All EyeLink Eye Tracker Publications
All 14,000+ peer-reviewed EyeLink research publications up until 2025 (with some early 2026s) 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!
2016 |
Heather D. Lucas; Jim M. Monti; Edward McAuley; Patrick D. Watson; Arthur F. Kramer; Neal J. Cohen Relational memory and self-efficacy measures reveal distinct profiles of subjective memory concerns in older adults Journal Article In: Neuropsychology, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 568–578, 2016. @article{Lucas2016,Objective: Subjective memory concerns (SMCs) in healthy older adults are associated with future decline and can indicate preclinical dementia. However, SMCs may be multiply determined, and often correlate with affective or psychosocial variables rather than with performance on memory tests. Our objective was to identify sensitive and selective methods to disentangle the underlying causes of SMCs. Method: Because preclinical dementia pathology targets the hippocampus, we hypothesized that performance on hippocampally dependent relational memory tests would correlate with SMCs. We thus administered a series of memory tasks with varying dependence on relational memory processing to 91 older adults, along with questionnaires assessing depression, anxiety, and memory self-efficacy. We used correla-tional, regression, and mediation analyses to compare the variance in SMCs accounted for by these measures. Results: Performance on the task most dependent on relational memory processing showed a stronger negative association with SMCs than did other memory performance metrics. SMCs were also negatively associated with memory self-efficacy. These 2 measures, along with age and education, accounted for 40% of the variance in SMCs. Self-efficacy and relational memory were uncorrelated and independent predictors of SMCs. Moreover, self-efficacy statistically mediated the relationship between SMCs and depression and anxiety, which can be detrimental to cognitive aging. Conclusions: These data identify multiple mechanisms that can contribute to SMCs, and suggest that SMCs can both cause and be caused by age-related cognitive decline. Relational memory measures may be effective assays of objective memory difficulties, while assessing self-efficacy could identify detrimental affective responses to cognitive aging. |
Tiffany Hon; Ravi K. Das; Sunjeev K. Kamboj The effects of cognitive reappraisal following retrieval-procedures designed to destabilize alcohol memories in high-risk drinkers Journal Article In: Psychopharmacology, vol. 233, no. 5, pp. 851–861, 2016. @article{Hon2016,RATIONALE: Addiction is a disorder of motivational learning and memory. Maladaptive motivational memories linking drug-associated stimuli to drug seeking are formed over hundreds of reinforcement trials and accompanied by aberrant neuroadaptation in the mesocorticolimbic reward system. Such memories are resistant to extinction. However, the discovery of retrieval-dependent memory plasticity has opened up the possibility of permanent modification of established (long-term) memories during 'reconsolidation'.$backslash$n$backslash$nOBJECTIVES: Here, we investigate whether reappraisal of maladaptive alcohol cognitions performed after procedures designed to destabilize alcohol memory networks affected subsequent alcohol memory, craving, drinking and attentional bias.$backslash$n$backslash$nMETHODS: Forty-seven at-risk drinkers attended two sessions. On the first lab session, participants underwent one of two prediction error-generating procedures in which outcome expectancies were violated while retrieving alcohol memories (omission and value prediction error groups). Participants in a control group retrieved non-alcohol memories. Participants then reappraised personally relevant maladaptive alcohol memories and completed measures of reappraisal recall, alcohol verbal fluency and craving. Seven days later, they repeated these measures along with attentional bias assessment.$backslash$n$backslash$nRESULTS: Omission prediction error (being unexpectedly prevented from drinking beer), but not a value prediction error (drinking unexpectedly bitter-tasting beer) or control procedure (drinking unexpectedly bitter orange juice), was associated with significant reductions in verbal fluency for positive alcohol-related words. No other statistically robust outcomes were detected.$backslash$n$backslash$nCONCLUSIONS: This study provides partial preliminary support for the idea that a common psychotherapeutic strategy used in the context of putative memory retrieval-destabilization can alter accessibility of alcohol semantic networks. Further research delineating the necessary and sufficient requirements for producing alterations in alcohol memory performance based on memory destabilization is still required. |
Karolina M. Lempert; Eli Johnson; Elizabeth A. Phelps Emotional arousal predicts intertemporal choice Journal Article In: Emotion, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 647–656, 2016. @article{Lempert2016,People generally prefer immediate rewards to rewards received after a delay, often even when the delayed reward is larger. This phenomenon is known as temporal discounting. It has been suggested that preferences for immediate rewards may be due to their being more concrete than delayed rewards. This concreteness may evoke an enhanced emotional response. Indeed, manipulating the representation of a future reward to make it more concrete has been shown to heighten the reward's subjective emotional intensity, making people more likely to choose it. Here the authors use an objective measure of arousal—pupil dilation—to investigate if emotional arousal mediates the influence of delayed reward concreteness on choice. They recorded pupil dilation responses while participants made choices between immediate and delayed rewards. They manipulated concreteness through time interval framing: delayed rewards were presented either with the date on which they would be received (e.g., “$30, May 3”; DATE condition, more concrete) or in terms of delay to receipt (e.g., “$30, 7 days; DAYS condition, less concrete). Contrary to prior work, participants were not overall more patient in the DATE condition. However, there was individual variability in response to time framing, and this variability was predicted by differences in pupil dilation between conditions. Emotional arousal increased as the subjective value of delayed rewards increased, and predicted choice of the delayed reward on each trial. This study advances our understanding of the role of emotion in temporal discounting. |
Victoria A. Roach; Graham M. Fraser; James H. Kryklywy; Derek G. V. Mitchell; Timothy D. Wilson The eye of the beholder: Can patterns in eye movement reveal aptitudes for spatial reasoning? Journal Article In: Anatomical Sciences Education, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 357–366, 2016. @article{Roach2016,Mental rotation ability (MRA) is linked to academic success in the spatially complex Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine, and Mathematics (STEMM) disciplines, and anatomical sciences. Mental rotation literature suggests that MRA may manifest in the movement of the eyes. Quantification of eye movement data may serve to distinguish MRA across individuals, and serve as a consideration when designing visualizations for instruction. It is hypothesized that high-MRA individuals will demonstrate fewer eye fixations, conduct shorter average fixation durations (AFD), and demonstrate shorter response times, than low-MRA individuals. Additionally, individuals with different levels of MRA will attend to different features of the block-figures presented in the electronic mental rotations test (EMRT). All participants (n = 23) completed the EMRT while metrics of eye movement were collected. The test required participants view pairs of three-dimensional (3D) shapes, and identify if the pair is rotated but identical, or two different structures. Temporal analysis revealed no significant correlations between response time, average fixation durations, or number of fixations and mental rotation ability. Further analysis of within-participant variability yielded a significant correlation for response time variability, but no correlation between AFD variability and variability in the number of fixations. Additional analysis of salience revealed that during problem solving, individuals of differing MRA attended to different features of the block images; suggesting that eye movements directed at salient features may contribute to differences in mental rotations ability, and may ultimately serve to predict success in anatomy. |
Matteo Toscani; Sunčica Zdravković; Karl R. Gegenfurtner Lightness perception for surfaces moving through different illumination levels Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 16, no. 15, pp. 1–18, 2016. @article{Toscani2016,Lightness perception has mainly been studied with static scenes so far. This study presents four experiments investigating lightness perception under dynamic illumination conditions. We asked participants for lightness matches of a virtual three-dimensional target moving through a light field while their eye movements were recorded. We found that the target appeared differently, depending on the direction of motion in the light field and its precise position in the light field. Lightness was also strongly affected by the choice of fixation positions with the spatiotemporal image sequence. Overall, lightness constancy was improved when observers could freely view the object, over when they were forced to fixate certain regions. Our results show that dynamic scenes and nonuniform light fields are particularly challenging for our visual system. Eye movements in such scenarios are chosen to improve lightness constancy. |
Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder; Tori E. Foster; Andrea M. Zawoyski Repeated versus wide reading: A randomized control design study examining the impact of fluency interventions on underlying reading behavior Journal Article In: Journal of School Psychology, vol. 59, pp. 13–38, 2016. @article{Ardoin2016,Repeated readings (RR) has garnered much attention as an evidence based intervention designed to improve all components of reading fluency (rate, accuracy, prosody, and comprehension). Despite this attention, there is not an abundance of research comparing its effectiveness to other potential interventions. The current study presents the findings from a randomized control trial study involving the assignment of 168 second grade students to a RR, wide reading (WR), or business as usual condition. Intervention students were provided with 9–10 weeks of intervention with sessions occurring four times per week. Pre- and post-testing were conducted using Woodcock-Johnson III reading achievement measures (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001, curriculum-based measurement (CBM) probes, measures of prosody, and measures of students' eye movements when reading. Changes in fluency were also monitored using weekly CBM progress monitoring procedures. Data were collected on the amount of time students spent reading and the number of words read by students during each intervention session. Results indicate substantial gains made by students across conditions, with some measures indicating greater gains by students in the two intervention conditions. Analyses do not indicate that RR was superior to WR. In addition to expanding the RR literature, this study greatly expands research evaluating changes in reading behaviors that occur with improvements in reading fluency. Implications regarding whether schools should provide more opportunities to repeatedly practice the same text (i.e., RR) or practice a wide range of text (i.e., WR) are provided. |
Yoram S. Bonneh; Yael Adini; Uri Polat Contrast sensitivity revealed by spontaneous eyeblinks: Evidence for a common mechanism of oculomotor inhibition Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 16, no. 7, pp. 1–15, 2016. @article{Bonneh2016,Spontaneous eyeblinks are known to serve important physiological functions, and recent evidence shows that they are also linked to cognitive processes. It is yet unclear whether this link reflects a crude rate modulation or, alternatively, an automatic and precise process, tightly linked to the low-level properties of sensory stimuli. We have recently reported (Y. S. Bonneh, Adini, & Polat, 2015) that, for microsaccades, the onset and release from inhibition in response to transient stimuli depend systematically on the low-level stimulus parameters. Here we reanalyzed our previous data for both microsaccades and eyeblinks for observers with sufficient blinking (.10% of trials, 18 of 23 observers tested) who watched and silently counted sequences of Gabor patches at 1 Hz with varied contrast and spatial frequency. We found that spontaneous eyeblinks, although less frequent, were similar to microsaccades in their modulation pattern in response to transient stimuli, demonstrating inhibition and rebound, which were dependent on the contrast and spatial frequency of the stimuli. The average blink response time, measured as the latency of the first blink following its release from inhibition, was longer for lower contrast and higher spatial frequency. Importantly, it was highly correlated with a similar measure for microsaccades as well as with psychophysical measures of contrast sensitivity. These results suggest that both eyeblinks and microsaccades are linked to the same inhibitory mechanism that presumably turns off oculomotor events while processing previous events and generates a rebound effect upon its release. The onset of both eyeblinks and microsaccades may thus reflect the time course of this mechanism and the associated cognitive process. |
Ha Hong; Daniel L. K. Yamins; Najib J. Majaj; James J. DiCarlo Explicit information for category-orthogonal object properties increases along the ventral stream Journal Article In: Nature Neuroscience, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 613–622, 2016. @article{Hong2016,Extensive research has revealed that the ventral visual stream hierarchically builds a robust representation for supporting visual object categorization tasks. We systematically explored the ability of multiple ventral visual areas to support a variety of 'category-orthogonal' object properties such as position, size and pose. For complex naturalistic stimuli, we found that the inferior temporal (IT) population encodes all measured category-orthogonal object properties, including those properties often considered to be low-level features (for example, position), more explicitly than earlier ventral stream areas. We also found that the IT population better predicts human performance patterns across properties. A hierarchical neural network model based on simple computational principles generates these same cross-area patterns of information. Taken together, our empirical results support the hypothesis that all behaviorally relevant object properties are extracted in concert up the ventral visual hierarchy, and our computational model explains how that hierarchy might be built. |
Paul Zerr; Katharine N. Thakkar; Siarhei Uzunbajakau; Stefan Van der Stigchel Error compensation in random vector double step saccades with and without global adaptation Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 127, pp. 141–151, 2016. @article{Zerr2016,In saccade sequences without visual feedback endpoint errors pose a problem for subsequent saccades. Accurate error compensation has previously been demonstrated in double step saccades (DSS) and is thought to rely on a copy of the saccade motor vector. However, these studies typically use fixed target vectors on each trial, calling into question the generalizability of the findings due to the high stimulus predictability. We present a random walk DSS paradigm (random target vector amplitudes and directions) to provide a more complete, realistic and generalizable description of error compensation in saccade sequences. We regressed the vector between the endpoint of the second saccade and the endpoint of a hypothetical second saccade that does not take first saccade error into account on the ideal compensation vector. This provides a direct and complete estimation of error compensation in DSS. We observed error compensation with varying stimulus displays that was comparable to previous findings. We also employed this paradigm to extend experiments that showed accurate compensation for systematic undershoots after specific-vector saccade adaptation. Utilizing the random walk paradigm for saccade adaptation by Rolfs et al. (2010) together with our random walk DSS paradigm we now also demonstrate transfer of adaptation from reactive to memory guided saccades for global saccade adaptation. We developed a new, generalizable DSS paradigm with unpredictable stimuli and successfully employed it to verify, replicate and extend previous findings, demonstrating that endpoint errors are compensated for saccades in all directions and variable amplitudes. |
Yasmine El-Shamayleh; Anitha Pasupathy Contour curvature as an invariant code for objects in visual area V4 Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 20, pp. 5532–5543, 2016. @article{ElShamayleh2016,Size-invariant object recognition-the ability to recognize objects across transformations of scale-is a fundamental feature of biological and artificial vision. To investigate its basis in the primate cerebral cortex, we measured single neuron responses to stimuli of varying size in visual area V4, a cornerstone of the object-processing pathway, in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Leveraging two competing models for how neuronal selectivity for the bounding contours of objects may depend on stimulus size, we show that most V4 neurons (∼70%) encode objects in a size-invariant manner, consistent with selectivity for a size-independent parameter of boundary form: for these neurons, "normalized" curvature, rather than "absolute" curvature, provided a better account of responses. Our results demonstrate the suitability of contour curvature as a basis for size-invariant object representation in the visual cortex, and posit V4 as a foundation for behaviorally relevant object codes. |
Andrea Helo; Pia Rämä; Sebastian Pannasch; David Meary Eye movement patterns and visual attention during scene viewing in 3-to 12-month-olds Journal Article In: Visual Neuroscience, vol. 33, pp. e014, 2016. @article{Helo2016,Recently, two attentional modes have been associated with specific eye movement patterns during scene processing. Ambient mode, characterized by short fixations and long saccades during early scene inspection, is associated with localization of objects. Focal mode, characterized by longer fixations, is associated with more detailed object feature processing during later inspection phase. The aim of the present study was to investigate the development of these attentional modes. More specifically, we examined whether indications of ambient and focal attention modes are similar in infants and adults. Therefore, we measured eye movements in 3-to 12-months-old infants while exploring visual scenes. Our results show that both adults and 12-month-olds had shorter fixation durations within the first 1.5 s of scene viewing compared with later time phases (>2.5 s); indicating that there was a transition from ambient to focal processing during image inspection. In younger infants, fixation durations between two viewing phases did not differ. Our results suggest that at the end of the first year of life, infants have developed an adult-like scene viewing behavior. The evidence for the existence of distinct attentional processing mechanisms during early infancy furthermore underlines the importance of the concept of the two modes. |
Jason J. Ki; Simon P. Kelly; Lucas C. Parra Attention strongly modulates reliability of neural responses to naturalistic narrative stimuli Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 10, pp. 3092–3101, 2016. @article{Ki2016,Attentional engagement is a major determinant of how effectively we gather information through our senses. Alongside the sheer growth in the amount and variety of information content that we are presented with through modern media, there is increased variability in the degree to which we "absorb" that information. Traditional research on attention has illuminated the basic principles of sensory selection to isolated features or locations, but it provides little insight into the neural underpinnings of our attentional engagement with modern naturalistic content. Here, we show in human subjects that the reliability of an individual's neural responses with respect to a larger group provides a highly robust index of the level of attentional engagement with a naturalistic narrative stimulus. Specifically, fast electroencephalographic evoked responses were more strongly correlated across subjects when naturally attending to auditory or audiovisual narratives than when attention was directed inward to a mental arithmetic task during stimulus presentation. This effect was strongest for audiovisual stimuli with a cohesive narrative and greatly reduced for speech stimuli lacking meaning. For compelling audiovisual narratives, the effect is remarkably strong, allowing perfect discrimination between attentional state across individuals. Control experiments rule out possible confounds related to altered eye movement trajectories or order of presentation. We conclude that reliability of evoked activity reproduced across subjects viewing the same movie is highly sensitive to the attentional state of the viewer and listener, which is aided by a cohesive narrative. |
Oleg V. Komogortsev; Alexey Karpov Oculomotor plant characteristics : The effects of environment and stimulus Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 621–632, 2016. @article{Komogortsev2016,This paper presents an objective evaluation of the effects of environmental factors, such as stimulus presentation and eye tracking specifications, on the biometric accuracy of oculomotor plant characteristic (OPC) biometrics. The study examines the largest known dataset for eye movement biometrics, with eye movements recorded from 323 subjects over multiple sessions. Six spatial precision tiers (0.01°, 0.11°, 0.21°, 0.31°, 0.41°, 0.51°), six temporal resolution tiers (1000 Hz, 500 Hz, 250 Hz, 120 Hz, 75 Hz, 30 Hz), and three stimulus types (horizontal, random, textual) are evaluated to identify acceptable conditions under which to collect eye movement data. The results suggest the use of eye tracking equipment providing at least 0.1° spatial precision and 30 Hz sampling rate for biometric purposes, and the use of a horizontal pattern stimulus when using the two- dimensional oculomotor plant model developed by Komogortsev et al. [1] |
Lauri Oksama; Jukka Hyönä Position tracking and identity tracking are separate systems: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 146, no. 393-409, pp. 1–16, 2016. @article{Oksama2016,How do we track multiple moving objects in our visual environment? Some investigators argue that tracking is based on a parallel mechanism (e.g., Cavanagh & Alvarez, 2005; Pylyshyn, 1989), others argue that tracking contains a serial component (e.g. Holcombe & Chen, 2013; Oksama & Hyönä, 2008). In the present study, we put previous theories into a direct test by registering observers' eye movements when they tracked identical moving targets (the MOT task) or when they tracked distinct object identities (the MIT task). The eye movement technique is a useful tool to study whether overt focal attention is exploited during tracking. We found a qualitative difference between these tasks in terms of eye movements. When the participants tracked only position information (MOT), the observers had a clear preference for keeping their eyes fixed for a rather long time on the same screen position. In contrast, active eye behavior was observed when the observers tracked the identities of moving objects (MIT). The participants updated over four target identities with overt attention shifts. These data suggest that there are two separate systems involved in multiple object tracking. The position tracking system keeps track of the positions of the moving targets in parallel without the need of overt attention shifts in the form of eye movements. On the other hand, the identity tracking system maintains identity-location bindings in a serial fashion by utilizing overt attention shifts. |
Anna Antonia Pape; Markus Siegel Motor cortex activity predicts response alternation during sensorimotor decisions Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 7, pp. 13098, 2016. @article{Pape2016,Our actions are constantly guided by decisions based on sensory information. The motor cortex is traditionally viewed as the final output stage in this process, merely executing motor responses based on these decisions. However, it is not clear if, beyond this role, the motor cortex itself impacts response selection. Here, we report activity fluctuations over motor cortex measured using MEG, which are unrelated to choice content and predict responses to a visuomotor task seconds before decisions are made. These fluctuations are strongly influenced by the previous trial's response and predict a tendency to switch between response alternatives for consecutive decisions. This alternation behaviour depends on the size of neural signals still present from the previous response. Our results uncover a response-alternation bias in sensorimotor decision making. Furthermore, they suggest that motor cortex is more than an output stage and instead shapes response selection during sensorimotor decision making. |
Matthew F. Peterson; Jing Lin; Ian Zaun; Nancy Kanwisher Individual differences in face-looking behavior generalize from the lab to the world Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 16, no. 7, pp. 1–18, 2016. @article{Peterson2016,Recent laboratory studies have found large, stable individual differences in the location people first fixate when identifying faces, ranging from the brows to the mouth. Importantly, this variation is strongly associated with differences in fixation-specific identification performance such that an individual's recognition ability is maximized when looking at their preferred location (Mehoudar, Arizpe, Baker, & Yovel, 2014; Peterson & Eckstein, 2013). This finding suggests that face representations are retinotopic and individuals enact gaze strategies that optimize identification, yet the extent to which this behavior reflects real-world gaze behavior is unknown. Here, we used mobile eye-trackers to test whether individual differences in face-gaze generalize from lab to real-world vision. In-lab fixations were measured with a speeded face identification task, while real-world behavior was measured as subjects freely walked around the MIT campus. We found a strong correlation between the patterns of individual differences in face-gaze in the laboratory and real-world settings. Our findings support the hypothesis that individuals optimize real-world face identification by consistently fixating the same location and thus strongly constraining the space of retinotopic input. The methods developed for this study entailed collecting a large set of high-definition, wide field-of-view natural videos from head-mounted cameras and the viewer's fixation position, allowing us to characterize subject's actually-experienced real-world retinotopic images. These images enable us to ask how vision is optimized not just for the statistics of the “natural images” found in web databases, but of the truly natural, retinotopic images that have landed on actual human retinae during real-world experience. |
Ronald Berg; Ariel Zylberberg; Roozbeh Kiani; Michael N. Shadlen; Daniel M. Wolpert Confidence is the bridge between multi-stage decisions Journal Article In: Current Biology, vol. 26, no. 23, pp. 3157–3168, 2016. @article{Berg2016,Demanding tasks often require a series of decisions to reach a goal. Recent progress in perceptual decision-making has served to unite decision accuracy, speed, and confidence in a common framework of bounded evidence accumulation, furnishing a platform for the study of such multi-stage decisions. In many instances, the strategy applied to each decision, such as the speed-accuracy trade-off, ought to depend on the accuracy of the previous decisions. However, as the accuracy of each decision is often unknown to the decision maker, we hypothesized that subjects may carry forward a level of confidence in previous decisions to affect subsequent decisions. Subjects made two perceptual decisions sequentially and were rewarded only if they made both correctly. The speed and accuracy of individual decisions were explained by noisy evidence accumulation to a terminating bound. We found that subjects adjusted their speed-accuracy setting by elevating the termination bound on the second decision in proportion to their confidence in the first. The findings reveal a novel role for confidence and a degree of flexibility, hitherto unknown, in the brain's ability to rapidly and precisely modify the mechanisms that control the termination of a decision. |
Gerardo Fernández; Marcelo Sapognikoff; Salvador Guinjoan; David Orozco; Osvaldo Agamennoni Word processing during reading sentences in patients with schizophrenia: Evidences from the eyetracking technique Journal Article In: Comprehensive Psychiatry, vol. 68, pp. 193–200, 2016. @article{Fernandez2016b,Purpose: The current study analyze the effect of word properties (i.e., word length, word frequency and word predictability) on the eye movement behavior of patients with schizophrenia (SZ) compared to age-matched controls. Method: 18 SZ patients and 40 age matched controls participated in the study. Eye movements were recorded during reading regular sentences by using the eyetracking technique. Eye movement analyses were performed using linear mixed models. Findings: Analysis of eye movements revealed that patients with SZ decreased the amount of single fixations, increased their total number of second pass fixations compared with healthy individuals (Controls). In addition, SZ patients showed an increase in gaze duration, compared to Controls. Interestingly, the effects of current word frequency and current word length processing were similar in Controls and SZ patients. The high rate of second pass fixations and its low rate in single fixation might reveal impairments in working memory when integrating neighbor words. In contrast, word frequency and length processing might require less complex mechanisms, which were functioning in SZ patients. Conclusion: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study measuring how patients with SZ process dynamically well-defined words embedded in regular sentences. The findings suggest that evaluation of the resulting changes in eye movement behavior may supplement current symptom-based diagnosis. |
Yuki Kamide; Shane Lindsay; Christoph Scheepers; Anuenue Kukona Event processing in the visual world: Projected motion paths during spoken sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 804–812, 2016. @article{Kamide2016,Motion events in language describe the movement of an entity to another location along a path. In 2 eye-tracking experiments, we found that comprehension of motion events involves the online construction of a spatial mental model that integrates language with the visual world. In Experiment 1, participants listened to sentences describing the movement of an agent to a goal while viewing visual scenes depicting the agent, goal, and empty space in between. Crucially, verbs suggested either upward (e.g., jump) or downward (e.g., crawl) paths. We found that in the rare event of fixating the empty space between the agent and goal, visual attention was biased upward or downward in line with the verb. In Experiment 2, visual scenes depicted a central obstruction, which imposed further constraints on the paths and increased the likelihood of fixating the empty space between the agent and goal. The results from this experiment corroborated and refined the previous findings. Specifically, eye-movement effects started immediately after hearing the verb and were in line with data from an additional mouse-tracking task that encouraged a more explicit spatial reenactment of the motion event. In revealing how event comprehension operates in the visual world, these findings suggest a mental simulation process whereby spatial details of motion events are mapped onto the world through visual attention. The strength and detectability of such effects in overt eye-movements is constrained by the visual world and the fact that perceivers rarely fixate regions of empty space. |
Naveed A. Sheikh; Debra Titone The embodiment of emotional words in a second language: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Cognition and Emotion, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 488–500, 2016. @article{st16,The hypothesis that word representations are emotionally impoverished in a second language (L2) has variable support. However, this hypothesis has only been tested using tasks that present words in isolation or that require laboratory-specific decisions. Here, we recorded eye movements for 34 bilinguals who read sentences in their L2 with no goal other than comprehension, and compared them to 43 first language readers taken from our prior study. Positive words were read more quickly than neutral words in the L2 across first-pass reading time measures. However, this emotional advantage was absent for negative words for the earliest measures. Moreover, negative words but not positive words were influenced by concreteness, frequency and L2 proficiency in a manner similar to neutral words. Taken together, the findings suggest that only negative words are at risk of emotional disembodiment during L2 reading, perhaps because a positivity bias in L2 experiences ensures that positive words are emotionally grounded. |
Adrienne E. Barnes; Young-Suk Kim Low-skilled adult readers look like typically developing child readers: A comparison of reading skills and eye movement behavior Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 29, no. 9, pp. 1889–1914, 2016. @article{Barnes2016,The paper documents 41 European case histories that describe the seismogenic response of crystalline and sedimentary rocks to fluid injection. It is part of an on-going study to identify factors that have a bearing on the seismic hazard associated with fluid injection. The data generally support the view that injection in sedimentary rocks tends to be less seismogenic than in crystalline rocks. In both cases, the presence of faults near the wells that allow pressures to penetrate significant distances vertically and laterally can be expected to increase the risk of producing felt events. All cases of injection into crystalline rocks produce seismic events, albeit usually of non-damaging magnitudes, and all crystalline rock masses were found to be critically stressed, regardless of the strength of their seismogenic responses to injection. Thus, these data suggest that criticality of stress, whilst a necessary condition for producing earthquakes that would disturb (or be felt by) the local population, is not a sufficient condition. The data considered here are not fully consistent with the concept that injection into deeper crystalline formations tends to produce larger magnitude events. The data are too few to evaluate the combined effect of depth and injected fluid volume on the size of the largest events. Injection at sites with low natural seismicity, defined by the expectation that the local peak ground acceleration has less than a 10% chance of exceeding 0.07 g in 50 years, has not produced felt events. Although the database is limited, this suggests that low natural seismicity, corresponding to hazard levels at or below 0.07 g, may be a useful indicator of a low propensity for fluid injection to produce felt or damaging events. However, higher values do not necessarily imply a high propensity. |
Judith Degen; Michael K. Tanenhaus Availability of alternatives and the processing of scalar implicatures: A visual world eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 172–201, 2016. @article{Degen2016,Two visual world experiments investigated the processing of the implicature associated with some using a “gumball paradigm.” On each trial, participants saw an image of a gumball machine with an upper chamber with orange and blue gumballs and an empty lower chamber. Gumballs dropped to the lower chamber, creating a contrast between a partitioned set of gumballs of one color and an unpartitioned set of the other. Participants then evaluated spoken statements, such as “You got some of the blue gumballs.” Experiment 1 investigated the time course of the pragmatic enrichment from some to not all when the only utterance alternatives available to refer to the dif- ferent sets were some and all. In Experiment 2, the number terms two, three, four, and five were also included in the set of alternatives. Scalar implicatures were delayed relative to the interpreta- tion of literal statements with all only when number terms were available. The results are inter- preted as evidence for a constraint-based account of scalar implicature processing. |
Adam C. Snyder; Michael J. Morais; Matthew A. Smith Dynamics of excitatory and inhibitory networks are differentially altered by selective attention Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 116, no. 4, pp. 1807–1820, 2016. @article{sms16,Inhibition and excitation form two fundamental modes of neuronal interaction, yet we understand relatively little about their distinct roles in service of perceptual and cognitive processes. We developed a multidimensional waveform analysis to identify fast-spiking (putative inhibitory) and regular-spiking (putative excitatory) neurons in vivo and used this method to analyze how attention affects these two cell classes in visual area V4 of rhesus macaques. We found that putative inhibitory neurons had both greater increases in firing rate and decreases in correlated variability with attention when compared to putative excitatory neurons. Moreover, the time course of attention effects for putative inhibitory neurons more closely tracked the temporal statistics of target probability in our task. Finally, the session-to-session variability in a behavioral measure of attention co-varied with the magnitude of this effect. Together, these results suggest that selective targeting of inhibitory neurons and networks is a critical mechanism for attentional modulation. |
Ruud L. Van Den Brink; Peter R. Murphy; Sander Nieuwenhuis Pupil diameter tracks lapses of attention Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 10, pp. e0165274, 2016. @article{VanDenBrink2016,Our ability to sustain attention for prolonged periods of time is limited. Studies on the relationship between lapses of attention and psychophysiological markers of attentional state, such as pupil diameter, have yielded contradicting results. Here, we investigated the relationship between tonic fluctuations in pupil diameter and performance on a demanding sustained attention task. We found robust linear relationships between baseline pupil diameter and several measures of task performance, suggesting that attentional lapses tended to occur when pupil diameter was small. However, these observations were primarily driven by the joint effects of time-on-task on baseline pupil diameter and task performance. The linear relationships disappeared when we statistically controlled for time-on-task effects and were replaced by consistent inverted U-shaped relationships between baseline pupil diameter and each of the task performance measures, such that most false alarms and the longest and most variable response times occurred when pupil diameter was both relatively small and large. Finally, we observed strong linear relationships between the temporal derivative of pupil diameter and task performance measures, which were largely independent of time-on-task. Our results help to reconcile contradicting findings in the literature on pupil-linked changes in attentional state, and are consistent with the adaptive gain theory of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine function. Moreover, they suggest that the derivative of baseline pupil diameter is a potentially useful psychophysiological marker that could be used in the on-line prediction and prevention of attentional lapses. |
Sujaya Neupane; Daniel Guitton; Christopher C. Pack Dissociation of forward and convergent remapping in primate visual cortex Journal Article In: Current Biology, vol. 26, no. 12, pp. R491–R492, 2016. @article{Neupane2016,A fundamental concept in neuroscience is the receptive field, the area of space over which a neuron gathers information. Until about 25 years ago, visual receptive fields were thought to be determined entirely by the pattern of retinal inputs, so it was quite surprising to find neurons in primate cortex with receptive fields that changed position every time a saccade was executed [1]. Although this discovery has figured prominently into theories of visual perception, there is still much debate about the nature of the phenomenon: Some studies report forward remapping [1–3], in which receptive fields shift to their postsaccadic locations, and others report convergent remapping, in which receptive fields shift toward the saccade target [4]. These two possibilities can be difficult to distinguish, particularly when the two types of remapping lead to receptive field shifts in similar directions [5], as was the case in virtually all previous experiments. Here we report new data from neurons in primate cortical area V4, where both types of remapping have previously been reported [3,6]. Using an experimental configuration in which forward and convergent remapping would lead to receptive field shifts in opposite directions, we show that forward remapping is the dominant type of receptive field shift in V4. |
Christian H. Poth; Werner X. Schneider Breaking object correspondence across saccades impairs object recognition: The role of color and luminance Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 16, no. 11, pp. 1–12, 2016. @article{Poth2016,Rapid saccadic eye movements bring the foveal region of the eye's retina onto objects for high-acuity vision. Saccades change the location and resolution of objects' retinal images. To perceive objects as visually stable across saccades, correspondence between the objects before and after the saccade must be established. We have previously shown that breaking object correspondence across the saccade causes a decrement in object recognition (Poth, Herwig, & Schneider, 2015). Color and luminance can establish object correspondence, but it is unknown how these surface features contribute to transsaccadic visual processing. Here, we investigated whether changing the surface features color-and-luminance and color alone across saccades impairs postsaccadic object recognition. Participants made saccades to peripheral objects, which either maintained or changed their surface features across the saccade. After the saccade, participants briefly viewed a letter within the saccade target object (terminated by a pattern mask). Postsaccadic object recognition was assessed as participants' accuracy in reporting the letter. Experiment A used the colors green and red with different luminances as surface features, Experiment B blue and yellow with approximately the same luminances. Changing the surface features across the saccade deteriorated postsaccadic object recognition in both experiments. These findings reveal a link between object recognition and object correspondence relying on the surface features colors and luminance, which is currently not addressed in theories of transsaccadic perception. We interpret the findings within a recent theory ascribing this link to visual attention (Schneider, 2013). |
Ruud L. Brink; Thomas Pfeffer; Christopher M. Warren; Peter R. Murphy; Klodiana-Daphne Tona; Nic J. Wee; Eric J. Giltay; Martijn S. Noorden; Serge A. R. B. Rombouts; Tobias H. Donner; Sander Nieuwenhuis Catecholaminergic neuromodulation shapes intrinsic MRI functional connectivity in the human brain Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 30, pp. 7865–7876, 2016. @article{Brink2016,The brain commonly exhibits spontaneous (i.e., in the absence of a task) fluctuations in neural activity that are correlated across brain regions. It has been established that the spatial structure, or topography, of these intrinsic correlations is in part determined by the fixed anatomical connectivity between regions. However, it remains unclear which factors dynamically sculpt this topography as a function of brain state. Potential candidate factors are subcortical catecholaminergic neuromodulatory systems, such as the locus ceruleus-norepinephrine system, which send diffuse projections to most parts of the forebrain. Here, we systematically characterized the effects of endogenous central neuromodulation on correlated fluctuations during rest in the human brain. Using a double-blind placebo-controlled crossover design, we pharmacologically increased synaptic catecholamine levels by administering atomoxetine, an NE transporter blocker, and examined the effects on the strength and spatial structure of resting-state MRI functional connectivity. First, atomoxetine reduced the strength of inter-regional correlations across three levels of spatial organization, indicating that catecholamines reduce the strength of functional interactions during rest. Second, this modulatory effectonintrinsic correlations exhibited a substantial degree of spatial specificity: the decrease in functional connectivity showed an anterior–posterior gradient in the cortex, depended on the strength of baseline functional connectivity, and was strongest for connections between regions belonging to distinct resting-state networks. Thus, catecholamines reduce intrinsic correlations in a spatially heterogeneous fashion. We conclude that neuromodulation is an important factor shaping the topography of intrinsic functional connectivity. |
Helen Wray; Jeffrey S. Wood; Matthew Haigh; Andrew J. Stewart Threats may be negative promises (but warnings are more than negative tips) Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 593–600, 2016. @article{Wray2016,In everyday situations conditional promises, threats, tips, and warnings are commonplace. Previous research has reported disruption to eye movements during reading when conditional promises are produced by someone who does not have control over the conditional outcome event, but no such disruption for the processing of conditional tips. In the present paper, we examine how readers process conditional threats and warnings. We compare one account which views conditional threats and warnings simply as promises and tips with negative outcomes, with an alternative account which highlights their broader pragmatic differences. In an eye-tracking experiment we find evidence suggesting that, in processing terms, while threats operate like negative promises, warnings are more than negative tips. |
Paul J. Boon; Artem V. Belopolsky; Jan Theeuwes The role of the oculomotor system in updating visual-spatial working memory across saccades Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 9, pp. e0161829, 2016. @article{Boon2016,Visual-spatial workingmemory (VSWM) helps us to maintain and manipulate visual infor- mation in the absence of sensory input. It has been proposed thatVSWMis an emergent property of the oculomotor system. In the present study we investigated the role of the ocu- lomotor system in updating of spatial working memory representations across saccades. Participants had to maintain a location in memory while making a saccade to a different location. During the saccade the target was displaced, which went unnoticed by the partici- pants. After executing the saccade, participants had to indicate the memorized location. If memory updating fully relies on cancellation driven by extraretinal oculomotor signals, the displacement should have no effect on the perceived location of thememorized stimulus. However, if postsaccadic retinal information about the location of the saccade target is used, the perceived location will be shifted according to the target displacement. As it has been suggested thatmaintenance of accurate spatial representations across saccades is especially important for action control, we used different ways of reporting the location held in memory; amatch-to-sample task, a mouse click or by making another saccade. The results showed a small systematic target displacement bias in all response modalities. Parametric manipulation of the distance between the to-be-memorized stimulus and sac- cade target revealed that target displacement bias increased over time and changed its spa- tial profile from being initially centered on locations around the saccade target to becoming spatially global. Taken together results suggest that we neither rely exclusively on extraret- inal nor on retinal information in updating working memory representations across sac- cades. The relative contribution of retinal signals is not fixed but depends on both the time available to integrate these signals as well as the distance between the saccade target and the remembered location. |
Jessica Werthmann; Anita Jansen; Anne Roefs Make up your mind about food: A healthy mindset attenuates attention for high-calorie food in restrained eaters Journal Article In: Appetite, vol. 105, pp. 53–59, 2016. @article{Werthmann2016,Attention bias for food could be a cognitive pathway to overeating in obesity and restrained eating. Yet, empirical evidence for individual differences (e.g., in restrained eating and body mass index) in attention bias for food is mixed. We tested experimentally if temporarily induced health versus palatability mindsets influenced attention bias for food, and whether restrained eating moderated this relation. After manipulating mindset (health vs. palatability) experimentally, food-related attention bias was measured by eye-movements (EM) and response latencies (RL) during a visual probe task depicting high-calorie food and non-food. Restrained eating was assessed afterwards. A significant interaction of mindset and restrained eating on RL bias emerged, β = 0.36, t(58) = 2.05 |
Joris A. Elshout; Freekje Asten; Carel B. Hoyng; Douwe P. Bergsma; Albert V. Van den Berg Visual rehabilitation in chronic cerebral blindness: A randomized controlled crossover study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neurology, vol. 7, pp. 92, 2016. @article{Elshout2016,The treatment of patients suffering from cerebral blindness following stroke is a topic of much recent interest. Several types of treatment are under investigation, such as substitution with prisms and compensation training of saccades. A third approach, aimed at vision restitution is controversial, as a proper controlled study design is missing. In the current study, 27 chronic stroke patients with homonymous visual field defects were trained at home with a visual training device. We used a discrimination task for two types of stimuli: a static point stimulus and a new optic flow-discontinuity stimulus. Using a randomized controlled crossover design, each patient received two successive training rounds, one with high contrast stimuli in their affected hemifield (test) and one round with low-contrast stimuli in their intact hemifield (control). Goldmann and Humphrey perimetry were performed at the start of the study and following each training round. In addition, reading performance was measured. Goldmann perimetry revealed a statistically significant reduction of the visual field defect after the test training, but not after the control training or after no intervention. For both training rounds combined, Humphrey perimetry revealed that the effect of a directed training (sensitivity change in trained hemifield) exceeded that of an undirected training (sensitivity change in untrained hemifield). The interaction between trained and tested hemifield was just above the threshold of significance (p = 0.058). Interestingly, reduction of the field defect assessed by Goldmann perimetry increases with the difference between defect size as measured by Humphrey and Goldmann perimetry prior to training. Moreover, improvement of visual sensitivity measured by Humphrey perimetry increases with the fraction of non-responsive elements (i.e., more relative field loss) in Humphrey perimetry prior to training. Reading speed revealed a significant improvement after training. Our findings demonstrate that our training can result in reduction of the visual field. Improved reading performance after defect training further supports the significance of our training for improvement in daily life activities. |
Nina M. Hanning; Donatas Jonikaitis; Heiner Deubel; Martin Szinte Oculomotor selection underlies feature retention in visual working memory Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 115, no. 2, pp. 1071–1076, 2016. @article{Hanning2016,Oculomotor selection, spatial task relevance and visual working memory (WM) are described as three processes highly intertwined and sustained by similar cortical structures. However, as task relevant locations always constitute potential saccade targets, no study so far has been able to distinguish between oculomotor selection and spatial task relevance. Here, we designed an experiment that allowed us to dissociate in humans the contribution of task relevance, oculomotor selection and oculomotor execution to the retention of feature representations in WM. We report that task relevance and oculomotor selection lead to dissociable effects on feature WM maintenance. In a first task, in which an objects location was encoded as a saccade target, its feature representations were successfully maintained in WM, while they declined at non-saccade target locations. Likewise, we observed a similar WM benefit at the target of saccades that were prepared but never executed. In a second task, when an objects location was marked as task relevant but constituted a non-saccade target (a location to avoid), feature representations maintained at that location did not benefit. Combined, our results demonstrate that oculomotor selection is consistently associated with WM, whereas task relevance is not. This provides evidence for an overlapping circuitry serving saccade target selection and feature based WM, that can be dissociated from processes encoding task relevant locations. |
Srikant Jayaraman; Raymond M. Klein; Matthew D. Hilchey; Gouri Shanker Patil; Ramesh Kumar Mishra Spatial gradients of oculomotor inhibition of return in deaf and normal adults Journal Article In: Experimental Brain Research, vol. 234, no. 1, pp. 323–330, 2016. @article{Jayaraman2016,We explored the effect of deafness on the spatial (gradient) and temporal (decay) properties of oculomotor inhibition of return (IOR) using a task developed by Vaughan (Theoretical and applied aspects of eye movement research. Elsevier, North Holland, pp 143-150, 1984) in which participants made a sequence of saccades to carefully placed targets . Unlike IOR tasks in which ignored cues are used to explore the aftereffects of covert orienting, this task better approximates real-world behavior in which participants are free to make eye movements to potentially relevant inputs. Because IOR is a bias against returning attention and gaze to a previously attended location, we expected to find, and we did find, slower saccades toward previously fixated locations. Replicating Vaughan, a gradient of inhibition around a previously fixated location was observed and this inhibition began to decay after 1200 ms. Importantly, there were no significant differences between the deaf and the normal hearing subjects, on neither the magnitude of oculomotor IOR, nor its decay over time, nor its gradient around the previously fixated location . |
Daniel P. Newman; Steven W. Lockley; Gerard M. Loughnane; Ana C. P. Martins; Rafael Abe; Marco T. R. Zoratti; Simon P. Kelly; Megan H. O'Neill; Shantha M. W. Rajaratnam; Redmond G. O'Connell; Mark A. Bellgrove Ocular exposure to blue-enriched light has an asymmetric influence on neural activity and spatial attention Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 6, pp. 27754, 2016. @article{Newman2016,Brain networks subserving alertness in humans interact with those for spatial attention orienting. We employed blue-enriched light to directly manipulate alertness in healthy volunteers. We show for the first time that prior exposure to higher, relative to lower, intensities of blue-enriched light speeds response times to left, but not right, hemifield visual stimuli, via an asymmetric effect on right-hemisphere parieto-occipital α-power. Our data give rise to the tantalising possibility of light-based interventions for right hemisphere disorders of spatial attention. The mechanisms for alertness in humans interact with those for spatial attention orienting in an intriguing fash-ion 1,2 . For example, the debilitating inattention of left space observed in patients suffering from unilateral spatial neglect subsequent to right-hemisphere damage can be temporarily overcome by phasic alerting tones 3 . Sleep deprivation in healthy participants causes relative left hemifield inattention in the visual domain 4 , while a pro-nounced auditory inattention to left space occurs during drowsy periods prior to sleep onset 5 . Brain imaging work in both neglect patients and neurologically healthy participants suggests that the distribution of attention between the hemifields is balanced by competitive activation between the hemispheres, specifically within a bilaterally represented dorsal network for spatial attention orienting 1,6,7 . Current models propose that this bilateral orienting network interacts with the right-hemisphere-lateralised ventral network subserving non-spatial processes such as alertness 1,2 which may be preferentially innervated by the locus-coeruleus/noradrenergic (LC-NA) system 1,8,9 . Despite demonstrations that manipulations of alertness can transiently shift spatial attention bias, neuro-science has thus far failed to identify non-invasive methods of manipulating alertness that lead to an enduring improvement in attention to left space. One promising avenue for manipulating alertness is offered by recent photobiology studies of light. Although it is recognised that light exerts powerful alerting effects on brain and behaviour, its mechanism of action has only recently been studied. Specifically, recent research has identified a set of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) which are maximally sensitive to short wavelength (blue) light (~480 nm) and which mediate a light induced alerting signal to the human brain, in a dose dependent manner 10–12 |
Emiel Hoven; Franziska Hartung; Michael Burke; Roel M. Willems Individual differences in sensitivity to style during literary reading: Insights from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Collabra, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–16, 2016. @article{Hoven2016,Style is an important aspect of literature, and stylistic deviations are sometimes labeled foregrounded, since their manner of expression deviates from the stylistic default. Russian Formalists have claimed that foregrounding increases processing demands and therefore causes slower reading – an effect called retardation. We tested this claim experimentally by having participants read short literary stories while measuring their eye movements. Our results confirm that readers indeed read slower and make more regressions towards foregrounded passages as compared to passages that are not foregrounded. A closer look, however, reveals significant individual differences in sensitivity to foregrounding. Some readers in fact do not slow down at all when reading foregrounded passages. The slowing down effect for literariness was related to a slowing down effect for high perplexity (unexpected) words: those readers who slowed down more during literary passages also slowed down more during high perplexity words, even though no correlation between literariness and perplexity existed in the stories. We conclude that individual differences play a major role in processing of literary texts and argue for accounts of literary reading that focus on the interplay between reader and text. |
Laurence C. Jayet Bray; Sonia Bansal; Wilsaan M. Joiner Quantifying the spatial extent of the corollary discharge benefit to transsaccadic visual perception Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 115, no. 3, pp. 1132–1145, 2016. @article{JayetBray2016,Extraretinal information, such as corollary discharge (CD), is hypothesized to help compensate for saccade-induced visual input disruptions. However, support for this hypothesis is largely for one-dimensional transsaccadic visual changes, with little comprehensive information on the spatial characteristics. Here we systematically mapped the two-dimensional extent of this compensation by quantifying the insensitivity to different displacement metrics. Human subjects made saccades to targets positioned at different amplitudes (4° or 8°) and directions (rightward, oblique, or upward). After the saccade the initial target disappeared and, after a blank period, reappeared at a shifted location-a collinear, diagonal, or orthogonal displacement. Subjects reported the perceived shift direction, and we determined the displacement detection based on the perceptual judgments. The two-dimensional insensitivity fields resulting from the perceptual thresholds had spatial features similar to the saccadic eye movement variability: 1) scaled with movement amplitude, 2) oriented (less sensitive to the change) along the saccade vector, and 3) approximately constant in shape when normalized by movement amplitude. In addition, comparing the postsaccadic perceptual estimate of the presaccadic target location to that based solely on the postsaccade visual error showed that overall the perceptual estimate was approximately 50% more accurate and 35% less variable than estimates based solely on this visual information. However, this relationship was not uniform: The benefit of extraretinal information was observed largely for displacements with a component parallel to the saccade vector. These results suggest a graded use of extraretinal information when forming the postsaccadic perceptual evaluation of transsaccadic environmental changes. |
Neil Stewart; Simon Gächter; Takao Noguchi; Timothy L. Mullett Eye movements in strategic choice Journal Article In: Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, vol. 29, no. 2-3, pp. 137–156, 2016. @article{Stewart2016,In risky and other multiattribute choices, the process of choosing is well described by random walk or drift diffusion models in which evidence is accumulated over time to threshold. In strategic choices, level-k and cognitive hierarchy models have been offered as accounts of the choice process, in which people simulate the choice processes of their opponents or partners. We recorded the eye movements in 2 × 2 symmetric games including dominance-solvable games like prisoner's dilemma and asymmetric coordination games like stag hunt and hawk–dove. The evidence was most consistent with the accumulation of payoff differences over time: we found longer duration choices with more fixations when payoffs differences were more finely balanced, an emerging bias to gaze more at the payoffs for the action ultimately chosen, and that a simple count of transitions between payoffs—whether or not the comparison is strategically informative—was strongly associated with the final choice. The accumulator models do account for these strategic choice process measures, but the level-k and cognitive hierarchy models do not. |
Dovin Kiernan; Gerome Manson; Matthew Heath; Luc Tremblay; Timothy N. Welsh Corrections in saccade endpoints scale to the amplitude of target displacements in a double-step paradigm Journal Article In: Neuroscience Letters, vol. 611, pp. 46–50, 2016. @article{Kiernan2016,It is widely held that discrete goal-directed eye movements (saccades) are ballistic in nature because their durations are too short to allow for sensory-based online correction. Recent studies, however, have provided evidence that saccadic endpoints can be mediated via online corrections. Specifically, it has been reported that saccade trajectories adapt to the eccentricity of an unexpectedly perturbed target location (i.e., target 'jump' paradigm). If saccades are subject to online correction mechanisms, then the magnitude of such changes should scale to the amplitude of the target jump. To test this hypothesis, saccadic endpoints for trials on which the target jumped one of three amplitudes (Small: 2.5°, Medium: 5.0°, and Large: 7.5° i.e., Jump trials) immediately after saccade onset were compared with the endpoints of trials in which the target location did not change (i.e., Reference trials). Results showed that primary saccade endpoints for Jump trials were longer than for Reference trials. Importantly, the magnitude of this increase in endpoint scaled with the amplitude of the target jump. Thus, these results support emerging and coalescent evidence that saccade trajectories are subject to online corrections. |
Neil Stewart; Frouke Hermens; William J. Matthews Eye movements in risky choice Journal Article In: Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, vol. 29, no. 2-3, pp. 116–136, 2016. @article{Stewart2016a,We asked participants to make simple risky choices while we recorded their eye movements. We built a complete statistical model of the eye movements and found very little systematic variation in eye movements over the time course of a choice or across the different choices. The only exceptions were finding more (of the same) eye movements when choice options were similar, and an emerging gaze bias in which people looked more at the gamble they ultimately chose. These findings are inconsistent with prospect theory, the priority heuristic, or decision field theory. However, the eye movements made during a choice have a large relationship with the final choice, and this is mostly independent from the contribution of the actual attribute values in the choice options. That is, eye movements tell us not just about the processing of attribute values but also are independently associated with choice. The pattern is simple—people choose the gamble they look at more often, independently of the actual numbers they see—and this pattern is simpler than predicted by decision field theory, decision by sampling, and the parallel constraint satisfaction model. |
Ignace T. C. Hooge; Kenneth Holmqvist; Marcus Nyström In: Vision Research, vol. 128, pp. 6–18, 2016. @article{Hooge2016,Most modern video eye trackers use the p-CR (pupil minus CR) technique to deal with small relative movements between the eye tracker camera and the eye. We question whether the p-CR technique is appropriate to investigate saccade dynamics. In two experiments we investigated the dynamics of pupil, CR and gaze signals obtained from a standard SMI Hi-Speed eye tracker. We found many differences between the pupil and the CR signals. Differences concern timing of the saccade onset, saccade peak velocity and post-saccadic oscillation (PSO). We also obtained that pupil peak velocities were higher than CR peak velocities. Saccades in the eye trackers' gaze signal (that is constructed from p-CR) appear to be excessive versions of saccades in the pupil signal. We conclude that the pupil-CR technique is not suitable for studying detailed dynamics of eye movements. |
Georgie Powell; Zoe Meredith; Rebecca McMillin; Tom C. A. Freeman Bayesian models of individual differences: Combining autistic traits and sensory thresholds to predict motion perception Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 27, no. 12, pp. 1562–1572, 2016. @article{Powell2016,According to Bayesian models, perception and cognition depend on the optimal combination of noisy incoming evidence with prior knowledge of the world. Individual differences in perception should therefore be jointly determined by a person's sensitivity to incoming evidence and his or her prior expectations. It has been proposed that individuals with autism have flatter prior distributions than do nonautistic individuals, which suggests that prior variance is linked to the degree of autistic traits in the general population. We tested this idea by studying how perceived speed changes during pursuit eye movement and at low contrast. We found that individual differences in these two motion phenomena were predicted by differences in thresholds and autistic traits when combined in a quantitative Bayesian model. Our findings therefore support the flatter-prior hypothesis and suggest that individual differences in prior expectations are more systematic than previously thought. In order to be revealed, however, individual differences in sensitivity must also be taken into account. |
Bin Shen; Meng-Chun Chiu; Shuo-Heng Li; Guo-Joe Huang; Ling-Jun Liu; Ming-Chou Ho Attentional bias to betel quid cues: An eye tracking study Journal Article In: Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 705–711, 2016. @article{sclhlh16,The World Health Organization regards betel quid as a human carcinogen, and DSM-IV and ICD-10 dependence symptoms may develop with heavy use. This study, conducted in central Taiwan, investigated whether betel quid chewers can exhibit overt orienting to selectively respond to the betel quid cues. Twenty-four male chewers' and 23 male nonchewers' eye movements to betel-quid-related pictures and matched pictures were assessed during a visual probe task. The eye movement index showed that betel quid chewers were more likely to initially direct their gaze to the betel quid cues, t(23) = 3.70, p < .01 |
Annie Tran; James E. Hoffman Visual attention is required for multiple object tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 42, no. 12, pp. 2103–2114, 2016. @article{Tran2016,In the multiple object tracking task, participants attempt to keep track of a moving set of target objects embedded in an identical set of moving distractors. Depending on several display parameters, observers are usually only able to accurately track 3 to 4 objects. Various proposals attribute this limit to a fixed number of discrete indexes (Pylyshyn, 1989), limits in visual attention (Cavanagh & Alvarez, 2005), or “architectural limits” in visual cortical areas (Franconeri, 2013). The present set of experiments examined the specific role of visual attention in tracking using a dual-task methodology in which participants tracked objects while identifying letter probes appearing on the tracked objects and distractors. As predicted by the visual attention model, probe identification was faster and/or more accurate when probes appeared on tracked objects. This was the case even when probes were more than twice as likely to appear on distractors suggesting that some minimum amount of attention is required to maintain accurate tracking performance. When the need to protect tracking accuracy was relaxed, participants were able to allocate more attention to distractors when probes were likely to appear there but only at the expense of large reductions in tracking accuracy. A final experiment showed that people attend to tracked objects even when letters appearing on them are task-irrelevant, suggesting that allocation of attention to tracked objects is an obligatory process. These results support the claim that visual attention is required for tracking objects. |
Zehui Zhan; Lei Zhang; Hu Mei; Patrick S. W. Fong Online learners' reading ability detection based on eye-tracking sensors Journal Article In: Sensors, vol. 16, pp. 1457, 2016. @article{Zhan2016,© 2016 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.The detection of university online learners' reading ability is generally problematic and time-consuming. Thus the eye-tracking sensors have been employed in this study, to record temporal and spatial human eye movements. Learners' pupils, blinks, fixation, saccade, and regression are recognized as primary indicators for detecting reading abilities. A computational model is established according to the empirical eye-tracking data, and applying the multi-feature regularization machine learning mechanism based on a Low-rank Constraint. The model presents good generalization ability with an error of only 4.9% when randomly running 100 times. It has obvious advantages in saving time and improving precision, with only 20 min of testing required for prediction of an individual learner's reading ability. |
John M. Henderson; Wonil Choi; Matthew W. Lowder; Fernanda Ferreira Language structure in the brain: A fixation-related fMRI study of syntactic surprisal in reading Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 132, pp. 293–300, 2016. @article{Henderson2016,How is syntactic analysis implemented by the human brain during language comprehension? The current study combined methods from computational linguistics, eyetracking, and fMRI to address this question. Subjects read passages of text presented as paragraphs while their eye movements were recorded in an MRI scanner. We parsed the text using a probabilistic context-free grammar to isolate syntactic difficulty. Syntactic difficulty was quantified as syntactic surprisal, which is related to the expectedness of a given word's syntactic category given its preceding context. We compared words with high and low syntactic surprisal values that were equated for length, frequency, and lexical surprisal, and used fixation-related (FIRE) fMRI to measure neural activity associated with syntactic surprisal for each fixated word. We observed greater neural activity for high than low syntactic surprisal in two predicted cortical regions previously identified with syntax: left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and less robustly, left anterior superior temporal lobe (ATL). These results support the hypothesis that left IFG and ATL play a central role in syntactic analysis during language comprehension. More generally, the results suggest a broader cortical network associated with syntactic prediction that includes increased activity in bilateral IFG and insula, as well as fusiform and right lingual gyri. |
Georgie Powell; Petroc Sumner; James J. Harrison; Aline Bompas Interaction between contours and eye movements in the perception of afterimages: A test of the signal ambiguity theory Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 16, no. 7, pp. 1–11, 2016. @article{Powell2016a,An intriguing property of afterimages is that conscious experience can be strong, weak, or absent following identical stimulus adaptation. Previously we suggested that postadaptation retinal signals are inherently ambiguous, and therefore the perception they evoke is strongly influenced by cues that increase or decrease the likelihood that they represent real objects (the signal ambiguity theory). Here we provide a more definitive test of this theory using two cues previously found to influence afterimage perception in opposite ways and plausibly at separate loci of action. However, by manipulating both cues simultaneously, we found that their effects interacted, consistent with the idea that they affect the same process of object interpretation rather than being independent influences. These findings bring contextual influences on afterimages into more general theories of cue combination, and we suggest that afterimage perception should be considered alongside other areas of vision science where cues are found to interact in their influence on perception. |
Judith Peth; Kristina Suchotzki; Matthias Gamer Influence of countermeasures on the validity of the Concealed Information Test Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 53, no. 9, pp. 1429–1440, 2016. @article{Peth2016,The Concealed Information Test (CIT) is a psychophysiological technique that allows for detecting crime-related knowledge. Usually, autonomic response measures are used for this purpose, but ocular measures have also been proposed recently. Prior studies reported heterogeneous results for the usage of countermeasures (CM) to corrupt the CIT's validity, depending on the CM technique and the dependent measure. The current study systematically compared the application of physical and mental CM on autonomic and ocular measures during the CIT. Sixty participants committed a mock crime and were assigned to one of three guilty conditions: standard guilty (without CM), physical CM, or mental CM. An additional group of 20 innocents was investigated with the same CIT to calculate validity estimates. Electrodermal responses were more vulnerable for CM usage compared to heart rate and respiration, and physical CM were more effective than mental CM. Independent of CM usage, a combined score of autonomic responses enabled a valid differentiation between guilty and innocent examinees. Fixations and blinks also allowed for detecting crime-related knowledge, but these measures were more affected by CM application than autonomic responses. The current study delivered further evidence that CM differentially impact physiological and ocular responses in the CIT. Whereas individual data channels were strongly affected by CM usage, a combination of different response measures yielded a relatively stable differentiation of guilty and innocent examinees when mental CM were used. These findings are especially relevant for field applications and might inspire future studies to detect or prevent CM usage in CIT examinations. |
Başak Akdoğan; Fuat Balcı; Hedderik Rijn Temporal expectation indexed by pupillary response Journal Article In: Timing & Time Perception, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 354–370, 2016. @article{Akdogan2016,Forming temporal expectations plays an instrumental role for the optimization of behavior and allo- cation of attentional resources. Although the effects of temporal expectations on visual attention are well-established, the question of whether temporal predictions modulate the behavioral outputs of the autonomic nervous system such as the pupillary response remains unanswered. Therefore, this study aimed to obtain an online measure of pupil size while human participants were asked to dif- ferentiate between visual targets presented after varying time intervals since trial onset. Specifically, we manipulated temporal predictability in the presentation of target stimuli consisting of letters which appeared after either a short or long delay duration (1.5 vs. 3 s) in the majority of trials (75%) within different test blocks. In the remaining trials (25%), no target stimulus was present to investi- gate the trajectory of preparatory pupillary response under a low level of temporal uncertainty. The results revealed that the rate of preparatory pupillary response was contingent upon the time of target appearance such that pupils dilated at a higher rate when the targets were expected to appear after a shorter as compared to a longer delay period irrespective of target presence. The finding that pupil size can track temporal regularities and exhibit differential preparatory response between dif- ferent delay conditions points to the existence of a distributed neural network subserving temporal information processing which is crucial for cognitive functioning and goal-directed behavior. |
Joseph Arizpe; Dwight J. Kravitz; Vincent Walsh; Galit Yovel; Chris I. Baker Differences in looking at own-and other-race faces are subtle and analysis-dependent: An account of discrepant reports Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. e0148253, 2016. @article{Arizpe2016,The Other-Race Effect (ORE) is the robust and well-established finding that people are generally poorer at facial recognition of individuals of another race than of their own race. Over the past four decades, much research has focused on the ORE because understanding this phenomenon is expected to elucidate fundamental face processingmechanisms and the influence of experience on such mechanisms. Several recent studies of the ORE in which the eye-movements of participants viewing own- and other-race faces were tracked have, however, reported highly conflicting results regarding the presence or absence of differential patterns of eye-movements to own- versus other-race faces. This discrepancy, of course, leads to conflicting theoretical interpretations of the perceptual basis for the ORE. Here we investigate fixation patterns to own- versus other-race (African and Chinese) faces for Caucasian participants using |
Masaki Emoto; Hideki Fukuda Correlation between peak velocity of saccades and susceptibility to motion blur Journal Article In: Journal of Display Technology, vol. 12, no. 9, pp. 976–981, 2016. @article{Emoto2016,A major problem in the subjective evaluation of TV image quality is individual variability among viewers. If observers are not carefully selected for viewing studies, large individual differences in the susceptibility to image blurring result in imprecise evaluations and loss of power to detect statistically significant differences between experimental conditions. In assessments of the picture quality of traditional television, which has a narrow field of view (FOV), observers' visual acuity (VA) should be screened before the subjective evaluations. For emerging TV systems with wide FOV (Ultra-High-Definition TV: UHDTV), in which objects move quickly relative to the display frame, it is unclear whether screening viewers' VA is sufficient for selecting viewers to subjectively evaluate moving picture quality or sharpness. Here, we evaluated saccadic eye movement parameters to identify adequate methods to screen participants for studies evaluating UHDTV motion image quality. Each participant's evaluations of two moving pictures were highly correlated, suggesting that participants evaluated sharpness consistently. A significant correlation was observed between the average subjective evaluation score and the peak saccade velocity, but not the VA, of each participant. We conclude that each participant has a certain susceptibility to image blur when evaluating moving pictures, and that this susceptibility correlates with the participant's peak saccade velocity. Thus, the objective measure of peak saccade velocity can be used to screen participants for motion picture evaluation studies. |
Jean-Baptiste Bernard; Susana T. L. Chung The role of external features in face recognition with central vision loss Journal Article In: Optometry and Vision Science, vol. 93, no. 5, pp. 510–520, 2016. @article{Bernard2016a,PURPOSE: We evaluated how the performance of recognizing familiar face images depends on the internal (eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth) and external face features (chin, outline of face, hairline) in individuals with central vision loss. METHODS: In experiment 1, we measured eye movements for four observers with central vision loss to determine whether they fixated more often on the internal or the external features of face images while attempting to recognize the images. We then measured the accuracy for recognizing face images that contained only the internal, only the external, or both internal and external features (experiment 2) and for hybrid images where the internal and external features came from two different source images (experiment 3) for five observers with central vision loss and four age-matched control observers. RESULTS: When recognizing familiar face images, approximately 40% of the fixations of observers with central vision loss was centered on the external features of faces. The recognition accuracy was higher for images containing only external features (66.8 ± 3.3% correct) than for images containing only internal features (35.8 ± 15.0%), a finding contradicting that of control observers. For hybrid face images, observers with central vision loss responded more accurately to the external features (50.4 ± 17.8%) than to the internal features (9.3 ± 4.9%), whereas control observers did not show the same bias toward responding to the external features. CONCLUSIONS: Contrary to people with normal vision who rely more on the internal features of face images for recognizing familiar faces, individuals with central vision loss show a higher dependence on using external features of face images. |
Mariel Roberts; Rachel Cymerman; R. Theodore Smith; Lynne Kiorpes; Marisa Carrasco Covert spatial attention is functionally intact in amblyopic human adults Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 16, no. 15, pp. 1–19, 2016. @article{rcskc16,Certain abnormalities in behavioral performance and neural signaling have been attributed to a deficit of visual attention in amblyopia, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by a diverse array of visual deficits following abnormal binocular childhood experience. Critically, most have inferred attention's role in their task without explicitly manipulating and measuring its effects against a baseline condition. Here, we directly investigate whether human amblyopic adults benefit from covert spatial attention—the selective processing of visual information in the absence of eye movements—to the same degree as neurotypical observers. We manipulated both involuntary (Experiment 1) and voluntary (Experiment 2) attention during an orientation discrimination task for which the effects of covert spatial attention have been well established in neurotypical and special populations. In both experiments, attention significantly improved accuracy and decreased reaction times to a similar extent (a) between the eyes of the amblyopic adults and (b) between the amblyopes and their age- and gender- matched controls. Moreover, deployment of voluntary attention away from the target location significantly impaired task performance (Experiment 2). The magnitudes of the involuntary and voluntary attention benefits did not correlate with amblyopic depth or severity. Both groups of observers showed canonical performance fields (better performance along the horizontal than vertical meridian and at the lower than upper vertical meridian) and similar effects of attention across locations. Despite their characteristic low-level vision impairments, covert spatial attention remains functionally intact in human amblyopic adults. |
Valeria C. Caruso; Daniel S. Pages; Marc A. Sommer; Jennifer M. Groh In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 115, no. 6, pp. 3162–3173, 2016. @article{Caruso2016,Saccadic eye movements can be elic- ited by more than one type of sensory stimulus. This implies substantial transformations of signals originating in different sense organs as they reach a common motor output pathway. In this study, we compared the prevalence and magnitude of auditory- and visually evoked activity in a structure implicated in oculomotor processing, the primate frontal eye fields (FEF). We recorded from 324 single neurons while 2 monkeys performed delayed saccades to visual or auditory targets. We found that 64% of FEF neurons were active on presenta- tion of auditory targets and 87% were active during auditory-guided saccades, compared with 75 and 84% for visual targets and saccades. As saccade onset approached, the average level of population activity in the FEF became indistinguishable on visual and auditory trials. FEF activity was better correlated with the movement vector than with the target location for both modalities. In summary, the large proportion of auditory-responsive neurons in the FEF, the similarity between visual and auditory activity levels at the time of the saccade, and the strong correlation between the activity and the saccade vector suggest that auditory signals undergo tailoring to match roughly the strength of visual signals present in the FEF, facilitating accessing of a common motor output pathway. |
Atsushi Kikumoto; Jason Hubbard; Ulrich Mayr Dynamics of task-set carry-over: evidence from eye-movement analyses Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 899–906, 2016. @article{Kikumoto2016,Trial-to-trial carry-over of task sets (i.e., task-set inertia) is often considered as a primary reason for task-switch costs. Yet, we know little about the dynamics of such carry-over effects, in particular how much they are driven by the most recent trial rather than characterized by a more continuous memory gradient. Using eye-tracking, we examined in a 3-task, switching paradigm whether there is a greater probability of non-target fixations to stimuli associated with the previously relevant attentional set than to those associated with the less-recent set. Indeed, we found strong evidence for more interference (expressed in terms of non-target fixations) from recent than from less-recent tasks and that in particular the interference from pre-switch trials contributed substantially to the overall pattern of response-time switch costs. Moreover, task-set carry-over was dominated by the most-recent trial when subjects could expect task repetitions (with a 33 % switch rate). In comparison, when tasks were selected randomly (with a 66 % switch rate), interference from the most recent trial decreased, whereas interference from less-recent trials increased. In sum, carry-over interference dynamics were characterized both by a gradual recency gradient and expectations about task-transition probabilities. Beyond that, there was little evidence for a unique role of the most-recent trial. |
Arkady Konovalov; Ian Krajbich Gaze data reveal distinct choice processes underlying model-based and model-free reinforcement learning Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 7, pp. 12438, 2016. @article{Konovalov2016,Organisms appear to learn and make decisions using different strategies known as model-free and model-based learning; the former is mere reinforcement of previously rewarded actions and the latter is a forward-looking strategy that involves evaluation of action-state transition probabilities. Prior work has used neural data to argue that both model-based and model-free learners implement a value comparison process at trial onset, but model-based learners assign more weight to forward-looking computations. Here using eye-tracking, we report evidence for a different interpretation of prior results: model-based subjects make their choices prior to trial onset. In contrast, model-free subjects tend to ignore model-based aspects of the task and instead seem to treat the decision problem as a simple comparison process between two differentially valued items, consistent with previous work on sequential-sampling models of decision making. These findings illustrate a problem with assuming that experimental subjects make their decisions at the same prescribed time. |
Vincent B. McGinty; Antonio Rangel; William T. Newsome Orbitofrontal cortex value signals depend on fixation location during free viewing Journal Article In: Neuron, vol. 90, no. 6, pp. 1299–1311, 2016. @article{McGinty2016,In the natural world, monkeys and humans judge the economic value of numerous competing stimuli by moving their gaze from one object to another, in a rapid series of eye movements. This suggests that the primate brain processes value serially, and that value-coding neurons may be modulated by changes in gaze. To test this hypothesis, we presented monkeys with value-associated visual cues and took the unusual step of allowing unrestricted free viewing while we recorded neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). By leveraging natural gaze patterns, we found that a large proportion of OFC cells encode gaze location and, that in some cells, value coding is amplified when subjects fixate near the cue. These findings provide the first cellular-level mechanism for previously documented behavioral effects of gaze on valuation and suggest a major role for gaze in neural mechanisms of valuation and decision-making under ecologically realistic conditions. |
Evelyn Milburn; Tessa Warren; Michael Walsh Dickey World knowledge affects prediction as quickly as selectional restrictions: Evidence from the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 536–548, 2016. @article{Milburn2016,There has been considerable debate regarding the question of whether linguistic knowledge and world knowledge are separable and used differently during processing or not (Hagoort et al, 2004). Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension (Matsuki et al, 2011). Event-based plausibility immediately influences on-line language comprehension (Paczynski et al, 2012). Multiple influences of semantic memory on sentence processing: Distinct effects of semantic relatedness on violations of real-world event/state knowledge and animacy selection restrictions (Warren et al, 2007). Investigating effects of selectional restriction violations and plausibility violation severity on eye movements in reading. Previous investigations into this question have provided mixed evidence as to whether violations of selectional restrictions are detected earlier than violations of world knowledge. We report a visual world eye-tracking study comparing the timing of facilitation contributed by selectional restrictions vs. world knowledge. College-aged adults (n = 36) viewed photographs of natural scenes while listening to sentences. Participants anticipated upcoming direct objects similarly regardless of whether facilitation was provided by only world knowledge or a combination of selectional restrictions and world knowledge. These results suggest that selectional restrictions are not available earlier in comprehension than world knowledge. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter; Annie Jia Semantic and plausibility preview benefit effects in English: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 12, pp. 1839–1866, 2016. @article{Schotter2016a,Theories of preview benefit in reading hinge on integration across saccades and the idea that preview benefit is greater the more similar the preview and target are. Schotter (2013) reported preview benefit from a synonymous preview, but it is unclear whether this effect occurs because of similarity between the preview and target (i.e., integration), or because of contextual fit of the preview—synonyms satisfy both accounts. Studies in Chinese have found evidence for preview benefit for words that are unrelated to the target, but are contextually plausible (Yang, Li, Wang, Slattery, & Rayner, 2014; Yang, Wang, Tong, & Rayner, 2012), which is incompatible with an integration account but supports a contextual fit account. Here, we used plausible and implausible unrelated previews in addition to plausible synonym, antonym, and identical previews to further investigate these accounts for readers of English. Early reading measures were shorter for all plausible preview conditions compared to the implausible preview condition. In later reading measures, a benefit for the plausible unrelated preview condition was not observed. In a second experiment, we asked questions that probed whether the reader encoded the preview or target. Readers were more likely to report the preview when they had skipped the word and not regressed to it, and when the preview was plausible. Thus, under certain circumstances, the preview word is processed to a high level of representation (i.e., semantic plausibility) regardless of its relationship to the target, but its influence on reading is relatively short-lived, being replaced by the target word, when fixated. |
Gregory L. West; Sarah Lippé The development of inhibitory saccadic trajectory deviations correlates with measures of antisaccadic inhibition Journal Article In: NeuroReport, vol. 27, pp. 1196–1201, 2016. @article{West2016,Chronological age is related positively to a participant's ability to inhibit distracting information. Inhibition can be measured using the trajectory deviation of a saccade. Saccadic curvature away from distracting visual information is controlled through top–down inhibition mediated by the frontal eye fields. In the present study, we aimed to further test the saccadic trajectory deviation paradigm's sensitivity to the development of frontal inhibitory procuresses by comparing its measure of saccadic inhibition with that of a widely used paradigm, namely, the antisaccade task. We show that the later ‘inhibition' phase of the trajectory deviation function correlated strongly with the measure of antisaccadic inhibition obtained in the same individuals. As expected, the earlier ‘capture' phase of the trajectory deviation function, which does not represent the involvement of frontal structures, did not correlate with antisaccadic inhibition. Further, both measures of frontal inhibition increased with chronological age. |
Lorenzo Vignali; Nicole A. Himmelstoss; Stefan Hawelka; Fabio Richlan; Florian Hutzler Oscillatory brain dynamics during sentence reading: A fixation-related spectral perturbation analysis Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 10, pp. 191, 2016. @article{Vignali2016,The present study investigated oscillatory brain dynamics during self-paced sentence-level processing. Participants read fully correct sentences, sentences containing a semantic violation and "sentences" in which the order of the words was randomized. At the target word level, fixations on semantically unrelated words elicited a lower-beta band (13-18 Hz) desynchronization. At the sentence level, gamma power (31-55 Hz) increased linearly for syntactically correct sentences, but not when the order of the words was randomized. In the 300-900 ms time window after sentence onsets, theta power (4-7 Hz) was greater for syntactically correct sentences as compared to sentences where no syntactic structure was preserved (random words condition). We interpret our results as conforming with a recently formulated predictive-coding framework for oscillatory neural dynamics during sentence-level language comprehension. Additionally, we discuss how our results relate to previous findings with serial visual presentation vs. self-paced reading. |
Jennifer Malsert; Didier Grandjean Mixed saccadic paradigm releases top-down emotional interference in antisaccade and prosaccade trials Journal Article In: Experimental Brain Research, vol. 234, no. 10, pp. 2915–2922, 2016. @article{Malsert2016,Saccadic movements are well known to involve specific top-down or bottom-up processes depending on the task and paradigm characteristics. For example, after the Gap bottom-up effect, it has been shown that an Instruction effect, i.e., asking to identify a peripheral target instead of simply look toward it, reduces latencies in prosaccade (PS) but not in antisaccade (AS) tasks. Nevertheless, in a mixed task comprising AS, PS and nosaccade trials, such differences vanished. Thus, it has been suggested that a top-down effect could be dependent on tonic or phasic neuronal activation and that only the tonic frontal activation could enable interferences with other cortical regions involved. In this study, we tested the interference of emotional information with saccadic performance depending on cognitive cost of the task. We used emotional facial expression cues in block and mixed paradigms. Using a generalized linear mixed model for the analysis, we found a main effect of the paradigm, with task and emotional effects only in mixed saccadic task that could suggest a top-down effect of emotional information processing over the regions involved in saccadic performances. Moreover, we demonstrated that prosaccades latencies are significantly reduced by emotion, while antisaccades are significantly increased, suggesting a disinhibition of reflexive saccades. |
Matthew T. Rätsep; Andrew F. Hickman; Brandon Maser; Jessica Pudwell; Graeme N. Smith; Donald Brien; Patrick W. Stroman; Michael A. Adams; James N. Reynolds; B. Anne Croy; Angelina Paolozza Impact of preeclampsia on cognitive function in the offspring Journal Article In: Behavioural Brain Research, vol. 302, pp. 175–181, 2016. @article{rhmpsbsarc16,Preeclampsia (PE) is a significant clinical disorder occurring in 3-5% of all human pregnancies. Offspring of PE pregnancies (PE-F1s) are reported to exhibit greater cognitive impairment than offspring from uncomplicated pregnancies. Previous studies of PE-F1 cognitive ability used tests with bias that do not assess specific cognitive domains. To improve cognitive impairment classification in PE-F1s we used standardized clinical psychometric testing and eye tracking studies of saccadic eye movements. PE-F1s ( n= 10) and sex/age matched control participants ( n= 41 for psychometrics; n= 59 for eye-tracking) were recruited from the PE-NET study or extracted from the NeuroDevNet study databases. Participants completed a selected array of psychometric tests which assessed executive function, working memory, attention, inhibition, visuospatial processing, reading, and math skills. Eye-tracking studies included the prosaccade, antisaccade, and memory-guided tasks. Psychometric testing revealed an impairment in working memory among PE-F1s. Eye-tracking studies revealed numerous impairments among PE-F1s including additional saccades required to reach the target, poor endpoint accuracy, and slower reaction time. However, PE-F1s made faster saccades than controls, and fewer sequence errors in the memory-guided task. Our study provides a comprehensive assessment of cognitive function among PE-F1s. The development of PE may be seen as an early predictor of reduced cognitive function in children, specifically in working memory and oculomotor control. Future studies should extended to a larger study populations, and may be valuable for early studies of children born to pregnancies complicated by other disorders, such as gestational diabetes or intrauterine growth restriction. |
Mallory C. Stites; Kara D. Federmeier; Kiel Christianson Do morphemes matter when reading compound words with transposed letters? Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, pp. 1–23, 2016. @article{Stites2016,The current study investigates the online processing consequences of encountering compound words with transposed letters (TLs), to determine if cross-morpheme TLs are more disruptive to reading than those within a single morpheme, as would be predicted by accounts of obligatory morpho-orthopgrahic decomposition. Two measures of online processing, eye movements and event-related potentials (ERPs), were collected in separate experiments. Participants read sentences containing correctly spelled compound words (cupcake), or compounds with TLs occurring either across morphemes (cucpake) or within one morpheme (cupacke). Results showed that between- and within-morpheme transpositions produced equal processing costs in both measures, in the form of longer reading times (Experiment 1) and a late posterior positivity (Experiment 2) that did not differ between conditions. Findings converge to suggest that within- and between-morpheme TLs are equally disruptive to recognition, providing evidence against obligatory morpho-orthographic processing and in favour of whole-word access of English compound words during sentence reading. |
Ravi D. Mill; Akira R. O'Connor; Ian G. Dobbins Pupil dilation during recognition memory: Isolating unexpected recognition from judgment uncertainty Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 154, pp. 81–94, 2016. @article{Mill2016,Optimally discriminating familiar from novel stimuli demands a decision-making process informed by prior expectations. Here we demonstrate that pupillary dilation (PD) responses during recognition memory decisions are modulated by expectations, and more specifically, that pupil dilation increases for unexpected compared to expected recognition. Furthermore, multi-level modeling demonstrated that the time course of the dilation during each individual trial contains separable early and late dilation components, with the early amplitude capturing unexpected recognition, and the later trailing slope reflecting general judgment uncertainty or effort. This is the first demonstration that the early dilation response during recognition is dependent upon observer expectations and that separate recognition expectation and judgment uncertainty components are present in the dilation time course of every trial. The findings provide novel insights into adaptive memory-linked orienting mechanisms as well as the general cognitive underpinnings of the pupillary index of autonomic nervous system activity. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter; Mallorie Leinenger Reversed preview benefit effects: Forced fixations emphasize the importance of parafoveal vision for efficient reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 42, no. 12, pp. 2039–2067, 2016. @article{Schotter2016,Current theories of eye movement control in reading posit that processing of an upcoming parafoveal preview word is used to facilitate processing of that word once it is fixated (i.e., as a foveal target word). This preview benefit is demonstrated by shorter fixation durations in the case of valid (i.e., identical or linguistically similar) compared with invalid (i.e., dissimilar) preview conditions. However, we suggest that processing of the preview can directly influence fixation behavior on the target, independent of similarity between them. In Experiment 1, unrelated high and low frequency words were used as orthogonally crossed previews and targets and we observed a reversed preview benefit for low frequency targets—shorter fixation durations with an invalid, higher frequency preview compared with a valid, low frequency preview. In Experiment 2, the target words were replaced with orthographically legal and illegal nonwords and we found a similar effect of preview frequency on fixation durations on the targets, as well as a bimodal distribution in the illegal nonword target conditions with a denser early peak for high than low frequency previews. In Experiment 3, nonwords were used as previews for high and low frequency targets, replicating standard findings that “denied” preview increases fixation durations and the influence of target properties. These effects can be explained by forced fixations, cases in which fixations on the target were shortened as a consequence of the timing of word recognition of the preview relative to the time course of saccade programming to that word from the prior one. That is, the preview word was (at least partially) recognized so that it should have been skipped, but the word could not be skipped because the saccade to that word was in a nonlabile stage. In these cases, the system preinitiates the subsequent saccade off the upcoming word to the following word and the intervening fixation is short. |
Lotje Linden; Françoise Vitu On the optimal viewing position for object processing Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 78, no. 2, pp. 602–617, 2016. @article{Linden2016,Numerous studies have shown that a visually pre- sented word is processed most easily when participants initial- ly fixate just to the left of the word's center. Fixating on this optimal viewing position (OVP) results in shorter response times and a lower probability of making additional within- word refixations (OVP effects), but also longer initial- fixation durations (an inverted-OVP or I-OVP effect), as com- pared to initially fixating at the beginning or the end of the word. Thus, typical curves are u-shaped (or inverted-u- shaped), with a leftward bias. Most researchers explain the u-shape in terms of visual constraints, and the leftward bias in terms of language constraints. Previous studies have dem- onstrated that (I)-OVP effects are not specific to words, but generalize to object viewing. We further investigated this by comparing the strength and (a)symmetry of (I-)OVP effects for words and objects. To this purpose, we gave participants an object- versus word-naming task in which we manipulated the position at which they initially fixated the stimulus (i.e., a line drawing or the written name of an object). Our results showed that object viewing, just as word viewing, resulted in u-shaped (I-)OVP curves. However, the effect was weaker than for words. Furthermore, for words, the curves were bi- ased to the left, whereas they were symmetrical for objects. This might indicate that part ofthe (I-)OVP effect for words is language specific, and that (I-)OVP effects for objects are a purer measure of the effect of visual constraints. |
Louis F. Dell'Osso; Faruk H. Orge; Jonathan B. Jacobs Effects of augmented tenotomy and reattachment in the infantile nystagmus syndrome Journal Article In: Digital Journal of Opthalmology, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 12–24, 2016. @article{DellOsso2016,PURPOSE: To test the hypothesis that augmented tenotomy and reattachment surgery (AT-R), which involves placing an additional suture in each distal tendon during the 4-muscle tenotomy and reattachment (T-R) or other infantile nystagmus syndrome (INS) procedures, could increase the beneficial effects of many types of extraocular muscle (EOM) surgery to treat INS. METHODS: Both infrared reflection and high-speed digital video systems were used to record the eye movements in 4 patients with INS before and after AT-R surgery. Data were analyzed using the eXpanded Nystagmus Acuity Function (NAFX) that is part of the OMtools software. RESULTS: Placement of the augmentation suture did not interfere with Kestenbaum, Anderson, bilateral medial rectus muscle recession, or T-R surgeries. The therapeutic effects of AT-R were similar to but not equal to those from the traditional single-suture surgeries (ie, broadening longest foveation domain [LFD] but no improvement of NAFX peak). The average of the NAFX percent improvements after AT-R was within 31% of those estimated from NAFX values before T-R; the average of the percent broadenings of the LFD values after AT-R was within 16%. CONCLUSIONS: The AT-R does not improve the foveation quality in INS above the traditional T-R surgery. It is not improved by an additional suture; indeed, some improvements may be diminished by the added suture. The hypothesized augmented-tendon suture technique (sans tenotomy) has been modified and remains to be tested. |
Su Keun Jeong; Yaoda Xu The impact of top-down spatial attention on laterality and hemispheric asymmetry in the human parietal cortex Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 16, no. 10, pp. 1–21, 2016. @article{Jeong2016,The human parietal cortex exhibits a preference to contralaterally presented visual stimuli (i.e., laterality) as well as an asymmetry between the two hemispheres with the left parietal cortex showing greater laterality than the right. Using visual short-term memory and perceptual tasks and varying target location predictability, this study examined whether hemispheric laterality and asymmetry are fixed characteristics of the human parietal cortex or whether they are dynamic and modulated by the deployment of top-down attention to the target present hemifield. Two parietal regions were examined here that have previously been shown to be involved in visual object individuation and identification and are located in the inferior and superior intraparietal sulcus (IPS), respectively. Across three experiments, significant laterality was found in both parietal regions regardless of attentional modulation with laterality being greater in the inferior than superior IPS, consistent with their roles in object individuation and identification, respectively. Although the deployment of top-down attention had no effect on the superior IPS, it significantly increased laterality in the inferior IPS. The deployment of top-down spatial attention can thus amplify the strength of laterality in the inferior IPS. Hemispheric asymmetry, on the other hand, was absent in both brain regions and only emerged in the inferior but not the superior IPS with the deployment of top-down attention. Interestingly, the strength of hemispheric asymmetry significantly correlated with the strength of laterality in the inferior IPS. Hemispheric asymmetry thus seems to only emerge when there is a sufficient amount of laterality present in a brain region. |
Arnout W. Koornneef; Jakub Dotlačil; Paul W. Broek; Ted J. M. Sanders The influence of linguistic and cognitive factors on the time course of verb-based implicit causality Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 69, no. 3, pp. 455–481, 2016. @article{Koornneef2016,In three eye-tracking experiments the influence of the Dutch causal connective "want" (because) and the working memory capacity of readers on the usage of verb-based implicit causality was examined. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that although a causal connective is not required to activate implicit causality information during reading, effects of implicit causality surfaced more rapidly and were more pronounced when a connective was present in the discourse than when it was absent. In addition, Experiment 3 revealed that-in contrast to previous claims-the activation of implicit causality is not a resource-consuming mental operation. Moreover, readers with higher and lower working memory capacities behaved differently in a dual-task situation. Higher span readers were more likely to use implicit causality when they had all their working memory resources at their disposal. Lower span readers showed the opposite pattern as they were more likely to use the implicit causality cue in the case of an additional working memory load. The results emphasize that both linguistic and cognitive factors mediate the impact of implicit causality on text comprehension. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of the ongoing controversies in the literature-that is, the focusing-integration debate and the debates on the source of implicit causality. |
Anne K. Rau; Kristina Moll; Korbinian Moeller; Stefan Huber; Margaret J. Snowling; Karin Landerl Same same, but different: Word and sentence reading in German and English Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 203–219, 2016. @article{rmmhsl16,The current study compared eye fixation patterns during word and sentence processing in a consistent and an inconsistent alphabetic orthography. German and English children as well as adults matched on word reading ability read matched sentences while their eye fixation behavior was recorded. Results indicated that German children read in a more small-unit plodder-like style with more diligent first-pass reading and less rereading. In contrast, English children read in a more large-unit explorer-like style with a greater tendency to skip words, and more regressions. It is important that these cross-linguistic processing differences largely persisted in the adult readers. Orthographic consistency thus influences both local word recognition and global sentence processing in developing and skilled readers. |
Susheel Vijayraghavan; Alex James Major; Stefan Everling Dopamine D1 and D2 Receptors Make Dissociable Contributions to Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortical Regulation of Rule-Guided Oculomotor Behavior Journal Article In: Cell Reports, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 805–816, 2016. @article{Vijayraghavan2016,Studies of neuromodulation of spatial short-term memory have shown that dopamine D1 receptor (D1R) stimulation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) dose-dependently modulates memory activity, whereas D2 receptors (D2Rs) selectively modulate activity related to eye movements hypothesized to encode movement feedback. We examined localized stimulation of D1Rs and D2Rs on DLPFC neurons engaged in a task involving rule representation in memory to guide appropriate eye movements toward or away from a visual stimulus. We found dissociable effects of D1R and D2R on DLPFC physiology. D1R stimulation degrades memory activity for the task rule and increases stimulus-related selectivity. In contrast, D2R stimulation affects motor activity tuning only when eye movements are made to the stimulus. Only D1R stimulation degrades task performance and increases impulsive responding. Our results suggest that D1Rs regulate rule representation and impulse control, whereas D2Rs selectively modulate eye-movement-related dynamics and not rule representation in the DLPFC. |
Carlos R. Cassanello; Sven Ohl; Martin Rolfs Saccadic adaptation to a systematically varying disturbance Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 116, no. 2, pp. 336–350, 2016. @article{Cassanello2016,Saccadic adaptation maintains the correct mapping between eye movements and their targets, yet the dynamics of saccadic gain changes in the presence of systematically varying disturbances has not been extensively studied. Here, we assessed changes in the gain of saccade amplitudes induced by continuous and periodic post-saccadic visual feedback. Observers made saccades following a sequence of target steps either along the horizontal meridian (Two-way adaptation) or with unconstrained saccade directions (Global adaptation). An intra-saccadic step-following a sinusoidal variation as a function of the trial number (with three different frequencies tested in separate blocks)-consistently displaced the target along its vector. The oculomotor system responded to the resulting feedback error by modifying saccade amplitudes in a periodic fashion with similar frequency of variation but lagging the disturbance by a few trials. This periodic response was superimposed on a drift towards stronger hypometria with similar asymptotes and decay rates across stimulus conditions. The magnitude of the periodic response decreased with increasing frequency and was smaller and more delayed for Global than Two-way adaptation. These results suggest that-in addition to the well-characterized return-to-the-baseline response observed in protocols using constant visual feedback-the oculomotor system attempts to minimize the feedback error by integrating its variation across trials. This process resembles a convolution with an internal response function, whose structure would be determined by coefficients of the learning model. Our protocol reveals this fast learning process in single short experimental sessions, qualifying it for the study of sensorimotor learning in health and disease. |
Markku Kilpeläinen; Jan Theeuwes Efficient avoidance of the penalty zone in human eye movements Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 12, pp. e0167956, 2016. @article{Kilpelaeinen2016,People use eye movements extremely effectively to find objects of interest in a cluttered visual scene. Distracting, task-irrelevant attention capturing regions in the visual field should be avoided as they jeopardize the efficiency of search. In the current study, we used eye tracking to determine whether people are able to avoid making saccades to a predetermined visual area associated with a financial penalty, while making fast and accurate saccades towards stimuli placed near the penalty area. We found that in comparison to the same task without a penalty area, the introduction of a penalty area immediately affected eye movement behaviour: the proportion of saccades to the penalty area was immediately reduced. Also, saccadic latencies increased, but quite modestly, and mainly for saccades towards stimuli near the penalty area. We conclude that eye movement behaviour is under efficient cognitive control and thus quite flexible: it can immediately be adapted to changing environ- mental conditions to improve reward outcome. |
MiYoung Kwon; Rong Liu; Lillian Chien Compensation for blur requires increase in field of view and viewing time Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 9, pp. e0162711, 2016. @article{Kwon2016b,Spatial resolution is an important factor for human patternrecognition. In particular, low res- olution (blur) is a defining characteristic of low vision. Here, we examined spatial (field of view) and temporal (stimulus duration) requirements for blurry object recognition.The spa- tial resolution of an image such as letter or face, was manipulated with a low-pass filter. In experiment 1, studying spatial requirement, observers viewed a fixed-size object through a window of varying sizes, whichwas repositioned until object identification(moving window paradigm). Field of view requirement, quantified as the number of “views” (windowreposi- tions) for correct recognition,was obtained for three blur levels, including no blur. In experi- ment 2, studying temporal requirement,we determinedthreshold viewing time, the stimulus duration yielding criterion recognition accuracy, at six blur levels, including no blur. For letter and face recognition,we found blur significantly increased the number of views, suggesting a larger field of view is required to recognize blurry objects.We also found blur significantly increased threshold viewing time, suggesting longer temporal integration is necessary to recognize blurry objects. The temporal integration reflects the tradeoff between stimulus intensity and time. While humans excel at recognizing blurry objects, our findings suggest compensating for blur requires increased field of view and viewing time. The need for larger spatial and longer temporal integration for recognizing blurry objectsmay furtherchallenge object recognition in low vision. Thus, interactions between blur and field of view should be considered for developing low vision rehabilitation or assistive aids. |
Ali Borji; James Tanner Reconciling saliency and object center-bias hypotheses in explaining free-viewing fixations Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, vol. 27, no. 6, pp. 1214–1226, 2016. @article{Borji2016,Predicting where people look in natural scenes has attracted a lot of interest in computer vision and computational neuroscience over the past two decades. Two seemingly contrasting categories of cues have been proposed to influence where people look: $backslash$textitlow-level image saliency and $backslash$textithigh-level semantic information. Our first contribution is to take a detailed look at these cues to confirm the hypothesis proposed by Henderson~$backslash$citehenderson1993eye and Nuthmann $backslash$& Henderson~$backslash$citenuthmann2010object that observers tend to look at the center of objects. We analyzed fixation data for scene free-viewing over 17 observers on 60 fully annotated images with various types of objects. Images contained different types of scenes, such as natural scenes, line drawings, and 3D rendered scenes. Our second contribution is to propose a simple combined model of low-level saliency and object center-bias that outperforms each individual component significantly over our data, as well as on the OSIE dataset by Xu et al.~$backslash$citexu2014predicting. The results reconcile saliency with object center-bias hypotheses and highlight that both types of cues are important in guiding fixations. Our work opens new directions to understand strategies that humans use in observing scenes and objects, and demonstrates the construction of combined models of low-level saliency and high-level object-based information. |
Zailiang Chen; Huajie Huang; Hailan Shen; Beiji Zou; Jiang Wang ROI extraction based on visual salience and visual evaluation Journal Article In: International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems, vol. 9, no. 1/2, pp. 57, 2016. @article{Chen2016a,With saliency map generated from visual attention model, this paper proposes two regions of interest (ROI) extraction algorithms respectively based on salient points and saliency regions. The former one adopts statistical and clustering techniques, selects cluster centre as seed points to fill outline map of image and finally makes mask operation between filled outline map and input image to implement ROI extraction. The latter one is based on salient regions, uses improved Grabcut image segmentation algorithm and saliency map generated from visual attention model to implement ROI extraction. To evaluate the performance of two proposed algorithms, this paper uses extracted ROI based on eye-movement data as evaluation criterion. The results show the algorithm based on salient points is applicable to extract simple images and has less runtime. The algorithm based on saliency regions is applicable to extract colourful and complex image. These two algorithms can be combined to get better performance. |
Jan Drewes; G. Goren; W. Zhu; J. H. Elder Recurrent processing in the formation of shape percepts Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 185–192, 2016. @article{Drewes2016,The human visual system must extract reliable object information from cluttered visual scenes several times per second, and this temporal constraint has been taken as evidence that the underlying cortical processing must be strictly feedforward. Here we use a novel rapid reinforcement paradigm to probe the temporal dynamics of the neural circuit underlying rapid object shape perception and thus test this feedforward assumption. Our results show that two shape stimuli are optimally reinforcing when separated in time by approximately 60 ms, suggesting an underlying recurrent circuit with a time constant (feedforward + feedback) of 60 ms. A control experiment demonstrates that this is not an attentional cueing effect. Instead, it appears to reflect the time course of feedback processing underlying the rapid perceptual organization of shape. |
Lauren S. Hopkins; Fred J. Helmstetter; Deborah E. Hannula Eye movements are captured by a perceptually simple conditioned stimulus in the absence of explicit contingency knowledge Journal Article In: Emotion, vol. 16, no. 8, pp. 1157–1171, 2016. @article{Hopkins2016,Past reports suggest that threatening materials can impact the efficiency of goal-directed behavior. However, questions remain about whether a conditional stimulus (CS) can capture attention as previous results may have been influenced by voluntary prioritization of a to-be-ignored CS. In 2 experiments, eye tracking was used to evaluate whether neutral, perceptually simple materials capture attention when they take on aversive properties via probabilistic fear conditioning with strict methods in place to eliminate voluntary CS prioritization. During training, participants attempted to fixate search targets (i.e., horizontally or vertically oriented rectangles) as quickly as possible to avoid shock. In reality, shock administration was related to rectangle orientation so that 1 rectangle (CS+) predicted shock more often than the other (CS-). Subsequently rectangles became distractors and were to be ignored. At this point, participants were instructed to fixate a new target and incidences of CS capture were examined. Results showed that saccades were made more quickly to the CS+ than the CS- as training progressed, and that oculomotor capture by irrelevant rectangles occurred more often for the CS+ than the CS-. An independent physiological index (skin conductance response) confirmed that contingencies had been learned, as SCR magnitude was greater for CS+ than CS- trials early in the test phase. These effects were documented despite the absence of explicit contingency knowledge, assessed using a postexperimental questionnaire. Collectively, these outcomes indicate that a CS can capture attention despite being task-irrelevant, and that these effects do not depend on conscious awareness of learned contingencies. |
Henri Olkoniemi; Henri Ranta; Johanna K. Kaakinen Individual differences in the processing of written sarcasm and metaphor: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 433–450, 2016. @article{Olkoniemi2016,The present study examined individual differences in the processing of different forms of figurative language. Sixty participants read sarcastic, metaphorical, and literal sentences embedded in story contexts while their eye movements were recorded, and responded to a text memory and an inference question after each story. Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC), need for cognition (NFC), and cognitive-affective processing were measured. The results showed that the processing of metaphors was characterized by slow-down during first-pass reading of the utterances, whereas sarcasm produced mainly delayed effects in the eye movement records. Sarcastic utterances were also harder to comprehend than literal or metaphorical utterances as indicated by poorer performance in responses to inference questions. Individual differences in general cognitive factors (WMC and NFC) were related to the processing of metaphors, whereas individual differences in both general cognitive factors (WMC) as well as processing of emotional information were related to the processing of sarcasm. The results indicate that different forms of figurative language pose different cognitive demands to the reader, and show that reader characteristics play a prominent role in figurative language comprehension. |
Maria M. Robinson; David E. Irwin Shifts of attention bias awareness of voluntary and reflexive eye movements Journal Article In: Experimental Brain Research, vol. 234, no. 6, pp. 1689–1699, 2016. @article{Robinson2016,Current theories regarding factors that influence people's awareness of their actions have underscored the role of peripheral signals (e.g., proprioceptive feedback) and central commands (e.g., the intention to make a response). The role of covert attention has been largely underexplored, even though attention and awareness have been tightly linked. The aim of the current study was to directly examine the impact of shifts of visual attention on people's awareness of their eye movements as they performed the antisaccade task. People tend to be unaware of a high percentage of erroneous eye movements on this task, thus lending it to the study of variables that might modulate people's awareness of their actions. In addition, this task provides the opportunity to compare two classes of actions, voluntary (antisaccade) and involuntary (erroneous prosaccade) eye movements, and thus to assess whether shifts of covert attention can or cannot override sources of information that may be present when people make voluntary but not reflexive responses. We found that shifts of visual attention did indeed influence participants' awareness of their own eye movements, leading them to misperceive reflexive and voluntary movements alike, suggesting that covert attention may override both peripheral and central signals to bias awareness. |
A. Caglar Tas; Steven J. Luck; Andrew Hollingworth The relationship between visual attention and visual working memory encoding: A dissociation between covert and overt orienting Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 48, no. 8, pp. 1121–1138, 2016. @article{Tas2016,There is substantial debate over whether visual working memory (VWM) and visual attention constitute a single system for the selection of task-relevant perceptual information or whether they are distinct systems that can be dissociated when their representational demands diverge. In the present study, we focused on the relationship between visual attention and the encoding of objects into VWM. Participants performed a color change-detection task. During the retention interval, a secondary object, irrelevant to the memory task, was presented. Participants were instructed either to execute an overt shift of gaze to this object (Experiments 1–3) or to attend it covertly (Experiments 4 and 5). Our goal was to determine whether these overt and covert shifts of attention disrupted the information held in VWM. We hypothesized that saccades, which typically introduce a memorial demand to bridge perceptual disrup- tion, would lead to automatic encoding of the secondary object. However, purely covert shifts of attention, which introduce no such demand, would not result in automatic memory encoding. The results supported these predictions. Saccades to the secondary object produced substantial interference with VWM performance, but covert shifts of attention to this object produced no interference with VWM performance. These results challenge prevailing theories that consider attention and VWM to reflect a common mechanism. In addition, they indicate that the relationship between attention and VWM is dependent on the memorial demands of the orienting behavior. |
Raymond Bertram; Johanna K. Kaakinen; Frank Bensch; Laura Helle; Eila Lantto; Pekka Niemi; Nina Lundbom Eye movements of radiologists reflect expertise in CT study interpretation: A potential tool to measure resident development Journal Article In: Radiology, vol. 281, no. 3, pp. 805–815, 2016. @article{Bertram2016,PURPOSE: To establish potential markers of visual expertise in eye movement (EM) patterns of early residents, advanced residents, and specialists who interpret abdominal computed tomography (CT) studies. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The institutional review board approved use of anonymized CT studies as research materials and to obtain anonymized eye-tracking data from volunteers. Participants gave written informed consent. RESULTS: Early residents (n = 15), advanced residents (n = 14), and specialists (n = 12) viewed 26 abdominal CT studies as a sequence of images at either 3 or 5 frames per second while EMs were recorded. Data were analyzed by using linear mixed-effects models. Early residents' detection rate decreased with working hours (odds ratio, 0.81; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.73, 0.91; P = .001). They detected less of the low visual contrast (but not of the high visual contrast) lesions (45% [13 of 29]) than did specialists (62% [18 of 29]) (odds ratio, 0.39; 95% CI: 0.25, 0.61; P , .001) or advanced residents (56% [16 of 29]) (odds ratio, 0.55; 95% CI: 0.33, 0.93; P = .024). Specialists and advanced residents had longer fixation durations at 5 than at 3 frames per second (specialists: b = .01; 95% CI: .004, .026; P = .008; advanced residents: b = .04; 95% CI: .03, .05; P , .001). In the presence of lesions, saccade lengths of specialists shortened more than those of advanced (b = .02; 95% CI: .007, .04; P = .003) and of early residents (b = .02; 95% CI: .008, 0.04; P = .003). Irrespective of expertise, high detection rate correlated with greater reduction of saccade length in the presence of lesions (b = 2.10; 95% CI: 2.16, 2.04; P = .002) and greater increase at higher presentation speed (b = .11; 95% CI: .04, .17; P = .001). CONCLUSION: Expertise in CT reading is characterized by greater adaptivity in EM patterns in response to the demands of the task and environment. |
Kathy Conklin; Ana Pellicer-Sánchez Using eye-tracking in applied linguistics and second language research Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 453–467, 2016. @article{Conklin2016,With eye-tracking technology the eye is thought to give researchers a window into the mind. Importantly, eye-tracking has significant advantages over traditional online processing measures: chiefly that it allows for more ‘natural' processing as it does not require a secondary task, and that it provides a very rich moment-to-moment data source. In recognition of the technology's benefits, an ever increasing number of researchers in applied linguistics and second language research are beginning to use it. As eye-tracking gains traction in the field, it is important to ensure that it is established in an empirically sound fashion. To do this it is important for the field to come to an understanding about what eye-tracking is, what eye-tracking measures tell us, what it can be used for, and what different eye-tracking systems can and cannot do. Further, it is important to establish guidelines for designing sound research studies using the technology. The goal of the current review is to begin to address these issues. |
Aline Ferreira; John Wayne Schwieter; Alexandra Gottardo; Jefferey Jones Cognitive effort in direct and inverse translation performance: Insight from eye-tracking technology Journal Article In: Cadernos de Tradução, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 60–80, 2016. @article{Ferreira2016,This case study examined the translation performance of four professional translators with the aim of exploring the cognitive effort involved in direct and inverse translation. Four professional translators translated two comparable texts from English into Spanish and from Spa- nish into English. Eye-tracking technology was used to analyze the total time spent in each task, fixation time, and average fixation time. Fixation count in three areas of interest was measured including: source text, target text, and browser, used as an external support. Results suggested that although total time and fixation count were indicators of cognitive effort during the tasks, fixation count in the areas of interest data showed that more effort was directed toward the source text in both tasks. Overall, this study demonstrates that while more traditional measures for translation difficulty (e.g., total time) indicate more effort in the inverse translation task, eye-tracking data indicate that differences in the effort applied in both directions must be carefully analyzed, mostly regarding the areas of interest. |
Nayoung Kwon; Patrick Sturt Processing control information in a nominal control construction: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 779–793, 2016. @article{Kwon2016,In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined the processing of the nominal control construction. Participants' eye-movements were monitored while they read sentences that included either giver control nominals (e.g. promise in Luke's promise to Sophia to photograph himself) or recipient control nominals (e.g. plea in Luke's plea to Sophia to photograph herself). In order to examine both the initial access of control information, and its later use in on-line processing, we combined a manipulation of nominal control with a gender match/mismatch paradigm. Results showed that there was evidence of processing difficulty for giver control sentences (relative to recipient control sentences) at the point where the control dependency was initially created, suggesting that control information was accessed during the early parsing stages. This effect is attributed to a recency preference in the formation of control dependencies; the parser prefers to assign a recent antecedent to PRO. In addition, readers slowed down after reading a reflexive pronoun that mismatched with the gender of the antecedent indicated by the control nominal (e.g. Luke's promise to Sophia to photograph herself). The mismatch cost suggests that control information of the nominal control construction was used to constrain dependency formation involving a controller, PRO and a reflexive, confirming the use of control information in on-line interpretation. |
Damien Litchfield; Tim Donovan Worth a quick look? Initial scene previews can guide eye movements as a function of domain-specific expertise but can also have unforeseen costs Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 42, no. 7, pp. 982–994, 2016. @article{Litchfield2016,Rapid scene recognition is a global visual process we can all exploit to guide search. This ability is thought to underpin expertise in medical image perception yet there is no direct evidence that isolates the expertise-specific contribution of processing scene previews on subsequent eye movement performance. We used the flash-preview moving window paradigm (Castelhano&Henderson, 2007) to investigate this issue. Expert radiologists and novice observers underwent 2 experiments whereby participants viewed a 250-ms scene preview or a mask before searching for a target. Observers looked for everyday objects from real-world scenes (Experiment 1), and searched for lung nodules from medical images (Experiment 2). Both expertise groups exploited the brief preview of the upcoming scene to more efficiently guide windowed search in Experiment 1, but there was only a weak effect of domain-specific expertise in Experiment 2, with experts showing small improvements in search metrics with scene previews. Expert diagnostic performance was better than novices in all conditions but was not contingent on seeing the scene preview, and scene preview actually impaired novice diagnostic performance. Experiment 3 required novice and experienced observers to search for a variety of abnormalities from different medical images. Rather than maximizing the expertise-specific advantage of processing scene previews, both novices and experienced radiographers were worse at detecting abnormalities with scene previews. We discuss how restricting access to the initial glimpse can be compensated for by subsequent search and discovery processing, but there can still be costs in integrating a fleeting glimpse of a medical scene. |
Mel McKendrick; Stephen H. Butler; Madeleine A. Grealy The effect of self-referential expectation on emotional face processing Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. e0155576, 2016. @article{McKendrick2016,The role of self-relevance has been somewhat neglected in static face processing paradigms but may be important in understanding how emotional faces impact on attention, cognition and affect. The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of self-relevant primes on processing emotional composite faces. Sentence primes created an expectation of the emotion of the face before sad, happy, neutral or composite face photos were viewed. Eye movements were recorded and subsequent responses measured the cognitive and affective impact of the emotion expressed. Results indicated that primes did not guide attention, but impacted on judgments of valence intensity and self-esteem ratings. Negative self-relevant primes led to the most negative self-esteem ratings, although the effect of the prime was qualified by salient facial features. Self-relevant expectations about the emotion of a face and subsequent attention to a face that is congruent with these expectations strengthened the affective impact of viewing the face. |
Nicole Wetzel; David Buttelmann; Andy Schieler; Andreas Widmann Infant and adult pupil dilation in response to unexpected sounds Journal Article In: Developmental Psychobiology, vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 382–392, 2016. @article{Wetzel2016,Surprisingly occurring sounds outside the focus of attention can involuntarily capture attention. This study focuses on the impact of deviant sounds on the pupil size as a marker of auditory involuntary attention in infants. We presented an oddball paradigm including four types of deviant sounds within a sequence of repeated standard sounds to 14-month-old infants and to adults. Environmental and noise deviant sounds elicited a strong pupil dilation response (PDR) in both age groups. In contrast, moderate frequency deviants elicited a significant PDR in adults only. Moreover, a principal component analysis revealed two components underlying the PDR. Component scores differ, depending on deviant types, between age groups. Results indicate age effects of parasympathetic inhibition and sympathetic activation of the pupil size caused by deviant sounds with a high arousing potential. Results demonstrate that the PDR is a sensitive tool for the investigation of involuntary attention to sounds in preverbal children. |
Amanda J. Connolly; Nicole J. Rinehart; Joanne Fielding Saccade adaptation in young people diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Combined Type Journal Article In: Neuroscience, vol. 333, pp. 27–34, 2016. @article{Connolly2016,Growing evidence suggests Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often co-occurs with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and a better understanding of the nature of their overlap, including at a neurobiological level, is needed. Research has implicated cerebellar-networks as part of the neural-circuitry disrupted in ASD, but little research has been carried out to investigate this in ADHD. We investigated cerebellar integrity using a double-step saccade adaptation paradigm in a group of male children age 8–15 (n = 12) diagnosed with ADHD-Combined Type (-CT). Their performance was compared to a group of age and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) controls (n = 12). Parent reported symptoms of ADHD-CT and ASD were measured, along with motor proficiency (Movement ABC-2). We found, on average, the adaptation of saccade gain was reduced for the ADHD-CT group compared to the TD group. Greater saccadic gain change (adaptation) was also positively correlated with higher Movement ABC-2 total and balance scores among the ADHD-CT participants. These differences suggest cerebellar networks underlying saccade adaptation may be disrupted in young people with ADHD-CT. Though our findings require further replication with larger samples, they suggest further research into cerebellar dysfunction in ADHD-CT, and as a point of neurobiological overlap with ASD, may be warranted. |
Vera Demberg; Asad Sayeed The frequency of rapid pupil dilations as a measure of linguistic processing difficulty Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. e0146194, 2016. @article{Demberg2016,While it has long been known that the pupil reacts to cognitive load, pupil size has received little attention in cognitive research because of its long latency and the difficulty of separating effects of cognitive load from the light reflex or effects due to eye movements. A novel measure, the Index of Cognitive Activity (ICA), relates cognitive effort to the frequency of small rapid dilations of the pupil. We report here on a total of seven experiments which test whether the ICA reliably indexes linguistically induced cognitive load: three experiments in reading (a manipulation of grammatical gender match / mismatch, an experiment of semantic fit, and an experiment comparing locally ambiguous subject versus object relative clauses, all in German), three dual-task experiments with simultaneous driving and spoken language comprehension (using the same manipulations as in the single-task reading experiments), and a visual world experiment comparing the processing of causal versus concessive discourse markers. These experiments are the first to investigate the effect and time course of the ICA in language processing. All of our experiments support the idea that the ICA indexes linguistic processing difficulty. The effects of our linguistic manipulations on the ICA are consistent for reading and auditory presentation. Furthermore, our experiments show that the ICA allows for usage within a multi-task paradigm. Its robustness with respect to eye movements means that it is a valid measure of processing difficulty for usage within the visual world paradigm, which will allow researchers to assess both visual attention and processing difficulty at the same time, using an eye-tracker. We argue that the ICA is indicative of activity in the locus caeruleus area of the brain stem, which has recently also been linked to P600 effects observed in psycholinguistic EEG experiments. |
Ann Kathrin Grohe; Andrea Weber The penefit of salience: Salient accented, but not unaccented words reveal accent adaptation effects Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 864, 2016. @article{Grohe2016,In two eye-tracking experiments, the effects of salience in accent training and speech accentedness on spoken-word recognition were investigated. Salience was expected to increase a stimulus' prominence and therefore promote learning. A training-test paradigm was used on native German participants utilizing an artificial German accent. Salience was elicited by two different criteria: Production and listening training as a subjective criterion and accented (Experiment 1) and canonical test words (Experiment 2) as an objective criterion. During training in Experiment 1, participants either read single German words out loud and deliberately devoiced initial voiced stop consonants (e.g., Balken-"beam" pronounced as *Palken), or they listened to pre-recorded words with the same accent. In a subsequent eye-tracking experiment, looks to auditorily presented target words with the accent were analyzed. Participants from both training conditions fixated accented target words more often than a control group without training. Training was identical in Experiment 2, but during test, canonical German words that overlapped in onset with the accented words from training were presented as target words (e.g., Palme-"palm tree" overlapped in onset with the training word *Palken) rather than accented words. This time, no training effect was observed; recognition of canonical word forms was not affected by having learned the accent. Therefore, accent learning was only visible when the accented test tokens in Experiment 1, which were not included in the test of Experiment 2, possessed sufficient salience based on the objective criterion "accent." These effects were not modified by the subjective criterion of salience from the training modality. |
Nayoung Kwon; Patrick Sturt Attraction effects in honorific agreement in Korean Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 1302, 2016. @article{Kwon2016a,Previous studies have suggested that sentence processing is mediated by content-addressable direct retrieval processes (McElree, 2000; McElree et al., 2003). However, the memory retrieval processes may differ as a function of the type of dependency. For example, while many studies have reported facilitatory intrusion effects associated with a structurally illicit antecedent during the processing of subject-verb number or person agreement and negative polarity items (Pearlmutter et al., 1999; Xiang et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013), studies investigating reflexives have not found consistent evidence of intrusion effects (Parker et al., 2015; Sturt and Kwon, 2015; cf. Nicol and Swinney, 1989; Sturt, 2003). Similarly, the memory retrieval processes could be also sensitive to cross-linguistic differences (cf. Lago et al., 2015). We report one self-paced reading experiment and one eye-tracking experiment that examine the processing of subject-verb honorific agreement, a dependency that is different from those that have been studied to date, in Korean, a typologically different language from those previously studied. The overall results suggest that the retrieval processes underlying the processing of subject-verb honorific agreement in Korean are susceptible to facilitatory intrusion effects from a structurally illicit but feature-matching subject, with a pattern that is similar to subject-verb agreement in English. In addition, the attraction effect was not limited to the ungrammatical sentences but was also found in grammatical sentences. The clear attraction effect in the grammatical sentences suggest that the attraction effect does not solely arise as the result of an error-driven process (cf. Wagers et al., 2009), but is likely also to result from general mechanisms of retrieval processes of activating of potential items in memory (Vasishth et al., 2008). |
Laura Vilkaitem Are nonadjacent collocations processed faster? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 10, pp. 1632–1642, 2016. @article{Vilkaitem2016,Numerous studies have shown processing advantages for collocations, but they only investigated processing of adjacent collocations (e.g., provide information). However, in naturally occurring language, nonadjacent collocations (provide some of the information) are equally, if not more frequent. This raises the question whether the same kind of processing advantage holds for nonadjacent collocations as for adjacent ones. This paper reports on an eye-tracking experiment in which participants read sentences containing either adjacent or nonadjacent collocations or matched control phrases. The results replicated the finding that collocations are processed faster than control phrases, and extended this finding to nonadjacent collocations. However, the results also suggest that the facilitative effect might be larger for adjacent collocations than for nonadjacent ones. |
Lijing Wang; Xueli He; Yingchun Chen Quantitative relationship model between workload and time pressure under different flight operation tasks Journal Article In: International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, vol. 54, pp. 93–102, 2016. @article{Wang2016f,The goal of this study was to establish a quantitative relationship model between workload and task demand under different tasks, when time pressure was set as the main influential factor to the task demand, with three workload measurement parameters. The workload "redline" was also analyzed and determined with the relationship models between the workload measurement parameters and time pressure. The experiment was designed with three different tasks under different time pressures. Three workload measurement parameters (subjective evaluation workload, accuracy and pupil diameter) and the subjective feeling threshold of time pressure were measured experimentally and then used in a comprehensive analysis for the relationship model. The data analysis result showed significant differences in workload under different time pressures, but workload was not affected by the task type. With a time pressure of 0.8, participants felt a sense of time urgency and the accuracy decreased by approximately 85%. The results demonstrate that the subjective evaluation workload, accuracy and pupil diameter can be used as the measurement parameters for the workload under different time pressures and for different tasks. Thus, for a time pressure of 0.8, an accuracy of 80%-85% was determined as the workload "redline". Linear relationships were found between subjective evaluation workload, and pupil diameter and time pressure, and a quadratic curve relationship was found between accuracy and time pressure. Workload prediction can thus be performed using these relationship models between workload and time pressure. |
Daw-An Wu; Patrick Cavanagh Where are you looking? Pseudogaze in afterimages Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 1–10, 2016. @article{Wu2016,How do we know where we are looking? A frequent assumption is that the subjective experience of our direction of gaze is assigned to the location in the world that falls on our fovea. However, we find that observers can shift their subjective direction of gaze among different nonfoveal points in an afterimage. Observers were asked to look directly at different corners of a diamond-shaped afterimage. When the requested corner was 3.5° in the periphery, the observer often reported that the image moved away in the direction of the attempted gaze shift. However, when the corner was at 1.75° eccentricity, most reported successfully fixating at the point. Eye-tracking data revealed systematic drift during the subjective fixations on peripheral locations. For example, when observers reported looking directly at a point above the fovea, their eyes were often drifting steadily upwards. We then asked observers to make a saccade from a subjectively fixated, nonfoveal point to another point in the afterimage, 7° directly below their fovea. The observers consistently reported making appropriately diagonal saccades, but the eye movement traces only occasionally followed the perceived oblique direction. These results suggest that the perceived direction of gaze can be assigned flexibly to an attended point near the fovea. This may be how the visual world acquires its stability during fixation of an object, despite the drifts and microsaccades that are normal characteristics of visual fixation. |
Amanda J. Connolly; Nicole J. Rinehart; Beth P. Johnson; Nicole Papadopoulos; Joanne Fielding In: Neuroscience, vol. 334, pp. 47–54, 2016. @article{Connolly2016a,Although there is little overlap in core diagnostic criteria for ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), ASD symptoms are estimated to co-occur in children with ADHD in 20–50% of cases. As motor control deficits are common to both disorders, we investigated the impact of ASD symptoms on ocular motor control in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder-Combined Type (ADHD-CT), using a cued saccade paradigm sensitive to cerebellar ocular motor impairment in ASD. Basic saccade metrics (latency, velocity and accuracy), trial-to-trial variability, and main sequences relationships (saccade velocity for a given amplitude) were assessed, for 14 males with ADHD-CT and 14 typically developing (TD) males (aged 8–14, IQ > 80). Our results revealed that saccade profiles of the ADHD-CT group showed a pattern of hypermetria and altered main sequence. As the cerebellum is crucially involved in the regulation of saccade parameters, we propose that this pattern of deficit in ADHD-CT is consistent with the widely reported morphological abnormalities in ocular motor vermis (cerebellar lobules VI-VII) in ADHD-CT and ASD. |
Danique Jeurissen; Matthew W. Self; Pieter R. Roelfsema Serial grouping of 2D-image regions with object-based attention in humans Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 5, pp. 1–22, 2016. @article{Jeurissen2016,After an initial stage of local analysis within the retina and early visual pathways, the human visual system creates a structured representation of the visual scene by co-selecting image elements that are part of behaviorally relevant objects. The mechanisms underlying this perceptual organization process are only partially understood. We here investigate the time-course of perceptual grouping of two-dimensional image-regions by measuring the reaction times of human participants and report that it is associated with the gradual spread of object-based attention. Attention spreads fastest over large and homogeneous areas and is slowed down at locations that require small-scale processing. We find that the time-course of the object-based selection process is well explained by a 'growth-cone' model, which selects surface elements in an incremental, scale-dependent manner. We discuss how the visual cortical hierarchy can implement this scale-dependent spread of object-based attention, leveraging the different receptive field sizes in distinct cortical areas. |
Annie Tremblay; Mirjam Broersma; Caitlin E. Coughlin; Jiyoun Choi Effects of the native language on the learning of fundamental frequency in second-language speech segmentation Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 985, 2016. @article{Tremblay2016,This study investigates whether the learning of prosodic cues to word boundaries in speech segmentation is more difficult if the native and second/foreign languages (L1 and L2) have similar (though non-identical) prosodies than if they have markedly different prosodies (Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis). It does so by comparing French, Korean, and English listeners' use of fundamental-frequency (F0) rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French. F0 rise signals phrase-final boundaries in French and Korean but word-initial boundaries in English. Korean-speaking and English-speaking L2 learners of French, who were matched in their French proficiency and French experience, and native French listeners completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which they recognized words whose final boundary was or was not cued by an increase in F0. The results showed that Korean listeners had greater difficulty using F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French than French and English listeners. This suggests that L1-L2 prosodic similarity can make the learning of an L2 segmentation cue difficult, in line with the proposed Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis. We consider mechanisms that may underlie this difficulty and discuss the implications of our findings for understanding listeners' phonological encoding of L2 words. |
Susanne Röder; Claus-Christian Carbon; Todd K. Shackelford; Katarzyna Pisanski; Bettina Weege; Bernhard Fink Men's visual attention to and perceptions of women's dance movements Journal Article In: Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 101, pp. 1–3, 2016. @article{rcspwf16,Sexual selection may have shaped male visual sensitivity to characteristics that provide information about female mate quality. Indeed, men judge certain facial and bodily configurations of women to be attractive, possibly because those configurations signal health and fertility. Most of this evidence derives from the study of women's facial and body photographs. We tested the hypothesis that attractive female dancers receive greater visual attention from men than do unattractive dancers. Twenty-nine men viewed video pairs of pre-categorized high and low attractive female dancers. Their eye gaze was tracked and they also provided ratings of attractiveness, femininity, and dance movement harmony. High attractive dancers received greater visual attention than did low attractive dancers and men's visual attention correlated positively with their judgments of attractiveness, femininity, and dance movement harmony. We discuss our findings in the context of the 'beauty captures the mind of the beholder' hypothesis and the role of dance movements in human mate selection. |
Jamie Ferri; Joseph Schmidt; Greg Hajcak; Turhan Canli Emotion regulation and amygdala-precuneus connectivity: Focusing on attentional deployment Journal Article In: Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 991–1002, 2016. @article{Ferri2016,Attentional deployment is an emotion regulation strategy that involves shifting attentional focus. Deploying attention to non-arousing, compared to arousing, regions of unpleasant images has been associated with reduced negative affect, reduced amygdala activation, and increased activity in fronto-parietal control networks. The current study examined neural correlates and functional connectivity associated with using attentional deployment to increase negative affect (deploying attention towards arousing unpleasant information) or to decrease negative affect (deploying attention away from arousing unpleasant information), compared to naturally viewing unpleasant images, in 42 individuals while concurrently monitoring eye movements. Directing attention to both arousing and non-arousing regions resulted in enhanced fronto-parietal activation compared to natural viewing, but only directing attention to non-arousing regions was associated with changes in amygdala activation. There were no significant differences in connectivity between naturally viewing unpleasant images and focusing on arousing regions. However, naturally viewing unpleasant images, relative to focusing on non-arousing regions, was associated with increased connectivity between the amygdala and visual cortex, while focusing on non-arousing regions of unpleasant images, compared to natural viewing, was associated with increased connectivity between the amygdala and the precuneus. Amygdala-precuneus connectivity correlated positively with eye-tracking measures of attentional deployment success and with trait reappraisal. Deploying attention away from arousing unpleasant information, then, may depend upon functional relationships between the amygdala and parietal regions implicated in attentional control. Furthermore, these relationships might relate to the ability to successfully implement attentional deployment, and the predisposition to utilize adaptive emotion regulation strategies. |