEG experiment showed that unattended conflicting stimuli, similarly to attended conflicting stimuli, led to an increase in theta-related frontocentral ERP activity and medial-frontal theta power, irrespective of the degree of conscious representation of the sources of conflict. This study provides evidence that medial-frontal theta oscillations represent a neural mechanism through which the mPFC may suppress and regulate potentially inappropriate actions that are automatically triggered by conflicting environmental stimuli to which we are oblivious. |
Steven G. Luke; Kiel Christianson Predicting inflectional morphology from context Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 735–748, 2015. @article{Luke2015,The present studies investigated the influence of the semantic and syntactic predictability of an inflectional morpheme on word recognition and morphological processing. In two eye-tracking experiments, we examined the effect of syntactic and semantic context on the processing of letter transpositions in inflected words. Participants experienced greater and earlier disruption from cross-morpheme letter transpositions when target verbs appeared in a context that syntactically predicted the presence of a past-tense suffix. Further, internal transpositions caused greater and earlier disruption even in monomorphemic verbs when syntactic context created an expectation of morphological complexity. No effect of semantic predictability was observed, potentially because the semantic manipulation was insufficiently strong. The results reveal that syntactic contexts typical of most English sentences can lead readers to make predictions about the morphological structure of upcoming words. |
Caleb E. Strait; Brianna J. Sleezer; Benjamin Y. Hayden Signatures of value comparison in ventral striatum neurons Journal Article In: PLoS Biology, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 1–22, 2015. @article{Strait2015,The ventral striatum (VS), like its cortical afferents, is closely associated with processing of rewards, but the relative contributions of striatal and cortical reward systems remains unclear. Most theories posit distinct roles for these structures, despite their similarities. We compared responses of VS neurons to those of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) Area 14 neurons, recorded in a risky choice task. Five major response patterns observed in vmPFC were also observed in VS: (1) offer value encoding, (2) value difference encoding, (3) preferential encoding of chosen relative to unchosen value, (4) a correlation between residual variance in responses and choices, and (5) prominent encoding of outcomes. We did observe some differences as well; in particular, preferential encoding of the chosen option was stronger and started earlier in VS than in vmPFC. Nonetheless, the close match between vmPFC and VS suggests that cortex and its striatal targets make overlapping contributions to economic choice. |
Jakub Dotlačil; Adrian Brasoveanu The manner and time course of updating quantifier scope representations in discourse Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 305–323, 2015. @article{Dotlacil2015,We present the results of two experiments, an eye-tracking study and a follow-up self-paced reading study, investigating the interpretation of quantifier scope in sentences with three quantifiers: two indefinites in subject and object positions and a universal distributive quantifier in ad-junct position. In addition to the fact that such three-way scope inter-actions have not been experimentally investigated before, they enable us to distinguish between different theories of quantifier scope interpretation in ways that are not possible when only simpler, two-way interactions are considered. The experiments show that contrary to underspecifica-tion theories of scope, a totally ordered scope-hierarchy representation is maintained and modified across sentences and this scope representation cannot be reduced to the truth-conditional/mental model representation of sentential meaning. The experiments also show that the processor uses scope-disambiguating information as early as possible to (re)analyze scope representation. |
Golbarg T. Saber; Franco Pestilli; Clayton E. Curtis Saccade planning evokes topographically specific activity in the dorsal and ventral streams Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 245–252, 2015. @article{Saber2015,Saccade planning may invoke spatially-specific feedback signals that bias early visual activity in favor of top-down goals. We tested this hypothesis by measuring cortical activity at the early stages of the dorsal and ventral visual processing streams. Human subjects maintained saccade plans to (prosaccade) or away (antisaccade) from a spatial location over long memory-delays. Results show that cortical activity persists in early visual cortex at the retinotopic location of upcoming saccade goals. Topographically specific activity persists as early as V1, and activity increases along both dorsal (V3A/B, IPS0) and ventral (hV4, VO1) visual areas. Importantly, activity persists when saccade goals are available only via working memory and when visual targets and saccade goals are spatially disassociated. We conclude that top-down signals elicit retinotopically specific activity in visual cortex both in the dorsal and ventral streams. Such activity may underlie mechanisms that prioritize locations of task-relevant objects. |
Meaghan Clough; Laura Mitchell; Lynette Millist; Nathaniel Lizak; Shin Beh; Teresa C. Frohman; Elliot M. Frohman; Owen B. White; Joanne Fielding Ocular motor measures of cognitive dysfunction in multiple sclerosis I: Inhibitory control Journal Article In: Journal of Neurology, vol. 262, no. 5, pp. 1130–1137, 2015. @article{Clough2015,Our ability to control and inhibit behaviours that are inappropriate, unsafe, or no longer required is crucial for functioning successfully in complex environments. Here, we investigated whether a series of ocular motor (OM) inhibition tasks could dissociate deficits in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), including patients with only a probable diagnosis (clinically isolated syndrome: CIS), from healthy individuals as well as a function of increasing disease duration. 25 patients with CIS, 25 early clinically definite MS patients (CDMS: ≤7 years of diagnosis), 24 late CDMS patients (>7 years from diagnosis), and 25 healthy controls participated. All participants completed a series of classic OM inhibition tasks [antisaccade (AS) task, memory-guided (MG) task, endogenous cue task], and a neuropsychological inhibition task [paced auditory serial addition test (PASAT)]. Clinical disability was characterised in CDMS patients using the Expanded Disability Severity Scale (EDSS). OM (latency and error) and PASAT performance were compared between patient groups and controls, as well as a function of disease duration. For CDMS patients only, results were correlated with EDSS score. All patient groups made more errors than controls on all OM tasks; error rate did not increase with increasing disease duration. In contrast, saccade latency (MG and endogenous cue tasks) was found to worsen with increasing disease duration. PASAT performance did not discriminate patient groups or disease duration. The EDSS did not correlate with any measure. These OM measures appear to dissociate deficit between patients at different disease durations. This suggests their utility as a measure of progression from the earliest inception of the disease. |
Hayward J. Godwin; Tamaryn Menneer; Charlotte A. Riggs; Kyle R. Cave; Nick Donnelly Perceptual failures in the selection and identification of low-prevalence targets in relative prevalence visual search Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 1, pp. 150–159, 2015. @article{Godwin2015b,Previous research has shown that during visual search tasts target prevalence (the proportion of trials in which a target appears) influences both the probability that a target will be detected, and the speed at which participants will quit searching and provide an 'absent' response. When prevelence is low (e.g., target presented on 2% of trials), participants are less likely to detect the target than when the prevelence is higher (e.g., 50% of trials). In the present set of experiments we examined perceptula faliures to detect low prevalence targets in visual search. We used a relative prevelence search task in order to be able to present and overall 50% target prevalence and thereby prevent the results being accounted for by early quitting behavour. Participants searched for two targets, one of which appeared on 45% of trials and another tha appeared on 5% of trials, leaving overall target prevalence at 50%. In the first experiment, participants searched for two dissimilar targets; in the second experiment, participants searched for two similar targets. Overall the results supported the notion that a reduction in prevalence primarily influenced perceptulal faliures of identification, rather than of selection. Thogether, these experiments add to a growing body of research exploring how and why observers fail to detect low prevalence targets, espically in real-world tasks in which some targets are more likely to appear than others. |
Kimberly Leiken; Brian McElree; Liina Pylkkänen Filling predictable and unpredictable gaps, with and without similarity-based interference: Evidence for LIFG effects of dependency processing Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 1739, 2015. @article{Leiken2015,One of the most replicated findings in neurolinguistic literature on syntax is the increase of hemodynamic activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) in response to object relative (OR) clauses compared to subject relative clauses. However, behavioral studies have shown that ORs are primarily only costly when similarity-based interference is involved and recently, Leiken and Pylkkänen (2014) showed with magnetoencephalography (MEG) that an LIFG increase at an OR gap is also dependent on such interference. However, since ORs always involve a cue indicating an upcoming dependency formation, OR dependencies could be processed already prior to the gap-site and thus show no sheer dependency effects at the gap itself. To investigate the role of gap predictability in LIFG dependency effects, this MEG study compared ORs to verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), which was used as an example of a non-predictable dependency. Additionally, we explored LIFG sensitivity to filler-gap order by including right node raising structures, in which the order of filler and gap is reverse to that of ORs and VPE. Half of the stimuli invoked similarity-based interference and half did not. Our results demonstrate that LIFG effects of dependency can be elicited regardless of whether the dependency is predictable, the stimulus materials evoke similarity-based interference, or the filler precedes the gap. Thus, contrary to our own prior data, the current findings suggest a highly general role for the LIFG in dependency interpretation that is not limited to environments involving similarity-based interference. Additionally, the millisecond time-resolution of MEG allowed for a detailed characterization of the temporal profiles of LIFG dependency effects across our three constructions, revealing that the timing of these effects is somewhat construction-specific. |
Tessa Warren; Evelyn Milburn; Nikole D. Patson; Michael Walsh Dickey Comprehending the impossible: what role do selectional restriction violations play? Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 8, pp. 932–939, 2015. @article{Warren2015,To elucidate how different kinds of knowledge are used during comprehension, readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences that were: plausible, impossible because of a selectional restriction violation (SRV) or impossible because of a violation of general world knowledge. Eye movements on the pre-critical, critical, and post-critical words evidenced disruption in the SRV condition compared to the other two conditions. These findings suggest that disruption associated with reading about impossible events is not directly determined by how impossible the event seems. Rather, the relationship between the verb and arguments in the sentence seems to matter. These findings are the strongest evidence to date that processing effects associated with selectional restrictions can dissociate from those associated with general world knowledge about events. |
Sheena K. Au-Yeung; Johanna K. Kaakinen; Simon P. Liversedge; Valerie Benson Processing of written irony in autism spectrum disorder: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Autism Research, vol. 8, no. 6, pp. 749–760, 2015. @article{AuYeung2015,Previous research has suggested that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have difficulties understanding others communicative intent and with using contextual information to correctly interpret irony. We recorded the eye movements of typically developing (TD) adults ASD adults when they read statements that could either be interpreted as ironic or non-ironic depending on the context of the passage. Participants with ASD performed as well as TD controls in their comprehension accuracy for speaker's statements in both ironic and non-ironic conditions. Eye movement data showed that for both participant groups, total reading times were longer for the critical region containing the speaker's statement and a subsequent sentence restating the context in the ironic condition compared to the non-ironic condition. The results suggest that more effortful processing is required in both ASD and TD participants for ironic compared with literal non-ironic statements, and that individuals with ASD were able to use contextual information to infer a non-literal interpretation of ironic text. Individuals with ASD, however, spent more time overall than TD controls rereading the passages, to a similar degree across both ironic and non-ironic conditions, suggesting that they either take longer to construct a coherent discourse representation of the text, or that they take longer to make the decision that their representation of the text is reasonable based on their knowledge of the world. |
Holly S. S. L. Joseph; Georgina Bremner; Simon P. Liversedge; Kate Nation Working memory, reading ability and the effects of distance and typicality on anaphor resolution in children Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 622–639, 2015. @article{Joseph2015,We investigated the time course of anaphor resolution in children and whether this is modulated by individual differences in working memory and reading skill. The eye movements of 30 children (10–11 years) were monitored as they read short paragraphs in which (1) the semantic typicality of an antecedent and (2) its distance in relation to an anaphor were orthogonally manipulated. Children showed effects of distance and typicality on the anaphor itself and also on the word to the right of the anaphor, suggesting that anaphoric processing begins immediately but continues after the eyes have left the anaphor. Furthermore, children showed no evidence of resolving anaphors in the most difficult condition (distant atypical antecedent), suggesting that anaphoric processing that is demanding may not occur online in children of this age. Finally, working memory capacity and reading comprehension skill affect the magnitude and time course of typicality and distance effects during anaphoric processing. |
Gregory P. Strauss; Emily S. Kappenman; Adam J. Culbreth; Lauren T. Catalano; Kathryn L. Ossenfort; Bern G. Lee; James M. Gold In: Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. 124, no. 2, pp. 288–301, 2015. @article{Strauss2015,Previous research provides evidence that individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) have emotion regulation abnormalities, particularly when attempting to use reappraisal to decrease negative emotion. The current study extended this literature by examining the effectiveness of a different form of emotion regulation, directed attention, which has been shown to be effective at reducing negative emotion in healthy individuals. Participants included outpatients with SZ (n = 28) and healthy controls (CN: n = 25), who viewed unpleasant and neutral images during separate event-related potential and eye-movement tasks. Trials included both passive viewing and directed attention segments. During directed attention, gaze was directed toward highly arousing aspects of an unpleasant image, less arousing aspects of an unpleasant image, or a nonarousing aspect of a neutral image. The late positive potential (LPP) event-related potential component indexed emotion regulation success. Directing attention to nonarousing aspects of unpleasant images decreased the LPP in CN; however, SZ showed similar LPP amplitude when attention was directed toward more or less arousing aspects of unpleasant scenes. Eye tracking indicated that SZ were more likely than CN to attend to arousing portions of unpleasant scenes when attention was directed toward less arousing scene regions. Furthermore, pupilary data suggested that SZ patients failed to engage effortful cognitive processes needed to inhibit the prepotent response of attending to arousing aspects of unpleasant scenes when attention was directed toward nonarousing scene regions. Findings add to the growing literature indicating that individuals with SZ display emotion regulation abnormalities and provide novel evidence that dysfunctional emotion-attention interactions and generalized cognitive control deficits are associated with ineffective use of directed attention strategies to regulate negative emotion. |
Xuelian Zang; Lina Jia; Hermann J. Müller; Zhuanghua Shi Invariant spatial context is learned but not retrieved in gaze-contingent limited-viewing search Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 807–819, 2015. @article{Zang2015,Our visual brain is remarkable in extracting invariant properties from the noisy environment, guiding selection of where to look and what to identify. However, how the brain achieves this is still poorly understood. Here we explore interactions of local context and global structure in the long-term learning and retrieval of invariant display properties. Participants searched for a target among distractors, without knowing that some “old” configurations were presented repeatedly (randomly inserted among “new” configurations). We simulated tunnel vision, limiting the visible region around fixation. Robust facilitation of performance for old versus new contexts was observed when the visible region was large but not when it was small. However, once the display was made fully visible during the subsequent transfer phase, facilitation did become manifest. Furthermore, when participants were given a brief preview of the total display layout prior to tunnel view search with 2 items visible, facilitation was already obtained during the learning phase. The eye movement results revealed contextual facilitation to be coupled with changes of saccadic planning, characterized by slightly extended gaze durations but a reduced number of fixations and shortened scan paths for old displays. Taken together, our findings show that invariant spatial display properties can be acquired based on scarce, para-/foveal information, while their effective retrieval for search guidance requires the availability (even if brief) of a certain extent of peripheral information. |
Brittany Avery; Christopher D. Cowper-Smith; David A. Westwood Spatial interactions between consecutive manual responses Journal Article In: Experimental Brain Research, vol. 233, no. 11, pp. 3283–3290, 2015. @article{Avery2015,We have shown that the latency to initiate a reaching movement is increased if its direction is the same as a previous movement compared to movements that differ by 90° or 180° (Cowper-Smith and Westwood in Atten Percept Psychophys 75:1914–1922, 2013). An influential study (Taylor and Klein in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 26:1639–1656, 2000), however, reported the opposite spatial pattern for manual keypress responses: repeated responses on the same side had reduced reaction time compared to responses on opposite sides. In order to determine whether there are fundamental differences in the patterns of spatial interactions between button-pressing responses and reaching movements, we compared both types of manual responses using common methods. Reaching movements and manual keypress responses were performed in separate blocks of trials using consecutive central arrow stimuli that directed participants to respond to left or right targets. Reaction times were greater for manual responses made to the same target as a previous response (M = 390 ms) as compared to the opposite target (M = 365 ms; similarity main effect: p < 0.001) regardless of whether the response was a reaching movement or a keypress response. This finding is broadly consistent with an inhibitory mechanism operating at the level of motor output that discourages movements that achieve the same spatial goal as a recent action. |
Cheng Chen; Xianghui Chen; Min Gao; Qiong Yang; Hongmei Yan Contextual influence on the tilt after-effect in foveal and para-foveal vision Journal Article In: Neuroscience Bulletin, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 307–316, 2015. @article{Chen2015c,A sensory stimulus can only be properly interpreted in light of the stimuli that surround it in space and time. The tilt illusion (TI) and tilt after-effect (TAE) provide good evidence that the perception of a target depends strongly on both its spatial and temporal context. In previous studies, the TI and TAE have typically been investigated separately, so little is known about their co-effects on visual perception and information processing mechanisms. Here, we considered the influence of the spatial context and the temporal effect together and asked how center- surround context affects the TAE in foveal and para- foveal vision. Our results showed that different center-surround spatial patterns signifi cantly affected the TAE for both foveal and para-foveal vision. In the fovea, the TAE was mainly produced by central adaptive gratings. Cross-oriented surroundings significantly inhibited the TAE, and iso-oriented surroundings slightly facilitated it; surround inhibition was much stronger than surround facilitation. In the para-fovea, the TAE was mainly decided by the surrounding patches. Likewise, a cross-oriented central patch inhibited the TAE, and an iso-oriented one facilitated it, but there was no significant difference between inhibition and facilitation. Our findings demonstrated, at the perceptual level, that our visual system adopts different mechanisms to process consistent or inconsistent central-surround orientation information and that the unequal magnitude magnitude of surround inhibition and facilitation is vitally important for the visual system to improve the detectability or discriminability of novel or incongruent stimuli. |
Steven G. Luke; John M. Henderson; Fernanda Ferreira Children's eye-movements during reading reflect the quality of lexical representations: An individual differences approach Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1675–1683, 2015. @article{Luke2015a,The lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) suggests that skilled reading requires high-quality lexical representations. In children, these representations are still developing, and it has been suggested that this development leads to more adult-like eye-movement behavior during the reading of connected text. To test this idea, a set of young adolescents (aged 11-13 years) completed a standardized measure of lexical quality and then participated in 3 eye-movement tasks: reading, scene search, and pseudoreading. The richness of participants' lexical representations predicted a variety of eye-movement behaviors in reading. Further, the influence of lexical quality was domain specific: Fixation durations in reading diverged from the other tasks as lexical quality increased. These findings suggest that eye movements become increasingly tuned to written language processing as lexical representations become more accurate and detailed. |
Ming Yan Visually complex foveal words increase the amount of parafoveal information acquired Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 111, no. Part A, pp. 91–96, 2015. @article{Yan2015,This study investigates the effect of foveal load (i.e., processing difficulty of currently fixated words) on parafoveal information processing. Contrary to the commonly accepted view that high foveal load leads to reduced parafoveal processing efficiency, results of the present study showed that increasing foveal visual (but not linguistic) processing load actually increased the amount of parafoveal information acquired, presumably due to the fact that longer fixation duration on the pretarget word provided more time for parafoveal processing of the target word. It is therefore proposed in the present study that foveal linguistic processing load is not the only factor that determines parafoveal processing; preview time (afforded by foveal word visual processing load) may jointly influence parafoveal processing. |
Eric Avila; Josef N. Geest; Sandra Kengne Kamga; M. Claire Verhage; Opher Donchin; Maarten A. Frens Cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation effects on saccade adaptation Journal Article In: Neural Plasticity, vol. 2015, pp. 968970, 2015. @article{Avila2015,Saccade adaptation is a cerebellar-mediated type of motor learning in which the oculomotor system is exposed to repetitive errors. Different types of saccade adaptations are thought to involve distinct underlying cerebellar mechanisms. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) induces changes in neuronal excitability in a polarity-specific manner and offers a modulatory, noninvasive, functional insight into the learning aspects of different brain regions. We aimed to modulate the cerebellar influence on saccade gains during adaptation using tDCS. Subjects performed an inward (n = 10) or outward (n = 10) saccade adaptation experiment (25% intrasaccadic target step) while receiving 1.5 mA of anodal cerebellar tDCS delivered by a small contact electrode. Compared to sham stimulation, tDCS increased learning of saccadic inward adaptation but did not affect learning of outward adaptation. This may imply that plasticity mechanisms in the cerebellum are different between inward and outward adaptation. TDCS could have influenced specific cerebellar areas that contribute to inward but not outward adaptation. We conclude that tDCS can be used as a neuromodulatory technique to alter cerebellar oculomotor output, arguably by engaging wider cerebellar areas and increasing the available resources for learning. |
Michele Furlan; Andrew T. Smith; Robin Walker Activity in the human superior colliculus relating to endogenous saccade preparation and execution Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 114, no. 2, pp. 1048–1058, 2015. @article{Furlan2015,In recent years a small number of studies have applied functional imaging techniques to investigate visual responses in the human superior colliculus (SC), but few have investigated its oculomotor functions. Here, in two experiments, we examined activity associated with endogenous saccade preparation. We used 3-T fMRI to record the hemodynamic activity in the SC while participants were either preparing or executing saccadic eye movements. Our results showed that not only executing a saccade (as previously shown) but also preparing a saccade produced an increase in the SC hemodynamic activity. The saccade-related activity was observed in the contralateral and to a lesser extent the ipsilateral SC. A second experiment further examined the contralateral mapping of saccade-related activity with a larger range of saccade amplitudes. Increased activity was again observed in both the contralateral and ipsilateral SC that was evident for large as well as small saccades. This suggests that the ipsilateral component of the increase in BOLD is not due simply to small-amplitude saccades producing bilateral activity in the foveal fixation zone. These studies provide the first evidence of presaccadic preparatory activity in the human SC and reveal that fMRI can detect activity consistent with that of buildup neurons found in the deeper layers of the SC in studies of nonhuman primates. |
Stefan Hawelka; Sarah Schuster; Benjamin Gagl; Florian Hutzler On forward inferences of fast and slow readers. An eye movement study Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 5, pp. 8432, 2015. @article{Hawelka2015,Unimpaired readers process words incredibly fast and hence it was assumed that top-down processing, such as predicting upcoming words, would be too slow to play an appreciable role in reading. This runs counter the major postulate of the predictive coding framework that our brain continually predicts probable upcoming sensory events. This means, it may generate predictions about the probable upcoming word during reading (dubbed forward inferences). Trying to asses these contradictory assumptions, we evaluated the effect of the predictability of words in sentences on eye movement control during silent reading. Participants were a group of fluent (i.e., fast) and a group of speed-impaired (i.e., slow) readers. The findings indicate that fast readers generate forward inferences, whereas speed-impaired readers do so to a reduced extent - indicating a significant role of predictive coding for fluent reading. |
Tai-Hsiang Huang; Su-Ling Yeh; Yung-Hao Yang; Hsin-I Liao; Ya-Yeh Tsai; Pai-Ju Chang; Homer H. Chen Method and experiments of subliminal cueing for real-world images Journal Article In: Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol. 74, no. 22, pp. 10111–10135, 2015. @article{Huang2015,Unconscious attention shift triggered by a subliminal cue has been shown to be automatic; however, whether it can be brought into effect for images of real-world scenes remains to be investigated. We present a subliminal cueing method that flashes briefly a visual cue before presenting a real-world image to the viewer. The effectiveness of the method is verified by experiments using three types of cues (spatial cue, face cue, and object cue) of varied durations. Results show that depending on the cue type, the viewer's visual attention is directed to the cued visual hemifield or the cued location without engaging the viewer's awareness. The experiments demonstrate that a brief subliminal cue presented prior to the color image of a real-world complex scene can attract human visual attention. The method is useful for many applications that require efficient, unresisting attention shift to a target image area. |
Matteo Lisi; Patrick Cavanagh; Marco Zorzi Spatial constancy of attention across eye movements is mediated by the presence of visual objects Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 1159–1169, 2015. @article{Lisi2015,Recent studies have shown that attentional facilitation lingers at the retinotopic coordinates of a previously attended position after an eye movement. These results are intriguing, because the retinotopic location becomes behaviorally irrelevant once the eyes have moved. Critically, in these studies participants were asked to maintain attention on a blank location of the screen. In the present study, we examined whether the continuing presence of a visual object at the cued location could affect the allocation of attention across eye movements. We used a trans-saccadic cueing paradigm in which the relevant positions could be defined or not by visual objects (simple square outlines). We find an attentional benefit at the spatiotopic location of the cue only when the object (the placeholder) has been continuously present at that location. We conclude that the presence of an object at the attended location is a critical factor for the maintenance of spatial constancy of attention across eye movements, a finding that helps to reconcile previous conflicting results. |
Rishi Rajalingham; Kailyn Schmidt; James J. DiCarlo Comparison of object recognition behavior in human and monkey Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 35, pp. 12127–12136, 2015. @article{Rajalingham2015,Although the rhesus monkey is used widely as an animal model of human visual processing, it is not known whether invariant visual object recognition behavior is quantitatively comparable across monkeys and humans. To address this question, we systematically compared the core object recognition behavior of two monkeys with that of human subjects. To test true object recognition behavior (rather than image matching), we generated several thousand naturalistic synthetic images of 24 basic-level objects with high variation in viewing parameters and image background. Monkeys were trained to perform binary object recognition tasks on a match-to-sample paradigm. Data from 605 human subjects performing the same tasks on Mechanical Turk were aggregated to characterize "pooled human" object recognition behavior, as well as 33 separate Mechanical Turk subjects to characterize individual human subject behavior. Our results show that monkeys learn each new object in a few days, after which they not only match mean human performance but show a pattern of object confusion that is highly correlated with pooled human confusion patterns and is statistically indistinguishable from individual human subjects. Importantly, this shared human and monkey pattern of 3D object confusion is not shared with low-level visual representations (pixels, V1+; models of the retina and primary visual cortex) but is shared with a state-of-the-art computer vision feature representation. Together, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that rhesus monkeys and humans share a common neural shape representation that directly supports object perception. |
Brian Riordan; Melody Dye; Michael N. Jones Grammatical number processing and anticipatory eye movements are not tightly coordinated in English spoken language comprehension Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 590, 2015. @article{Riordan2015,Recent studies of eye movements in world-situated language comprehension have demonstrated that rapid processing of morphosyntactic information - e.g., grammatical gender and number marking - can produce anticipatory eye movements to referents in the visual scene. We investigated how type of morphosyntactic information and the goals of language users in comprehension affected eye movements, focusing on the processing of grammatical number morphology in English-speaking adults. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they listened to simple English declarative (There are the lions.) and interrogative (Where are the lions?) sentences. In Experiment 1, no differences were observed in speed to fixate target referents when grammatical number information was informative relative to when it was not. The same result was obtained in a speeded task (Experiment 2) and in a task using mixed sentence types (Experiment 3). We conclude that grammatical number processing in English and eye movements to potential referents are not tightly coordinated. These results suggest limits on the role of predictive eye movements in concurrent linguistic and scene processing. We discuss how these results can inform and constrain predictive approaches to language processing. |
Masahiko Terao; Ikuya Murakami; Shin'ya Nishida Enhancement of motion perception in the direction opposite to smooth pursuit eye movement Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 15, no. 13, pp. 1–11, 2015. @article{Terao2015,When eyes track a moving target, a stationary background environment moves in the direction opposite to the eye movement on the observer's retina. Here, we report a novel effect in which smooth pursuit can enhance the retinal motion in the direction opposite to eye movement, under certain conditions. While performing smooth pursuit, the observers were presented with a counterphase grating on the retina. The counterphase grating consisted of two drifting component gratings: one drifting in the direction opposite to the eye movement and the other drifting in the same direction as the pursuit. Although the overall perceived motion direction should be ambiguous if only retinal information is considered, our results indicated that the stimulus almost always appeared to be moving in the direction opposite to the pursuit direction. This effect was ascribable to the perceptual dominance of the environmentally stationary component over the other. The effect was robust at suprathreshold contrasts, but it disappeared at lower overall contrasts. The effect was not associated with motion capture by a reference frame served by peripheral moving images. Our findings also indicate that the brain exploits eye-movement information not only for eye-contingent image motion suppression but also to develop an ecologically plausible interpretation of ambiguous retinal motion signals. Based on this biological assumption, we argue that visual processing has the functional consequence of reducing the apparent motion blur of a stationary background pattern during eye movements and that it does so through integration of the trajectories of pattern and color signals. |
Jan Brascamp; Randolph Blake; Tomas Knapen Negligible fronto-parietal BOLD activity accompanying unreportable switches in bistable perception Journal Article In: Nature Neuroscience, vol. 18, no. 11, pp. 1672–1678, 2015. @article{Brascamp2015,The human brain's executive systems have a vital role in deciding and selecting among actions. Selection among alternatives also occurs in the perceptual domain; for instance, when perception switches between interpretations during perceptual bistability. Whether executive systems also underlie this functionality remains debated, with known fronto-parietal concomitants of perceptual switches being variously interpreted as reflecting the switches' cause or as reflecting their consequences. We developed a procedure in which the two eyes receive different inputs and perception demonstrably switches between these inputs, yet the switches themselves are so inconspicuous as to become unreportable, minimizing their executive consequences. Fronto-parietal fMRI BOLD responses that accompanied perceptual switches were similarly minimized in this procedure, indicating that these reflect the switches' consequences rather than their cause. We conclude that perceptual switches do not always rely on executive brain areas and that processes responsible for selection among alternatives may operate outside the brain's executive systems. |
Anna Wilschut; Jan Theeuwes; Christian N. L. Olivers Nonspecific competition underlies transient attention Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 79, no. 5, pp. 844–860, 2015. @article{Wilschut2015,Cueing a target by abrupt visual stimuli enhances its perception in a rapid but short-lived fashion, an effect known as transient attention. Our recent study showed that when targets are cued at a constant, central location, the emergence of the transient performance pattern was dependent on the presence of competing distractors, whereas targets presented in isolation were enhanced in a sustained manner (Wilschut et al., PLoS ONE, 6:e27661, 2011). The current study examined in more detail whether the transience depends on the specific nature of the competition. We first replicated and extended the competition-dependent transient pattern for peripheral and variable target locations. We then investigated the role of feature similarity, compatibility, and proximity. Both competition by feature similarity and compatibility between the target and distractors were found to impair performance, but effects were additive with the effects of the cueing interval and did not change the transient performance function. Varying the spatial distance between target and distractors yielded mixed evidence, but here too a transient pattern could be observed for targets flanked by both close and far distractors. The results thus show that the presence or absence of competition determines whether attention appears transient or sustained, while the specific nature of the competition (in terms of location or feature) affects selection independent of time. |
Ming Yan; Reinhold Kliegl Perceptual Span Depends on Font Size During the Reading of Chinese Sentences Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 209–219, 2015. @article{Yan2015a,The present study explored the perceptual span (i.e., the physical extent of an area from which useful visual information is extracted during a single fixation) during the reading of Chinese sentences in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, we tested whether the rightward span can go beyond 3 characters when visually similar masks were used. Results showed that Chinese readers needed at least 4 characters to the right of fixation to maintain a normal reading behavior when visually similar masks were used and when characters were displayed in small fonts, indicating that the span is dynamically influenced by masking materials. In Experiments 2 and 3, we asked whether the perceptual span varies as a function of font size in spaced (German) and unspaced (Chinese) scripts. Results clearly suggest perceptual span depends on font size in Chinese, but we failed to find such evidence for German. We propose that the perceptual span in Chinese is flexible; it is strongly constrained by its language-specific properties such as high information density and lack of word spacing. Implications for saccade-target selection during the reading of Chinese sentences are discussed. |
Moreno I. Coco; Frank Keller Integrating mechanisms of visual guidance in naturalistic language production Journal Article In: Cognitive Processing, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 131–150, 2015. @article{Coco2015a,Situated language production requires the integration of visual attention and linguistic processing. Previous work has not conclusively disentangled the role of perceptual scene information and structural sentence information in guiding visual attention. In this paper, we present an eye-tracking study that demonstrates that three types of guidance, perceptual, conceptual, and structural, interact to control visual attention. In a cued language production experiment, we manipulate perceptual (scene clutter) and conceptual guidance (cue animacy) and measure structural guidance (syntactic complexity of the utterance). Analysis of the time course of language production, before and during speech, reveals that all three forms of guidance affect the complexity of visual responses, quantified in terms of the entropy of attentional landscapes and the turbulence of scan patterns, especially during speech. We find that perceptual and conceptual guidance mediate the distribution of attention in the scene, whereas structural guidance closely relates to scan pattern complexity. Furthermore, the eye-voice span of the cued object and its perceptual competitor are similar; its latency mediated by both perceptual and structural guidance. These results rule out a strict interpretation of structural guidance as the single dominant form of visual guidance in situated language production. Rather, the phase of the task and the associated demands of cross-modal cognitive processing determine the mechanisms that guide attention. |
Chantal L. Lemieux; Charles A. Collin; Elizabeth A. Nelson Modulations of eye movement patterns by spatial filtering during the learning and testing phases of an old/new face recognition task Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 2, pp. 536–550, 2015. @article{Lemieux2015,In two experiments, we examined the effects of varying the spatial frequency (SF) content of face images on eye movements during the learning and testing phases of an old/new recognition task. At both learning and testing, participants were presented with face stimuli band-pass filtered to 11 different SF bands, as well as an unfiltered baseline condition. We found that eye movements varied significantly as a function of SF. Specifically, the frequency of transitions between facial features showed a band-pass pattern, with more transitions for middle-band faces (a parts per thousand 5-20 cycles/face) than for low-band (a parts per thousand < 5 cpf) or high-band (a parts per thousand > 20 cpf) ones. These findings were similar for the learning and testing phases. The distributions of transitions across facial features were similar for the middle-band, high-band, and unfiltered faces, showing a concentration on the eyes and mouth; conversely, low-band faces elicited mostly transitions involving the nose and nasion. The eye movement patterns elicited by low, middle, and high bands are similar to those previous researchers have suggested reflect holistic, configural, and featural processing, respectively. More generally, our results are compatible with the hypotheses that eye movements are functional, and that the visual system makes flexible use of visuospatial information in face processing. Finally, our finding that only middle spatial frequencies yielded the same number and distribution of fixations as unfiltered faces adds more evidence to the idea that these frequencies are especially important for face recognition, and reveals a possible mediator for the superior performance that they elicit. |
Vishnu P. Murty; Sarah DuBrow; Lila Davachi The simple act of choosing influences declarative memory Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 16, pp. 6255–6264, 2015. @article{Murty2015,Individuals value the opportunity to make choices and exert control over their environment. This perceived sense of agency has been shown to have broad influences on cognition, including preference, decision-making, and valuation. However, it is unclear whether perceived control influences memory. Using a combined behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging approach, we investi- gated whether imbuing individuals with a sense of agency over their learning experience influences novelmemoryencoding. Participants encoded objects during a task that manipulated the opportunity to choose. Critically, unlike previous work on active learning, there was no relationship between individuals' choices and the content of memoranda. Despite this, we found that the opportunity to choose resulted in robust, reliable enhancements in declarative memory. Neuroimaging results revealed that anticipatory activation of the striatum, a region associated with decision-making, valuation, and exploration, correlated with choice-induced memory enhancements in behavior. These memory enhancements were further associated with interactions between the striatum and hippocampus. Specifi- cally, anticipatory signals in the striatum when participants are alerted to the fact that they will have to choose one of two memoranda were associated with encoding success effects in the hippocampus on a trial-by-trial basis. The precedence of the striatal signal in these interactions suggests a modulatory relationship of the striatum over the hippocampus. These findings not only demonstrate enhanced declarative memory when individuals have perceived control over their learning but also support a novel mechanism by which these enhancements emerge. Furthermore, they demonstrate a novel context in which mesolimbic and declarative memory systems interact. |
Chihiro Saegusa; Janis Intoy; Shinsuke Shimojo Visual attractiveness is leaky: The asymmetrical relationship between face and hair Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 377, 2015. @article{Saegusa2015,Predicting personality is crucial when communicating with people. It has been revealed that the perceived attractiveness or beauty of the face is a cue. As shown in the well-known "what is beautiful is good" stereotype, perceived attractiveness is often associated with desirable personality. Although such research on attractiveness used mainly the face isolated from other body parts, the face is not always seen in isolation in the real world. Rather, it is surrounded by one's hairstyle, and is perceived as a part of total presence. In human vision, perceptual organization/integration occurs mostly in a bottom up, task-irrelevant fashion. This raises an intriguing possibility that task-irrelevant stimulus that is perceptually integrated with a target may influence our affective evaluation. In such a case, there should be a mutual influence between attractiveness perception of the face and surrounding hair, since they are assumed to share strong and unique perceptual organization. In the current study, we examined the influence of a task-irrelevant stimulus on our attractiveness evaluation, using face and hair as stimuli. The results revealed asymmetrical influences in the evaluation of one while ignoring the other. When hair was task-irrelevant, it still affected attractiveness of the face, but only if the hair itself had never been evaluated by the same evaluator. On the other hand, the face affected the hair regardless of whether the face itself was evaluated before. This has intriguing implications on the asymmetry between face and hair, and perceptual integration between them in general. Together with data from a post hoc questionnaire, it is suggested that both implicit non-selective and explicit selective processes contribute to attractiveness evaluation. The findings provide an understanding of attractiveness perception in real-life situations, as well as a new paradigm to reveal unknown implicit aspects of information integration for emotional judgment. |
Petra Warschburger; Claudia Calvano; Eike M. Richter; Ralf Engbert Analysis of attentional bias towards attractive and unattractive body regions among overweight males and females: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 10, pp. e0140813, 2015. @article{Warschburger2015,BACKGROUND: Body image distortion is highly prevalent among overweight individuals. Whilst there is evidence that body-dissatisfied women and those suffering from disordered eating show a negative attentional bias towards their own unattractive body parts and others' attractive body parts, little is known about visual attention patterns in the area of obesity and with respect to males. Since eating disorders and obesity share common features in terms of distorted body image and body dissatisfaction, the aim of this study was to examine whether overweight men and women show a similar attentional bias. METHODS/DESIGN: We analyzed eye movements in 30 overweight individuals (18 females) and 28 normal-weight individuals (16 females) with respect to the participants' own pictures as well as gender- and BMI-matched control pictures (front and back view). Additionally, we assessed body image and disordered eating using validated questionnaires. DISCUSSION: The overweight sample rated their own body as less attractive and showed a more disturbed body image. Contrary to our assumptions, they focused significantly longer on attractive compared to unattractive regions of both their own and the control body. For one's own body, this was more pronounced for women. A higher weight status and more frequent body checking predicted attentional bias towards attractive body parts. We found that overweight adults exhibit an unexpected and stable pattern of selective attention, with a distinctive focus on their own attractive body regions despite higher levels of body dissatisfaction. This positive attentional bias may either be an indicator of a more pronounced pattern of attentional avoidance or a self-enhancing strategy. Further research is warranted to clarify these results. |
Theodoros P. Zanos; Patrick J. Mineault; Konstantinos T. Nasiotis; Daniel Guitton; Christopher C. Pack A sensorimotor role for traveling waves in primate visual cortex Journal Article In: Neuron, vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 615–627, 2015. @article{Zanos2015,Traveling waves of neural activity are frequently observed to occur in concert with the presentation of a sensory stimulus or the execution of a movement. Although such waves have been studied for decades, little is known about their function. Here we show that traveling waves in the primate extrastriate visual cortex provide a means of integrating sensory and motor signals. Specifically, we describe a traveling wave of local field potential (LFP) activity in cortical area V4 of macaque monkeys that is triggered by the execution of saccadic eye movements. These waves sweep across the V4 retinotopic map, following a consistent path from the foveal to the peripheral representations of space; their amplitudes correlate with the direction and size of each saccade. Moreover, these waves are associated with a reorganization of the postsaccadic neuronal firing patterns, which follow a similar retinotopic progression, potentially prioritizing the processing of behaviorally relevant stimuli. |
Marie-Josée Bisson; Walter J. B. Heuven; Kathy Conklin; Richard J. Tunney The role of verbal and pictorial information in multimodal incidental acquisition of foreign language vocabulary Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 68, no. 7, pp. 1306–1326, 2015. @article{Bisson2015,This study used eye tracking to investigate the allocation of attention to multimodal stimuli during an incidental learning situation, as well as its impact on subsequent explicit learning. Participants were exposed to foreign language (FL) auditory words on their own, in conjunction with written native language (NL) translations, or with both written NL translations and pictures. Incidental acquisition of FL words was assessed the following day through an explicit learning task where participants learned to recognize translation equivalents, as well as one week later through recall and translation recognition tests. Results showed higher accuracy scores in the explicit learning task for FL words presented with meaning during incidental learning, whether written meaning or both written meaning and picture, than for FL words presented auditorily only. However, participants recalled significantly more FL words after a week delay if they had been presented with a picture during incidental learning. In addition, the time spent looking at the pictures during incidental learning significantly predicted recognition and recall scores one week later. Overall, results demonstrated the impact of exposure to multimodal stimuli on subsequent explicit learning, as well as the important role that pictorial information can play in incidental vocabulary acquisition. |
Moreno I. Coco; Frank Keller The interaction of visual and linguistic saliency during syntactic ambiguity resolution Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 46–74, 2015. @article{Coco2015,Psycholinguistic research using the visual world paradigm has shown that the processing ofsentences is constrained by the visual context in which they occur. Recently, there has been growing interest in the interactions observed when both language and vision provide relevant information during sentence pro- cessing. In three visual world experiments on syntactic ambiguity resolution, we investigate how visual and linguistic information influence the interpretation ofambiguous sentences. We hypothesize that (1) visual and linguistic information both constrain which interpretation is pursued by the sentence pro- cessor, and (2) the two types of information act upon the interpretation of the sentence at different points during processing. In Experiment 1, we show that visual saliency is utilized to anticipate the upcoming arguments ofa verb. In Experiment 2, we operationalize linguistic saliency using intonational breaks and demonstrate that these give prominence to linguistic referents. These results confirm pre- diction (1). In Experiment 3, we manipulate visual and linguistic saliency together and find that both types of information are used, but at different points in the sentence, to incrementally update its current interpretation. This finding is consistent with prediction (2). Overall, our results suggest an adaptive processing architecture in which different types of information are used when they become available, optimizing different aspects of situated language processing. |
Rebecca Haworth; Stephanie Sobey; Jill M. Chorney; Michael Bezuhly; Paul Hong Measuring attentional bias in children with prominent ears: A prospective eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive & Aesthetic Surgery, vol. 68, no. 12, pp. 1662–1666, 2015. @article{Haworth2015,Background and aim: When observing new faces, most people focus their attention on the central triangle of the face containing the eyes, nose and mouth. When viewing faces with prominent ears, observers may divert their attention from the central triangle. The objective of this study was to determine whether there was an objective attentional bias to prominent ears in comparison to non-prominent ears. Methods: A total of 24 naïve participants (13 female; mean age 22.88 years) viewed 15 photographs of children with bilateral prominent ears, unilateral prominent ears and non-prominent ears. Both pre- and post-otoplasty photographs of two patients were included. The eye movements of participants were recorded using the EyeLink 1000, a table-mounted eye-tracking device. Results: Overall, the participants spent more time looking at the ear regions for faces with prominent ears in comparison to faces without prominent ears (p = 0.007 |
Karolina M. Lempert; Yu Lin Chen; Stephen M. Fleming Relating pupil dilation and metacognitive confidence during auditory decision-making Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 5, pp. e0126588, 2015. @article{Lempert2015,The sources of evidence contributing to metacognitive assessments of confidence in decision-making remain unclear. Previous research has shown that pupil dilation is related to the signaling of uncertainty in a variety of decision tasks. Here we ask whether pupil dilation is also related to metacognitive estimates of confidence. Specifically, we measure the relationship between pupil dilation and confidence during an auditory decision task using a general linear model approach to take into account delays in the pupillary response. We found that pupil dilation responses track the inverse of confidence before but not after a decision is made, even when controlling for stimulus difficulty. In support of an additional post-decisional contribution to the accuracy of confidence judgments, we found that participants with better metacognitive ability - that is, more accurate appraisal of their own decisions - showed a tighter relationship between post-decisional pupil dilation and confidence. Together our findings show that a physiological index of uncertainty, pupil dilation, predicts both confidence and metacognitive accuracy for auditory decisions. |
Xiaofan Peng; Maoyang Zhang; Dajun Zhang; Deguang Xie; Yusheng Guan From anger to attribution: Could attention be a bridge? Journal Article In: Social Behavior and Personality, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 505–518, 2015. @article{Peng2015,We explored whether or not anger increases attribution bias toward salient information by narrowing attention scope. In Experiment 1, participants made attributions about 6 daily events while experiencing anger or in a neutral state. The anger group was more biased toward the salient factor compared to the neutral group. Using eye-tracking methodology, in Experiment 2 we further demonstrated that attention scope that is narrowed due to anger is related to a polarized distribution of attention resources, particularly decreased eye fixation on the phrase containing nonsalient factors. Finally, in Experiment 3 we separated attention process from information salience and further confirmed that narrowing attention scope (polarizing attention resource) could bias the attribution. In sum, our results indicate that attention scope is the bridge by which anger increases attribution bias. |
Bertalan Polner; Désirée S. Aichert; Christine Macare; Anna Costa; Ulrich Ettinger Gently restless: Association of ADHD-like traits with response inhibition and interference control Journal Article In: European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, vol. 265, no. 8, pp. 689–699, 2015. @article{Polner2015,Impairment of inhibition-related functions is one of the most pronounced cognitive deficits found in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Compelling evidence from studies of unaffected relatives of patients with ADHD and of ADHD-like traits in healthy subjects suggest the continuous distribution of ADHD symptoms in the population. A more subtle inhibitory deficit can also be found in healthy relatives of patients and in subjects with high ADHD-like traits. Here, we examined the relationship between inhibitory performance and ADHD-like traits, for the first time, in a large sample of healthy adults by applying multiple, widely used tests of inhibition-related functions. ADHD-like traits, in general, were independently predicted by Stroop interference score and, at trend level, by go/no-go commission error rate while controlling for socio-demographic factors, verbal intelligence and neuroticism. Additionally, higher inattentive traits were related to worse Stroop performance at trend level, and higher hyperactive/impulsive traits were significantly associated with more go/no-go commission errors. ADHD-like traits were strongly related to neuroticism. The study shows that individual differences in ADHD-like traits are related to variance in fundamental inhibition-related functions over and above effects of negative affect regulation, but the relationships tend to be small. The results suggest the quasi-dimensionality of ADHD and raise further questions about the relationship between genetic factors and the deficit of inhibition-related functions in the ADHD spectrum. |
Luca Polonio; D. S. Guida; Giorgio Coricelli; Sibilla Di Guida; Giorgio Coricelli Strategic sophistication and attention in games: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Games and Economic Behavior, vol. 94, pp. 80–96, 2015. @article{Polonio2015,We used eye-tracking to measure the dynamic patterns of visual information acquisition in two-player normal-form games. Participants played one-shot games in which either, neither, or only one of the players had a dominant strategy. First, we performed a mixture models cluster analysis to group participants into types according to the pattern of visual information acquisition observed in a single class of games. Then, we predicted agents' choices in different classes of games and observed that patterns of visual information acquisition were game invariant. Our method allowed us to predict whether the decision process would lead to equilibrium choices or not, and to attribute out-of-equilibrium responses to limited cognitive capacities or social motives. Our results suggest the existence of individually heterogeneous-but-stable patterns of visual information acquisition based on subjective levels of strategic sophistication and social preferences. |
Guillermo Solovey; Guy Gerard Graney; Hakwan Lau A decisional account of subjective inflation of visual perception at the periphery Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 1, pp. 258–271, 2015. @article{Solovey2015,Human peripheral vision appears vivid compared to foveal vision; the subjectively perceived level of detail does not seem to drop abruptly with eccentricity. This compelling impression contrasts with the fact that spatial resolution is substantially lower at the periphery. A similar phenomenon occurs in visual attention, in which subjects usually overestimate their perceptual capacity in the unattended periphery. We have previously shown that at identical eccentricity, low spatial attention is associated with liberal detection biases, which we argue may reflect inflated subjective perceptual qualities. Our computational model suggests that this subjective inflation occurs because under the lack of attention, the trial-by-trial variability of the internal neural response is increased, resulting in more frequent surpassing of a detection criterion. In the current work, we hypothesized that the same mechanism may be at work in peripheral vision. We investigated this possibility in psychophysical experiments in which participants performed a simultaneous detection task at the center and at the periphery. Confirming our hypothesis, we found that participants adopted a conservative criterion at the center and liberal criterion at the periphery. Furthermore, an extension of our model predicts that detection bias will be similar at the center and at the periphery if the periphery stimuli are magnified. A second experiment successfully confirmed this prediction. These results suggest that, although other factors contribute to subjective inflation of visual perception in the periphery, such as top-down filling-in of information, the decision mechanism may be relevant too. |
Inbal Itzhak; Shari R. Baum Misleading bias-driven expectations in referential processing and the facilitative role of contrastive accent Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 623–650, 2015. @article{Itzhak2015,Probabilistic preferences are often facilitative in language processing and may assist in discourse prediction. However, occasionally these sources of information may lead to inaccurate expectations. The current study investigated a test case of this scenario. An eye-tracking experiment examined the interpretation of ambiguous personal pronouns in the context of implicit causality biases. We tested whether reference resolution may be facilitated online by contrastive accent in cases of a bias-inconsistent referent. Implicit causality biases directed looks to the biased noun phrase; however, when the name of the bias-inconsistent antecedent was accented (e.g., JOHN envied Bill because he [Formula: see text]), this tendency was modulated. Contrastive accent seems to dampen the occasionally confusing prediction of implicit causality biases in referential processing. This demonstrates one way in which the spoken language comprehension system copes with occasional misguidance of otherwise helpful probabilistic information. |
David R. Painter; Paul E. Dux; Jason B. Mattingley Causal involvement of visual area MT in global feature-based enhancement but not contingent attentional capture Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 118, pp. 90–102, 2015. @article{Painter2015,When visual attention is set for a particular target feature, such as color or shape, neural responses to that feature are enhanced across the visual field. This global feature-based enhancement is hypothesized to underlie the contingent attentional capture effect, in which task-irrelevant items with the target feature capture spatial attention. In humans, however, different cortical regions have been implicated in global feature-based enhancement and contingent capture. Here, we applied intermittent theta-burst stimulation (iTBS) to assess the causal roles of two regions of extrastriate cortex - right area MT and the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) - in both global feature-based enhancement and contingent capture. We recorded cortical activity using EEG while participants monitored centrally for targets defined by color and ignored peripheral checkerboards that matched the distractor or target color. In central vision, targets were preceded by colored cues designed to capture attention. Stimuli flickered at unique frequencies, evoking distinct cortical oscillations. Analyses of these oscillations and behavioral performance revealed contingent capture in central vision and global feature-based enhancement in the periphery. Stimulation of right area MT selectively increased global feature-based enhancement, but did not influence contingent attentional capture. By contrast, stimulation of the right TPJ left both processes unaffected. Our results reveal a causal role for the right area MT in feature-based attention, and suggest that global feature-based enhancement does not underlie the contingent capture effect. |
Daniel E. Schoth; H. J. Godwin; Simon P. Liversedge; Christina Liossi Eye movements during visual search for emotional faces in individuals with chronic headache Journal Article In: European Journal of Pain, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 722–732, 2015. @article{Schoth2015,BACKGROUND: Attentional biases for pain-related information have been frequently reported in individuals with chronic pain. Recording of participants' eye movements provides a continuous measure of attention, although to date this methodology has received little use in research exploring attentional biases in chronic pain. The aim of the current investigation was to explore the specificity of attentional orienting bias using a novel visual search task while recording participant eye movement behaviours. This also allowed for the investigation of whether attentional biases for pain-related information exist in the presence of multiple stimuli competing for attention. METHODS: Twenty-three participants with chronic headache and 24 pain-free, healthy control participants were engaged in a visual search task where pain, angry, happy and neutral faces were used as both target and distractor stimuli. While completing this task, participants' eye movements were recorded. RESULTS: Supporting the adopted hypothesis, participants with chronic headache, relative to healthy controls, demonstrated a significantly higher proportion of initial fixations to target pain expressions when the pain expressions were presented in displays containing neutral-distractor faces. No significant differences were found between groups in the time taken to fixate target pain expressions (localization time). CONCLUSIONS: Individuals with chronic headache show facilitated initial orienting towards pain expressions specifically when used as targets in a visual search task. This study adds to a growing body of research supporting the presence of pain-related attentional biases in chronic pain as assessed via different experimental paradigms, and shows biases to exist when multiple stimuli competing for attention are presented simultaneously. |
Sabine Soltani; Kristin R. Newman; Leanne Quigley; Amanda Fernandez; Keith S. Dobson; Christopher Sears Temporal changes in attention to sad and happy faces distinguish currently and remitted depressed individuals from never depressed individuals Journal Article In: Psychiatry Research, vol. 230, no. 2, pp. 454–463, 2015. @article{Soltani2015,Depression is associated with attentional biases for emotional information that are proposed to reflect stable vulnerability factors for the development and recurrence of depression. A key question for researchers is whether those who have recovered from depression also exhibit attentional biases, and if so, how similar these biases are to those who are currently depressed. To address this question, the present study examined attention to emotional faces in remitted depressed (N=26), currently depressed (N=16), and never depressed (N=33) individuals. Participants viewed sets of four face images (happy, sad, threatening, and neutral) while their eye movements were tracked throughout an 8-s presentation. Like currently depressed participants, remitted depressed participants attended to sad faces significantly more than never depressed participants and attended to happy faces significantly less. Analyzing temporal changes in attention revealed that currently and remitted depressed participants did not reduce their attention to sad faces over the 8-s presentation, unlike never depressed participants. In contrast, remitted depressed participants attended to happy faces similarly to never depressed participants, increasing their attention to happy faces over the 8-s presentation. The implications for cognitive theories of depression and depression vulnerability are discussed. |
Karolina M. Lempert; Elizabeth A. Phelps; Paul W. Glimcher; Elizabeth A. Phelps Emotional arousal and discount rate in intertemporal choice are reference-dependent Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 144, no. 2, pp. 366–373, 2015. @article{Lempert2015a,Many decisions involve weighing immediate gratification against future consequences. In such intertemporal choices, people often choose smaller, immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards. It has been proposed that emotional responses to immediate rewards lead us to choose them at our long-term expense. Here we utilize an objective measure of emotional arousal – pupil dilation – to examine the role of emotion in these decisions. We show that emotional arousal responses, as well as choices, in intertemporal choice tasks are reference-dependent and reflect the decision-maker's recent history of offers. Arousal increases when less predictable rewards are better than expected, whether those rewards are immediate or delayed. Furthermore, when immediate rewards are less predictable than delayed rewards, participants tend to be patient. When delayed rewards are less predictable, immediate rewards are preferred. Our findings suggest that we can encourage people to be more patient by changing the context in which intertemporal choices are made. |
Andriy Myachykov; Angelo Cangelosi; Rob Ellis; Martin H. Fischer The oculomotor resonance effect in spatial-numerical mapping Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 161, pp. 162–169, 2015. @article{Myachykov2015,We investigated automatic Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect in auditory number processing. Two experiments continually measured spatial characteristics of ocular drift at central fixation during and after auditory number presentation. Consistent with the notion of a spatially oriented mental number line, we found spontaneous magnitude-dependent gaze adjustments, both with and without a concurrent saccadic task. This fixation adjustment (1) had a small-number/left-lateralized bias and (2) it was biphasic as it emerged for a short time around the point of lexical access and it received later robust representation around following number onset. This pattern suggests a two-step mechanism of sensorimotor mapping between numbers and space - a first-pass bottom-up activation followed by a top-down and more robust horizontal SNARC. Our results inform theories of number processing as well as simulation-based approaches to cognition by identifying the characteristics of an oculomotor resonance phenomenon. |
Andrea M. Zawoyski; Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder Using eye tracking to observe differential effects of repeated readings for second-grade students as a function of achievement level Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 171–184, 2015. @article{Zawoyski2015,Repeated readings (RR) is an evidence-based instructional technique in which students read the same text multiple times. Currently, little is known about how effects of RR may differ based on students' achievement levels. Eye tracking provides a means for closely examining instructional effects because it permits measurement of subtle changes that occur during RR. The current study measured changes in the reading behavior of second-grade students who were divided into two groups of 22 students each based on their reading achievement levels. Participants read a grade-level passage embedded with low-and high-frequency target words four times in a single session while their eye movements were recorded. Findings replicated those of previous research, suggesting that RR facilitated reading for students in both groups, particularly on low-frequency target words. Results indicated both similarities and differences in patterns of performance between lower and higher performing readers. Additionally, results implied that effects were greater for lower performing readers because they made greater improvements on high-frequency target words, whereas effects were diminished for higher performing readers. The findings have implications for improving future eye movement research investigating young students' reading and the efficiency of RR in the classroom. |
Scott N. J. Watamaniuk; Stephen J. Heinen Allocation of attention during pursuit of large objects is no different than during fixation. Journal Article In: Journal of vision, vol. 15, no. 9, pp. 9, 2015. @article{Watamaniuk2015,Attention allocation during pursuit of a spot is usually characterized as asymmetric with more attention placed ahead of the target than behind it. However, attention is symmetrically allocated across larger pursuit stimuli. An unresolved issue is how tightly attention is constrained on large stimuli during pursuit. Although some work shows it is tightly locked to the fovea, other work shows it is allocated flexibly. To investigate this, we had observers perform a character identification task on large pursuit stimuli composed of arrays of five, nine, or 15 characters spaced between 0.6° and 4.0° apart. Initially, the characters were identical, but at a random time, they all changed briefly, rendering one of them unique. Observers identified the unique character. Consistent with previous literature, attention appeared narrow and symmetric around the pursuit target for tightly spaced (0.6°) characters. Increasing spacing dramatically expanded the attention scope, presumably by mitigating crowding. However, when we controlled for crowding, performance was limited by set size, suffering more for eccentric targets. Interestingly, the same limitations on attention allocation were observed with stationary and pursued stimuli-evidence that attention operates similarly during fixation and pursuit of a stimulus that extends into the periphery. The results suggest that attention is flexibly allocated during pursuit, but performance is limited by crowding and set size. In addition, performing the identification task did not hurt pursuit performance, further evidence that pursuit of large stimuli is relatively inattentive. |
Ming Yan; Jinger Pan; Nathalie N. Bélanger; Hua Shu Chinese deaf readers have early access to parafoveal semantics Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 254–261, 2015. @article{Yan2015c,In the present study, we manipulated different types of information available in the parafovea during the reading of Chinese sentences and examined how deaf readers make use of the parafoveal information. Results clearly indicate that although the reading-level matched hearing readers make greater use of orthographic information in the parafovea, parafoveal semantic information is obtained earlier among the deaf readers. In addition, a phonological preview benefit effect was found for the better deaf readers (relative to less-skilled deaf readers), although we also provide an alternative explanation for this effect. Providing evidence that Chinese deaf readers have higher efficiency when processing parafoveal semantics, the study indicates flexibility across individuals in the mechanisms underlying word recognition adapting to the inputs available in the linguistic environment. |
Signe Bray; Ramsha Almas; Aiden E. G. F. Arnold; Giuseppe Iaria; Glenda Macqueen Intraparietal sulcus activity and functional connectivity supporting spatial working memory manipulation Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1252–1264, 2015. @article{Bray2015,The intraparietal sulcus (IPS) is recruited during tasks requiring attention, maintenance and manipulation of information in working memory (WM). While WM tasks often show broad bilateral engagement along the IPS, topographic maps of contralateral (CL) visual space have been identified along the IPS, similar to retinotopic maps in visual cortex. In the present study, we asked how these visuotopic IPS regions are differentially involved in the maintenance and manipulation of spatial information in WM. Visuotopic mapping was performed in 26 participants to define regions of interest along the IPS, corresponding to previously described IPS0-4. In a separate task, we showed that while maintaining the location of a briefly flashed target in WM preferentially engaged CL IPS, manipulation of spatial information by mentally rotating the target around a circle engaged bilateral IPS, peaking in IPS1 in most participants. Functional connectivity analyses showed increased interaction between the IPS and prefrontal regions during manipulation, as well as interhemispheric interactions. Two control tasks demonstrated that covert attention shifts, and nonspatial manipulation (arithmetic), engaged patterns of IPS activation and connectivity that were distinct from WM manipulation. These findings add to our understanding of the role of IPS in spatial WM maintenance and manipulation. |
Ralf Engbert; Hans A. Trukenbrod; Simon Barthelmé; Felix A. Wichmann Spatial statistics and attentional dynamics in scene viewing Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–17, 2015. @article{Engbert2015,In humans and in foveated animals visual acuity is highly concentrated at the center of gaze, so that choosing where to look next is an important example of online, rapid decision-making. Computational neuroscientists have developed biologically-inspired models of visual attention, termed saliency maps, which successfully predict where people fixate on average. Using point process theory for spatial statistics, we show that scanpaths contain, however, important statistical structure, such as spatial clustering on top of distributions of gaze positions. Here, we develop a dynamical model of saccadic selection that accurately predicts the distribution of gaze positions as well as spatial clustering along individual scanpaths. Our model relies on activation dynamics via spatially-limited (foveated) access to saliency information, and, second, a leaky memory process controlling the re-inspection of target regions. This theoretical framework models a form of context-dependent decision-making, linking neural dynamics of attention to behavioral gaze data. |
Benjamin Gagl; Stefan Hawelka; Heinz Wimmer On sources of the word length effect in uoung readers Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 289–306, 2015. @article{Gagl2015,We investigated how letter length, phoneme length, and consonant clusters contribute to the word length effect in 2nd- and 4th-grade children. They read words from three different conditions: In one condition, letter length increased but phoneme length did not due to multiletter graphemes (Haus-Bauch-Schach). In the remaining conditions, phoneme length increased in correspondence with letter length. One presented monosyllabic words with consonant clusters (Herbst); the other presented disyllabic words without consonant clusters (Kö.nig). Phoneme and letter length contributed to the length effect in naming latencies. Words with consonant clusters elicited the largest length effect. We interpreted this finding as reflecting difficulties of young readers with accessing the output phonology of the tightly coarticulated consonant clusters from the separate phonemes delivered from serial grapheme-to-phoneme conversions. Moreover, eye-movement data indicated that increased reading speed, accompanied with decreased word length effects, is due to more efficient grapheme-to-phoneme conversions rather than the emergence of whole-word recognition. |
Rebekka Lencer; Andreas Sprenger; James L. Reilly; Jennifer E. McDowell; Leah H. Rubin; Judith A. Badner; Matcheri S. Keshavan; Godfrey D. Pearlson; Carol A. Tamminga; Elliot S. Gershon; Brett A. Clementz; John A. Sweeney Pursuit eye movements as an intermediate phenotype across psychotic disorders: Evidence from the B-SNIP study Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Research, vol. 169, no. 1-3, pp. 326–333, 2015. @article{Lencer2015,Smooth pursuit eye tracking deficits are a promising intermediate phenotype for schizophrenia and possibly for psychotic disorders more broadly. The Bipolar-Schizophrenia Network on Intermediate Phenotypes (B-SNIP) consortium investigated the severity and familiality of different pursuit parameters across psychotic disorders. Probands with schizophrenia (N=265), schizoaffective disorder (N=178), psychotic bipolar disorder (N=231), their first-degree relatives (N=306 |
Holger Mitterer; Eva Reinisch Letters don't matter: No effect of orthography on the perception of conversational speech Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 85, pp. 116–134, 2015. @article{Mitterer2015,It has been claimed that learning to read changes the way we perceive speech, with detrimental effects for words with sound-spelling inconsistencies. Because conversational speech is peppered with segment deletions and alterations that lead to sound-spelling inconsistencies, such an influence would seriously hinder the perception of conversational speech. We hence tested whether the orthographic coding of a segment influences its deletion costs in perception. German glottal stop, a segment that is canonically present but not orthographically coded, allows such a test. The effects of glottal-stop deletion in German were compared to deletion of /h/ in German (grapheme: h) and deletion of glottal stop in Maltese (grapheme: q) in an implicit task with conversational speech and explicit task with careful speech. All segment deletions led to similar reduction costs in the implicit task, while an orthographic effect, with larger effects for orthographically coded segments, emerged in the explicit task. These results suggest that learning to read does not influence how we process speech but mainly how we think about it. |
Adam Palanica; Roxane J. Itier Eye gaze and head orientation modulate the inhibition of return for faces Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 8, pp. 2589–2600, 2015. @article{Palanica2015,The present study used an inhibition of return (IOR) spatial cueing paradigm to examine how gaze direction and head orientation modulate attention capture for human faces. Target response time (RT) was measured after the presentation of a peripheral cue, which was either a face (with front-facing or averted gaze, in either frontal head view or averted head view) or a house (control). Participants fixated on a centered cross at all times and responded via button press to a peripheral target after a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) from the stimulus cue. At the shortest SOA (150 ms), RTs were shorter for faces than houses, independent of an IOR response, suggesting a cue-based RT advantage elicited by faces. At the longest SOA (2,400 ms), a larger IOR magnitude was found for faces compared to houses. Both the cue-based RT advantage and later IOR responses were modulated by gaze-head congruency; these effects were strongest for frontal gaze faces in frontal head view, and for averted gaze faces in averted head view. Importantly, participants were not given any specific information regarding the stimuli, nor were they told the true purpose of the study. These findings indicate that the congruent combination of head and gaze direction influence the exogenous attention capture of faces during inhibition of return. |
Demet Gurler; Nathan Doyle; Edgar Walker; John Magnotti; Michael S. Beauchamp A link between individual differences in multisensory speech perception and eye movements Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 1333–1341, 2015. @article{Gurler2015,The McGurk effect is an illusion in which visual speech information dramatically alters the perception of auditory speech. However, there is a high degree of individual variability in how frequently the illusion is perceived: some individuals almost always perceive the McGurk effect, while others rarely do. Another axis of individual variability is the pattern of eye movements make while viewing a talking face: some individuals often fixate the mouth of the talker, while others rarely do. Since the talker's mouth carries the visual speech necessary information to induce the McGurk effect, we hypothesized that individuals who frequently perceive the McGurk effect should spend more time fixating the talker's mouth. We used infrared eye tracking to study eye movements as 40 participants viewed audiovisual speech. Frequent perceivers of the McGurk effect were more likely to fixate the mouth of the talker, and there was a significant correlation between McGurk frequency and mouth looking time. The noisy encoding of disparity model of McGurk perception showed that individuals who frequently fixated the mouth had lower sensory noise and higher disparity thresholds than those who rarely fixated the mouth. Differences in eye movements when viewing the talker's face may be an important contributor to interindividual differences in multisensory speech perception. |
Ahu Gokce; Hermann J. Müller; Thomas Geyer Positional priming of visual pop-out search is supported by multiple spatial reference frames Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 838, 2015. @article{Gokce2015,The present study investigates the representations(s) underlying positional priming of visual ‘pop-out' search (Maljkovic and Nakayama, 1996). Three search items (one target and two distractors) were presented at different locations, in invariant (Experiment 1) or random (Experiment 2) cross-trial sequences. By these manipulations it was possible to disentangle retinotopic, spatiotopic, and object-centered priming representations. Two forms of priming were tested: target location facilitation (i.e., faster reaction times – RTs– when the trial n target is presented at a trial n-1 target relative to n-1 blank location) and distractor location inhibition (i.e., slower RTs for n targets presented at n-1 distractor compared to n-1 blank locations). It was found that target locations were coded in positional short-term memory with reference to both spatiotopic and object-centered representations (Experiment 1 vs. 2). In contrast, distractor locations were maintained in an object-centered reference frame (Experiments 1 and 2). We put forward the idea that the uncertainty induced by the experiment manipulation (predictable versus random cross-trial item displacements) modulates the transition from object- to space-based representations in cross-trial memory for target positions. |
Russell Cohen Hoffing; Aaron R. Seitz Pupillometry as a glimpse into the neurochemical basis of human memory encoding Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 765–774, 2015. @article{CohenHoffing2015,Neurochemical systems are well studied in animal learning; however, ethical issues limit methodologies to explore these systems in humans. Pupillometry provides a glimpse into the brain ʼs neurochemical systems, where pupil dynamics in monkeys have been linked with locus coeruleus activity, which releases norepinephrine (NE) throughout the brain. Here, we use pupil dynamics as a surrogate measure of neurochemical activity to explore the hypothesis that NE is involved in modulating memory encoding. We examine this using a task-irrelevant learning paradigm in which learning is boosted for stimuli temporally paired with task targets. We show that participants better recognize images that are paired with task targets than distractors and, in correspondence, that pupil size changes more for target-paired than distractor-paired images. To further investigate the hypothesis that NE nonspecifically guides learning for stimuli that are present with its release, a second procedure was used that employed an unexpected sound to activate the LC –NE system and induce pupil-size changes; results indicated a corresponding increase in memorization of images paired with the unexpected sounds. Together, these results suggest a relationship between the LC–NE system, pupil-size changes, and human memory encoding |
Suhad Sonbul Fatal mistake, awful mistake, or extreme mistake? Frequency effects on off-line/on-line collocational processing Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 419–437, 2015. @article{Sonbul2015,This study explored whether native speakers of English and non-natives are sensitive to corpus-derived frequency of synonymous adjective-noun collocations (e.g., fatal mistake, awful mistake, and extreme mistake) and whether level of proficiency can influence this sensitivity. Both off-line (typicality rating task) and on-line (eye-movement) measures were employed. Off-line results showed that both natives and non-natives were sensitive to collocational frequency with clearer effects for non-natives as their proficiency increased. On-line, however, proficiency had no effect on sensitivity to frequency; both natives and non-natives showed early sensitivity to collocational frequency (first pass reading time). This on-line sensitivity disappeared later in processing for both groups (total reading time and fixation count). Results are discussed in light of usage-based theories of language acquisition and processing. |
Barbara F. M. Marino; Giovanni Mirabella; Rossana Actis-Grosso; Emanuela Bricolo; Paola Ricciardelli Can we resist another person's gaze? Journal Article In: Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 9, pp. 258, 2015. @article{Marino2015,Adaptive adjustments of strategies are needed to optimize behavior in a dynamic and uncertain world. A key function in implementing flexible behavior and exerting self- control is represented by the ability to stop the execution of an action when it is no longer appropriate for the environmental requests. Importantly, stimuli in our environment are not equally relevant and some are more valuable than others. One example is the gaze of other people, which is known to convey important social information about their direction of attention and their emotional and mental states. Indeed, gaze direction has a significant impact on the execution of voluntary saccades of an observer since it is capable of inducing in the observer an automatic gaze-following behavior: a phenomenon named social or joint attention. Nevertheless, people can exert volitional inhibitory control on saccadic eye movements during their planning. Little is known about the interaction between gaze direction signals and volitional inhibition of saccades. To fill this gap, we administered a countermanding task to 15 healthy participants in which they were asked to observe the eye region of a face with the eyes shut appearing at central fixation. In one condition, participants were required to suppress a saccade, that was previously instructed by a gaze shift toward one of two peripheral targets, when the eyes were suddenly shut down (social condition, SC). In a second condition, participants were asked to inhibit a saccade, that was previously instructed by a change in color of one of the two same targets, when a change of color of a central picture occurred (non- social condition, N-SC). We found that inhibitory control was more impaired in the SC, suggesting that actions initiated and stopped by social cues conveyed by the eyes are more difficult to withhold. This is probably due to the social value intrinsically linked to these cues and the many uses we make of them. |
Nicholas E. Myers; Gustavo Rohenkohl; Valentin Wyart; Mark W. Woolrich; Anna C. Nobre; Mark G. Stokes Testing sensory evidence against mnemonic templates Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 4, pp. 1–25, 2015. @article{Myers2015,Most perceptual decisions require comparisons between current input and an internal template. Classic studies propose that templates are encoded in sustained activity of sensory neurons. However, stimulus encoding is itself dynamic, tracing a complex trajectory through activity space. Which part of this trajectory is pre-activated to reflect the template? Here we recorded magneto- and electroencephalography during a visual target-detection task, and used pattern analyses to decode template, stimulus, and decision-variable representation. Our findings ran counter to the dominant model of sustained pre-activation. Instead, template information emerged transiently around stimulus onset and quickly subsided. Cross-generalization between stimulus and template coding, indicating a shared neural representation, occurred only briefly. Our results are compatible with the proposal that template representation relies on a matched filter, transforming input into task-appropriate output. This proposal was consistent with a signed difference response at the perceptual decision stage, which can be explained by a simple neural model. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter; Michelle Lee; Michael Reiderman; Keith Rayner The effect of contextual constraint on parafoveal processing in reading Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 83, pp. 118–139, 2015. @article{Schotter2015,Semantic preview benefit in reading is an elusive and controversial effect because empirical studies do not always (but sometimes) find evidence for it. Its presence seems to depend on (at least) the language being read, visual properties of the text (e.g., initial letter capitalization), the type of relationship between preview and target, and as shown here, semantic constraint generated by the prior sentence context. Schotter (2013) reported semantic preview benefit for synonyms, but not semantic associates when the preview/target was embedded in a neutral sentence context. In Experiment 1, we embedded those same previews/targets into constrained sentence contexts and in Experiment 2 we replicated the effects reported by Schotter (2013; in neutral sentence contexts) and Experiment 1 (in constrained contexts) in a within-subjects design. In both experiments, we found an early (i.e., first-pass) apparent preview benefit for semantically associated previews in constrained contexts that went away in late measures (e.g., total time). These data suggest that sentence constraint (at least as manipulated in the current study) does not operate by making a single word form expected, but rather generates expectations about what kinds of words are likely to appear. Furthermore, these data are compatible with the assumption of the E-Z Reader model that early oculomotor decisions reflect "hedged bets" that a word will be identifiable and, when wrong, lead the system to identify the wrong word, triggering regressions. |
Tommy C. Blanchard; Benjamin Y. Hayden Monkeys are more patient in a foraging task than in a standard intertemporal choice task Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. e0117057, 2015. @article{Blanchard2015,Studies of animal impulsivity generally find steep subjective devaluation, or discounting, of delayed rewards - often on the order of a 50% reduction in value in a few seconds. Because such steep discounting is highly disfavored in evolutionary models of time preference, we hypothesize that discounting tasks provide a poor measure of animals' true time preferences. One prediction of this hypothesis is that estimates of time preferences based on these tasks will lack external validity, i.e. fail to predict time preferences in other contexts. We examined choices made by four rhesus monkeys in a computerized patch-leaving foraging task interleaved with a standard intertemporal choice task. Monkeys were significantly more patient in the foraging task than in the intertemporal choice task. Patch-leaving behavior was well fit by parameter-free optimal foraging equations but poorly fit by the hyperbolic discount parameter obtained from the intertemporal choice task. Day-to-day variation in time preferences across the two tasks was uncorrelated with each other. These data are consistent with the conjecture that seemingly impulsive behavior in animals is an artifact of their difficulty understanding the structure of intertemporal choice tasks, and support the idea that animals are more efficient rate maximizers in the multi-second range than intertemporal choice tasks would suggest. |
Julie Markant; Michael S. Worden; Dima Amso Not all attention orienting is created equal: Recognition memory is enhanced when attention orienting involves distractor suppression Journal Article In: Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, vol. 120, pp. 28–40, 2015. @article{Markant2015,Learning through visual exploration often requires orienting of attention to meaningful information in a cluttered world. Previous work has shown that attention modulates visual cortex activity, with enhanced activity for attended targets and suppressed activity for competing inputs, thus enhancing the visual experience. Here we examined the idea that learning may be engaged differentially with variations in attention orienting mechanisms that drive eye movements during visual search and exploration. We hypothesized that attention orienting mechanisms that engaged suppression of a previously attended location would boost memory encoding of the currently attended target objects to a greater extent than those that involve target enhancement alone. To test this hypothesis we capitalized on the classic spatial cueing task and the inhibition of return (IOR) mechanism (. Posner, 1980; Posner, Rafal, & Choate, 1985) to demonstrate that object images encoded in the context of concurrent suppression at a previously attended location were encoded more effectively and remembered better than those encoded without concurrent suppression. Furthermore, fMRI analyses revealed that this memory benefit was driven by attention modulation of visual cortex activity, as increased suppression of the previously attended location in visual cortex during target object encoding predicted better subsequent recognition memory performance. These results suggest that not all attention orienting impacts learning and memory equally. |
Nicholas E. Myers; Lena Walther; George Wallis; Mark G. Stokes; Anna C. Nobre In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 492–508, 2015. @article{Myers2015a,Working memory (WM) is strongly influenced by attention. In visual WM tasks, recall performance can be improved by an attention-guiding cue presented before encoding (precue) or during maintenance (retrocue). Although precues and retro- cues recruit a similar frontoparietal control network, the two are likely to exhibit some processing differences, because pre- cues invite anticipation of upcoming information whereas retro- cues may guide prioritization, protection, and selection of information already in mind. Here we explored the behavioral and electrophysiological differences between precueing and retrocueing in a new visual WM task designed to permit a direct comparison between cueing conditions. We found marked differences in ERP profiles between the precue and retrocue conditions. In line with precues primarily generating an anti- cipatory shift of attention toward the location of an upcoming item, we found a robust lateralization in late cue-evoked po- tentials associated with target anticipation. Retrocues elicited a different pattern of ERPs that was compatible with an early selec- tion mechanism, but not with stimulus anticipation. In contrast to the distinct ERP patterns, alpha-band (8–14 Hz) lateralization was indistinguishable between cue types (reflecting, in both conditions, the location of the cued item). We speculate that, whereas alpha-band lateralization after a precue is likely to enable anticipatory attention, lateralization after a retrocue may instead enable the controlled spatiotopic access to recently encoded visual information |
Katharine N. Thakkar; Jeffrey D. Schall; Stephan Heckers; Sohee Park Disrupted saccadic corollary discharge in schizophrenia Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 27, pp. 9935–9945, 2015. @article{Thakkar2015,Disruptions in corollary discharge (CD), motor signals that send information to sensory areas and allow for prediction of sensory states, are argued to underlie the perceived loss of agency in schizophrenia. Behavioral and neurophysiological evidence for CD in primates comes largely from the saccadic double-step task, which requires participants to make two visually triggered saccadic eye movements in brief succession. Healthy individuals use CD to anticipate the change in eye position resulting from the first saccade when preparing the second saccade. In the current study with human participants, schizophrenia patients and healthy controls of both sexes performed a modified double-step task. Most trials required a saccade to a single visual target (T1). On a subset of trials, a second target (T2) was flashed shortly following T1. Subjects were instructed to look directly at T2. Healthy individuals also use CD to make rapid, corrective responses following erroneous saccades to T1. To assess CD in schizophrenia, we examined the following on error trials: (1) frequency and latency of corrective saccades, and (2) mislocalization of the corrective (second) saccade in the direction predicted by a failure to use CD to account for the first eye movement. Consistent with disrupted CD, patients made fewer and slower error corrections. Importantly, the corrective saccade vector angle was biased in a manner consistent with disrupted CD. These results provide novel and clear evidence for dysfunctional CD in the oculomotor system in patients with schizophrenia. Based on neurophysiology work, these disturbances might have their basis in medial thalamus dysfunction. |
Alba Tuninetti; Tessa Warren; Natasha Tokowicz Cue strength in second-language processing: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 568–584, 2015. @article{Tuninetti2015,This study used eye-tracking and grammaticality judgement measures to examine how second-language (L2) learners process syntactic violations in English. Participants were native Arabic and native Mandarin Chinese speakers studying English as an L2, and monolingual English-speaking controls. The violations involved incorrect word order and differed in two ways predicted to be important by the unified competition model [UCM; MacWhinney, B. (2005). A unified model of language acquisition. In J. F. Kroll & A. M. B. de Groot (Eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches (pp. 49-67). Oxford: Oxford University Press.]. First, one violation had more and stronger cues to ungrammaticality than the other. Second, the grammaticality of these word orders varied in Arabic and Mandarin Chinese. Sensitivity to violations was relatively quick overall, across all groups. Sensitivity also was related to the number and strength of cues to ungrammaticality regardless of native language, which is consistent with the general principles of the UCM. However, there was little evidence of cross-language transfer effects in either eye movements or grammaticality judgements. |
Ming Yan; Werner Sommer Parafoveal-on-foveal effects of emotional word semantics in reading chinese sentences: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 1237–1243, 2015. @article{Yan2015b,Despite the well-known influence of emotional meaning on cognition, relatively less is known about its effects on reading behavior. We investigated whether fixation behavior during the reading of Chinese sentences is influenced by emotional word meaning in the parafovea. Two-character target words embedded into the same sentence frames provided emotionally positive, negative, or neutral contents. Fixation durations on neutral pretarget words were prolonged for positive parafoveal words and for highly frequent negative parafoveal words. In addition, fixation durations on foveal emotional words were shorter than those on neutral words. We also found that the role of emotional words varied as a function of their valence during foveal and parafoveal processing. These findings suggest a processing advantage for emotional words relative to emotionally neutral stimuli in foveal and parafoveal vision. We discuss implications for the notion of attention attraction due to emotional content. |
Tommy C. Blanchard; Caleb E. Strait; Benjamin Y. Hayden Ramping ensemble activity in dorsal anterior cingulate neurons during persistent commitment to a decision Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 114, no. 4, pp. 2439–2449, 2015. @article{Blanchard2015a,We frequently need to commit to a choice to achieve our goals; however, the neural processes that keep us motivated in pursuit of delayed goals remain obscure. We examined ensemble responses of neurons in macaque dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), an area previously implicated in self-control and persistence, in a task that requires commitment to a choice to obtain a reward. After reward receipt, dACC neurons signaled reward amount with characteristic ensemble firing rate patterns; during the delay in anticipation of the reward, ensemble activity smoothly and gradually came to resemble the postreward pattern. On the subset of risky trials, in which a reward was anticipated with 50% certainty, ramping ensemble activity evolved to the pattern associated with the anticipated reward (and not with the anticipated loss) and then, on loss trials, took on an inverted form anticorrelated with the form associated with a win. These findings enrich our knowledge of reward processing in dACC and may have broader implications for our understanding of persistence and self-control. |
Andrew L. Cohen; Adrian Staub Within-subject consistency and between-subject variability in Bayesian reasoning strategies Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 81, pp. 26–47, 2015. @article{Cohen2015,It is well known that people tend to perform poorly when asked to determine a posterior probability on the basis of a base rate, true positive rate, and false positive rate. The present experiments assessed the extent to which individual participants nevertheless adopt consistent strategies in these Bayesian reasoning problems, and investigated the nature of these strategies. In two experiments, one laboratory-based and one internet-based, each participant completed 36 problems with factorially manipulated probabilities. Many participants applied consistent strategies involving use of only one of the three probabilities provided in the problem, or additive combination of two of the probabilities. There was, however, substantial variability across participants in which probabilities were taken into account. In the laboratory experiment, participants' eye movements were tracked as they read the problems. There was evidence of a relationship between information use and attention to a source of information. Participants' self-assessments of their performance, however, revealed little confidence that the strategies they applied were actually correct. These results suggest that the hypothesis of base rate neglect actually underestimates people's difficulty with Bayesian reasoning, but also suggest that participants are aware of their ignorance. |
Peter J. Kohler; Patrick Cavanagh; Peter U. Tse Motion-induced position shifts are influenced by global motion, but dominated by component motion Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 110, pp. 93–99, 2015. @article{Kohler2015,Object motion and position have long been thought to involve largely independent visual computations. However, the motion-induced position shift (Eagleman & Sejnowski, 2007) shows that the perceived position of a briefly presented static object can be influenced by nearby moving contours. Here we combine a particularly strong example of this illusion with a bistable global motion stimulus to compare the relative effects of global and component motion on the shift in perceived position. We used a horizontally oscillating diamond (Lorenceau & Shiffrar, 1992) that produces two possible global directions (left and right when fully visible versus up and down when vertices are occluded by vertical bars) as well as the oblique component motion orthogonal to each contour. To measure the motion-induced shift we flashed a test dot on the contour as the diamond reversed direction (Cavanagh & Anstis, 2013). Although the global motion had a highly significant influence on the direction and size of the motion-induced position shift, the perceived displacement of the probe was closer to the direction of the component motion. These findings show that while global motion can clearly influence position shifts, it is the component motion that dominates in setting the position shift. This is true even though the perceived motion is in the global direction and the component motion is not consciously experienced. This suggests that perceived position is influenced by motion signals that arise earlier in time or earlier in processing compared to the stage at which the conscious experience of motion is determined. |
Carly J. Leonard; Angela Balestreri; Steven J. Luck Interactions between space-based and feature-based attention Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 11–16, 2015. @article{Leonard2015,Although early research suggested that attention to nonspatial features (i.e., red) was confined to stimuli appearing at an attended spatial location, more recent research has emphasized the global nature of feature-based attention. For example, a distractor sharing a target feature may capture attention even if it occurs at a task-irrelevant location. Such findings have been used to argue that feature-based attention operates independently of spatial attention. However, feature-based attention may nonetheless interact with spatial attention, yielding larger feature-based effects at attended locations than at unattended locations. The present study tested this possibility. In 2 experiments, participants viewed a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream and identified a target letter defined by its color. Target-colored distractors were presented at various task-irrelevant locations during the RSVP stream. We found that feature-driven attentional capture effects were largest when the target-colored distractor was closer to the attended location. These results demonstrate that spatial attention modulates the strength of feature-based attention capture, calling into question the prior evidence that feature-based attention operates in a global manner that is independent of spatial attention. |
Manuel Perea; María Jiménez; Miguel Martín-Suesta; Pablo Gómez Letter position coding across modalities: Braille and sighted reading of sentences with jumbled words Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 531–536, 2015. @article{Perea2015,This article explores how letter position coding is attained during braille reading and its implications for models of word recognition. When text is presented visually, the reading process easily adjusts to the jumbling of some letters (jugde-judge), with a small cost in reading speed. Two explanations have been proposed: One relies on a general mechanism of perceptual uncertainty at the visual level, and the other focuses on the activation of an abstract level of representation (i.e., bigrams) that is shared by all orthographic codes. Thus, these explanations make differential predictions about reading in a tactile modality. In the present study, congenitally blind readers read sentences presented on a braille display that tracked the finger position. The sentences either were intact or involved letter transpositions. A parallel experiment was conducted in the visual modality. Results revealed a substantially greater reading cost for the sentences with transposed-letter words in braille readers. In contrast with the findings with sighted readers, in which there is a cost of transpositions in the external (initial and final) letters, the reading cost in braille readers occurs serially, with a large cost for initial letter transpositions. Thus, these data suggest that the letter-position-related effects in visual word recognition are due to the characteristics of the visual stream. |
Katharine N. Thakkar; Jeffrey D. Schall; Gordon D. Logan; Sohee Park Cognitive control of gaze in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia Journal Article In: Psychiatry Research, vol. 225, no. 3, pp. 254–262, 2015. @article{Thakkar2015a,The objective of the present study was to compare two components of executive functioning, response monitoring and inhibition, in bipolar disorder (BP) and schizophrenia (SZ). The saccadic countermanding task is a translational paradigm optimized for detecting subtle abnormalities in response monitoring and response inhibition. We have previously reported countermanding performance abnormalities in SZ, but the degree to which these impairments are shared by other psychotic disorders is unknown. 18 BP, 17 SZ, and 16 demographically matched healthy controls (HC) participated in a saccadic countermanding task. Performance on the countermanding task is approximated as a race between movement generation and inhibition processes; this model provides an estimate of the time needed to cancel a planned movement. Response monitoring was assessed by the reaction time (RT) adjustments based on trial history. Like SZ patients, BP patients needed more time to cancel a planned movement. The two patient groups had equivalent inhibition efficiency. On trial history-based RT adjustments, however, we found a trend towards exaggerated trial history-based slowing in SZ compared to BP. Findings have implications for understanding the neurobiology of cognitive control, for defining the etiological overlap between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and for developing pharmacological treatments of cognitive impairments. |
Basil Wahn; Peter König Audition and vision share spatial attentional resources, yet attentional load does not disrupt audiovisual integration Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 1084, 2015. @article{Wahn2015,Humans continuously receive and integrate information from several sensory modalities. However, attentional resources limit the amount of information that can be processed. It is not yet clear how attentional resources and multisensory processing are interrelated. Specifically, the following questions arise: (1) Are there distinct spatial attentional resources for each sensory modality? and (2) Does attentional load affect multisensory integration? We investigated these questions using a dual task paradigm: participants performed two spatial tasks (a multiple object tracking task and a localization task), either separately (single task condition) or simultaneously (dual task condition). In the multiple object tracking task, participants visually tracked a small subset of several randomly moving objects. In the localization task, participants received either visual, auditory, or redundant visual and auditory location cues. In the dual task condition, we found a substantial decrease in participants' performance relative to the results of the single task condition. Importantly, participants performed equally well in the dual task condition regardless of the location cues' modality. This result suggests that having spatial information coming from different modalities does not facilitate performance, thereby indicating shared spatial attentional resources for the auditory and visual modality. Furthermore, we found that participants integrated redundant multisensory information similarly even when they experienced additional attentional load in the dual task condition. Overall, findings suggest that (1) visual and auditory spatial attentional resources are shared and that (2) audiovisual integration of spatial information occurs in an pre-attentive processing stage. |
Katharine N. Thakkar; Jeffrey D. Schall; Gordon D. Logan; Sohee Park Response inhibition and response monitoring in a saccadic double-step task in schizophrenia Journal Article In: Brain and Cognition, vol. 95, pp. 90–98, 2015. @article{Thakkar2015b,Background: Cognitive control impairments are linked to functional outcome in schizophrenia. The goal of the current study was to investigate precise abnormalities in two aspects of cognitive control: reactively changing a prepared response, and monitoring performance and adjusting behavior accordingly. We adapted an oculomotor task from neurophysiological studies of the cellular basis of cognitive control in nonhuman primates. Methods: 16 medicated outpatients with schizophrenia (SZ) and 18 demographically-matched healthy controls performed the modified double-step task. In this task, participants were required to make a saccade to a visual target. Infrequently, the target jumped to a new location and participants were instructed to rapidly inhibit and change their response. A race model provided an estimate of the time needed to cancel a planned movement. Response monitoring was assessed by measuring reaction time (RT) adjustments based on trial history. Results: SZ patients had normal visually-guided saccadic RTs but required more time to switch the response to the new target location. Additionally, the estimated latency of inhibition was longer in patients and related to employment. Finally, although both groups slowed down on trials that required inhibiting and changing a response, patients showed exaggerated performance-based adjustments in RTs, which was correlated with positive symptom severity. Conclusions: SZ patients have impairments in rapidly inhibiting eye movements and show idiosyncratic response monitoring. These results are consistent with functional abnormalities in a network involving cortical oculomotor regions, the superior colliculus, and basal ganglia, as described in neurophysiological studies of non-human primates using an identical paradigm, and provide a translational bridge for understanding cognitive symptoms of SZ. |
Basil Wahn; Peter König Vision and haptics share spatial attentional resources and visuotactile integration is not affected by high attentional load Journal Article In: Multisensory Research, vol. 28, no. 3-4, pp. 371–392, 2015. @article{Wahn2015a,Human information processing is limited by attentional resources. Two questions that are discussed in multisensory research are (1) whether there are separate spatial attentional resources for each sensory modality and (2) whether multisensory integration is influenced by attentional load. We investigated these questions using a dual task paradigm: Participants performed two spatial tasks (a multiple object tracking ['MOT'] task and a localization ['LOC'] task) either separately (single task condition) or simultaneously (dual task condition). In the MOT task, participants visually tracked a small subset of several randomly moving objects. In the LOC task, participants either received visual, tactile, or redundant visual and tactile location cues. In the dual task condition, we found a substantial decrease in participants' performance and an increase in participants' mental effort (indicated by an increase in pupil size) relative to the single task condition. Importantly, participants performed equally well in the dual task condition regardless of whether they received visual, tactile, or redundant multisensory (visual and tactile) location cues in the LOC task. This result suggests that having spatial information coming from different modalities does not facilitate performance, thereby indicating shared spatial attentional resources for the tactile and visual modality. Also, we found that participants integrated redundant multisensory information optimally even when they experienced additional attentional load in the dual task condition. Overall, findings suggest that (1) spatial attentional resources for the tactile and visual modality overlap and that (2) the integration of spatial cues from these two modalities occurs at an early pre-attentive processing stage. |
Stefan Huber; Sonja Cornelsen; Korbinian Moeller; Hans-Christoph Nuerk Toward a model framework of generalized parallel componential processing of multi-symbol numbers Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 732–745, 2015. @article{Huber2015,In this article, we propose and evaluate a new model framework of parallel componential multi-symbol number processing, generalizing the idea of parallel componential processing of multi-digit numbers to the case of negative numbers by considering the polarity signs similar to single digits. In a first step, we evaluated this account by defining and investigating a sign-decade compatibility effect for the comparison of positive and negative numbers, which extends the unit-decade compatibility effect in 2-digit number processing. Then, we evaluated whether the model is capable of accounting for previous findings in negative number processing. In a magnitude comparison task, in which participants had to single out the larger of 2 integers, we observed a reliable sign-decade compatibility effect with prolonged reaction times for incompatible (e.g., −97 vs. +53; in which the number with the larger decade digit has the smaller, i.e., negative polarity sign) as compared with sign-decade compatible number pairs (e.g., −53 vs. +97). Moreover, an analysis of participants' eye fixation behavior corroborated our model of parallel componential processing of multi-symbol numbers. These results are discussed in light of concurrent theoretical notions about negative number processing. On the basis of the present results, we propose a generalized integrated model framework of parallel componential multi-symbol processing. |
Naoko Koide; Takatomi Kubo; Satoshi Nishida; Tomohiro Shibata; Kazushi Ikeda Art expertise reduces influence of visual salience on fixation in viewing abstract- paintings Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. e0117696, 2015. @article{Koide2015,When viewing a painting, artists perceive more information from the painting on the basis of their experience and knowledge than art novices do. This difference can be reflected in eye scan paths during viewing of paintings. Distributions of scan paths of artists are different from those of novices even when the paintings contain no figurative object (i.e. abstract paintings). There are two possible explanations for this difference of scan paths. One is that artists have high sensitivity to high-level features such as textures and composition of colors and therefore their fixations are more driven by such features compared with novices. The other is that fixations of artists are more attracted by salient features than those of novices and the fixations are driven by low-level features. To test these, wemeasured eye fixations of artists and novices during the free viewing of various abstract paintings and compared the distribution of their fixations for each painting with a topological attentional map that quantifies the conspicuity of low-level features in the painting (i.e. saliency map).We found that the fixation distribution of artists was more distinguishable from the saliency map than that of novices. This difference indicates that fixations of artists are less driven by low-level features than those of novices. Our result suggests that artists may extract visual informa- tion from paintings based on high-level features. This ability of artists may be associated with artists' deep aesthetic appreciation of paintings. |