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2025 |
Nico A. Flierman; Sue Ann Koay; Willem S. Hoogstraten; Tom J. H. Ruigrok; Pieter Roelfsema; Aleksandra Badura; Chris I. De Zeeuw Encoding of cerebellar dentate neuron activity during visual attention in rhesus macaques Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 13, pp. 1–23, 2025. @article{Flierman2025,The role of cerebellum in controlling eye movements is well established, but its contribution to more complex forms of visual behavior has remained elusive. To study cerebellar activity during visual attention we recorded extracellular activity of dentate nucleus (DN) neurons in two non-human primates (NHPs). NHPs were trained to read the direction indicated by a peripheral visual stimulus while maintaining fixation at the center, and report the direction of the cue by performing a saccadic eye movement into the same direction following a delay. We found that single-unit DN neurons modulated spiking activity over the entire time course of the task, and that their activity often bridged temporally separated intra-trial events, yet in a heterogeneous manner. To better understand the heterogeneous relationship between task structure, behavioral performance, and neural dynamics, we constructed a behavioral, an encoding, and a decoding model. Both NHPs showed different behavioral strategies, which influenced the performance. Activity of the DN neurons reflected the unique strategies, with the direction of the visual stimulus frequently being encoded long before an upcoming saccade. Moreover, the latency of the ramping activity of DN neurons following presentation of the visual stimulus was shorter in the better performing NHP. Labeling with the retrograde tracer Cholera Toxin B in the recording location in the DN indicated that these neurons predominantly receive inputs from Purkinje cells in the D1 and D2 zones of the lateral cerebellum as well as neurons of the principal olive and medial pons, all regions known to connect with neurons in the prefrontal cortex contributing to planning of saccades. Together, our results highlight that DN neurons can dynamically modulate their activity during a visual attention task, comprising not only sensorimotor but also cognitive attentional components. |
Leigh B. Fernandez; Muzna Shehzad; Lauren V. Hadley Younger adults may be faster at making semantic predictions, but older adults are more efficient Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, pp. 1–8, 2025. @article{Fernandez2025,While there is strong evidence that younger adults use contextual information to generate semantic predictions, findings from older adults are less clear. Age affects cognition in a variety of different ways that may impact prediction mechanisms; while the efficiency of memory systems and processing speed decrease, life experience leads to complementary increases in vocabulary size, real-world knowledge, and even inhibitory control. Using the visual world paradigm, we tested prediction in younger (n = 30, between 18 and 35 years of age) and older adults (n = 30, between 53 and 78 years of age). Importantly, we differentiated early stage predictions based on simple spreading activation from the more resource-intensive tailoring of predictions when additional constraining information is provided. We found that older adults were slower than younger adults in generating early stage predictions but then quicker than younger adults to tailor those predictions given additional information. This suggests that while age may lead to delays in first activating relevant lexical items when listening to speech, increased linguistic experience nonetheless increases the efficiency with which contextual information is used. These findings are consistent with reports of age having positive as well as negative impacts on cognition and suggest conflation of different stages of prediction as a basis for the inconsistency in the aging-related literature to date. |
Alejandro J Estudillo Exploring the role of foveal and extrafoveal processing in emotion recognition: A gaze-contingent study Journal Article In: Behavioral Sciences, vol. 15, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Estudillo2025,Although the eye-tracking technique has been widely used to passively study emotion recognition, no studies have utilised this technique to actively manipulate eye- gaze strategies during the recognition facial emotions. The present study aims to fill this gap by employing a gaze-contingent paradigm. Observers were asked to determine the emotion displayed by centrally presented upright or inverted faces. Under the window condition, only a single fixated facial feature was available at a time, only allowing for foveal processing. Under the mask condition, the fixated facial feature was masked while the rest of the face remained visible, thereby disrupting foveal processing but allowing for extrafoveal processing. These conditions were compared with a full-view condition. The results revealed that while both foveal and extrafoveal information typically contribute to emotion identification, at a standard conversation distance, the latter alone generally suffices for efficient emotion identification. |
Lea Entzmann; Arni Gunnar Asgeirsson; Arni Kristjansson How does color distribution learning affect goal-directed visuomotor behavior? Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 254, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{Entzmann2025,While the visual world is rich and complex, importantly, it nevertheless contains many statistical regularities. For example, environmental feature distributions tend to remain relatively stable from one moment to the next. Recent findings have shown how observers can learn surprising details of environmental color distributions, even when the colors belong to actively ignored stimuli such as distractors in visual search. Our aim was to determine whether such learning influences orienting in the visual environment, measured with saccadic eye movements. In two visual search experiments, observers had to find an odd-one-out target. Firstly, we tested cases where observers selected targets by fixating them. Secondly, we measured saccadic eye movements when observers made judgments on the target and responded manually. Trials were structured in blocks, containing learning trials where distractors came from the same color distribution (uniform or Gaussian) while on subsequent test trials, the target was at different distances from the mean of the learning distractor distribution. For both manual and saccadic measures, performance improved throughout the learning trials and was better when the distractor colors came from a Gaussian distribution. Moreover, saccade latencies during test trials depended on the distance between the color of the current target and the distractors on learning trials, replicating results obtained with manual responses. Latencies were slowed when the target color was within the learning distractor color distribution and also revealed that observers learned the difference between uniform and Gaussian distributions. The importance of several variables in predicting saccadic and manual reaction times was studied using random forests, revealing similar rankings for both modalities, although previous distractor color had a higher impact on free eye movements. Overall, our results demonstrate learning of detailed characteristics of environmental color distributions that affects early attentional selection rather than later decisional processes. |
Thomas W. Elston; Joni D. Wallis Context-dependent decision-making in the primate hippocampal–prefrontal circuit Journal Article In: Nature Neuroscience, vol. 28, pp. 374–382, 2025. @article{Elston2025,What is good in one scenario may be bad in another. Despite the ubiquity of such contextual reasoning in everyday choice, how the brain flexibly uses different valuation schemes across contexts remains unknown. We addressed this question by monitoring neural activity from the hippocampus (HPC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) of two monkeys performing a state-dependent choice task. We found that HPC neurons encoded state information as it became available and then, at the time of choice, relayed this information to the OFC via theta synchronization. During choice, the OFC represented value in a state-dependent manner; many OFC neurons uniquely coded for value in only one state but not the other. This suggests a functional dissociation whereby the HPC encodes contextual information that is broadcast to the OFC via theta synchronization to select a state-appropriate value subcircuit, thereby allowing for contextual reasoning in value-based choice. |
Joshua O. Eayrs; Haya Serena Tobing; S. Tabitha Steendam; Nicoleta Prutean; Wim Notebaert; Jan R. Wiersema; Ruth M. Krebs; C. Nico Boehler Reward and efficacy modulate the rate of anticipatory pupil dilation Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Eayrs2025,Pupil size is a well-established marker of cognitive effort, with greater efforts leading to larger pupils. This is particularly true for pupil size during task performance, whereas findings on anticipatory effort triggered by a cue stimulus are less consistent. For example, a recent report by Frömer et al. found that in a cued-Stroop task, behavioral performance and electrophysiological markers of preparatory effort allocation were modulated by cued reward and ‘efficacy' (the degree to which rewards depended on good performance), but pupil size did not show a comparable pattern. Here, we conceptually replicated this study, employing an alternative approach to the pupillometry analyses. In line with previous findings, we found no modulation of absolute pupil size in the cue-to-target interval. Instead, we observed a significant difference in the rate of pupil dilation in anticipation of the target: pupils dilated more rapidly for high-reward trials in which rewards depended on good performance. This was followed by a significant difference in absolute pupil size within the first hundreds of milliseconds following Stroop stimulus onset, likely reflecting a lagging effect of anticipatory effort allocation. Finally, the slope of pupil dilation was significantly correlated with behavioral response times, and this association was strongest for the high-reward, high-efficacy trials, further supporting that the rate of anticipatory pupil dilation reflects anticipatory effort. We conclude that pupil size is modulated by anticipatory effort, but in a highly temporally-specific manner, which is best reflected by the rate of dilation in the moments just prior to stimulus onset. |
S. Duschek; T. Rainer; P. Piwkowski; J. Vorwerk; L. Riml; U. Ettinger Neural correlates of proactive and reactive control investigated using a novel precued antisaccade paradigm Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 62, pp. 1–17, 2025. @article{Duschek2025,This ERP study investigated central nervous correlates of proactive and reactive control using a novel precued antisaccade paradigm. Proactive control refers to preparatory processes during anticipation of a behaviorally relevant event; reactive control is activated after such an event to ensure goal attainment. A 64-channel EEG was obtained in 35 subjects; video-based eye tracking was applied for ocular recording. In the task, a target (probe) appeared left or right of the fixation point 1800ms after a visual cue; subjects had to move their gaze to the probe (prosaccade) or its mirror image position (antisaccade). Probes were emotional face expressions; their frame colors instructed task requirements. The cue informed about antisaccade probability (70% vs. 30%) in a trial. High antisaccade probability was associated with larger CNV amplitude than low antisaccade probability. In trials with incongruence between expected and actual task requirements, the probe N2 and P3a amplitudes were larger than in congruent trials. The P3a was smaller for affective than neutral probes. Task accuracy and speed were lower in incongruent trials and varied according to affective probe valence. EEG source imaging suggested origin of the ERPs in the orbitofrontal cortex and superior frontal gyrus. The difference for the CNV indicates greater cortical activity during higher proactive control demands. The larger probe N2 and P3a in incongruent trials reflect greater resource allocation to conflict monitoring and conflict resolution, i.e., reactive control. The influence of probe valence on the P3a suggests reduction of processing capacity due to higher emotional arousal. |
Alenka Doyle; Kamilla Volkova; Nicholas Crotty; Nicole Massa; Michael A. Grubb Information-driven attentional capture Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, pp. 1–7, 2025. @article{Doyle2025,Visual attention, the selective prioritization of sensory information, is crucial in dynamic, information-rich environments. That both internal goals and external salience modulate the allocation of attention is well established. However, recent empirical work has found instances of experience-driven attention, wherein task-irrelevant, physically non-salient stimuli reflexively capture attention in ways that are contingent on an observer's unique history. The prototypical example of experience-driven attention relies on a history of reward associations, with evidence attributing the phenomenon to reward-prediction errors. However, a mechanistic account, differing from the reward-prediction error hypothesis, is needed to explain how, in the absence of monetary reward, a history of target-seeking leads to attentional capture. Here we propose that what drives attentional capture in such cases is not target-seeking, but an association with instrumental information. To test this hypothesis, we used pre-cues to render the information provided by a search target either instrumental or redundant. We found that task-irrelevant, physically non-salient distractors associated with instrumental information were more likely to draw eye movements (a sensitive metric of information sampling) than were distractors associated with redundant information. Furthermore, saccading to an instrumental-information-associated distractor led to a greater behavioral cost: response times were slowed more severely. Crucially, the distractors had equivalent histories as sought targets, so any attentional differences between them must be due to different information histories resulting from our experimental manipulation. These findings provide strong evidence for the information history hypothesis and offer a method for exploring the neural signature of information-driven attentional capture. |
Gregory J. DiGirolamo; Federico Sorcini; Zachary Zaniewski; Jonathan B. Kruskal; Max P. Rosen In: Radiology, vol. 314, no. 2, pp. 1–7, 2025. @article{DiGirolamo2025,Background: Diagnostic error rates for detecting small lung nodules on chest CT scans remain high at 50%, despite advances in imaging technology and radiologist training. These failure rates may stem from limitations in conscious recognition processes. However, successful visual processes may be detecting the nodule independent of the radiologist's report. Purpose: To investigate visual processing in radiologists during the assessment of chest nodules to determine if radiologists have successful non- conscious processes that detect lung nodules on chest CT scans even when not consciously recognized or considered, as evidenced by changes in how long they look (dwell time) and pupil size to missed nodules. Materials and Methods: This prospective study, conducted from August 2014 to September 2023, compared six experienced radiologists with six medically naive control participants. Participants viewed 18 chest CT scans (nine abnormal with 16 nodules, nine normal) to detect lung nodules. High-speed video eye tracking measured gaze duration and pupil size (indicating physiological arousal) at missed nodule locations and the same locations on normal CT scans. The reference standard was the known presence or absence of nodules (as determined by a four-radiologist consensus panel) on abnormal and normal CT scans, respectively. Primary outcome measures were detection rates of nodules, and dwell time and pupil size at nodule locations versus normal tissue. Paired t tests were used for statistical analysis. Results: Twelve participants (six radiologists with an average of 9.3 years of radiologic experience and six controls with no radiologic experience) performed the evaluations. Radiologists missed on average 59% (9.5 of 16) of these lung nodules. For the missed nodules, radiologists exhibited longer dwell times (mean, 228 msec vs 175 msec; P = .005) and larger pupil size (mean, 1446 pixels vs 1349 pixels; P = .04.) than for normal tissue. Control participants showed no differences in dwell time (mean, 197 msec vs 180 msec; P = .64) or pupil size (mean, 1426 pixels vs 1714 pixels; P = .23) for missed nodules versus normal tissue locations. Conclusion: Radiologists' non-conscious processes during visual assessment of CT scans can detect lung nodules on chest CT scans even when conscious recognition fails, as evidenced by increased dwell time and larger pupil size. This successful non-conscious detection is a result of general radiology training. |
Nathan Didier; Dingcai Cao; Andrea C. King The eyes have it: Alcohol-induced eye movement impairment and perceived impairment in older adults with and without alcohol use disorder Journal Article In: Alcohol, Clinical and Experimental Research, no. November, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Didier2025,Background: While alcohol has been shown to impair eye movements in young adults, little is known about alcohol-induced oculomotor impairment in older adults with longer histories of alcohol use. Here, we examined whether older adults with chronic alcohol use disorder (AUD) exhibit more acute tolerance than age-matched light drinkers (LD), evidenced by less alcohol-induced oculomotor impairment and perceived impairment. Method: Two random-order, double-blinded laboratory sessions with administration of alcohol (0.8 g/kg) or placebo. Participants (n = 117; 55 AUD, 62 LD) were 40–65 years of age. Eye tracking outcomes (pupil size, smooth pursuit gain, pro- and anti-saccadic velocity, latency, and accuracy) were measured at baseline and repeated at peak and declining breath alcohol intervals. Participants rated their perceived impairment during rising and declining intervals. Results: Following alcohol consumption, older adults with AUD (vs. LD) showed less impairment on smooth pursuit gain and reported lower perceived impairment, but both groups showed similar pupil dilation and impairment on saccadic measures. Conclusions: While alcohol impaired older adults with AUD less than LD in terms of their ability to track a predictably moving object (i.e., smooth pursuit), both drinking groups were equally sensitive to alcohol-induced delays in reaction time, reductions in velocity, and deficits in accuracy to randomly appearing objects (i.e., saccade tasks). Thus, despite decades of chronic excessive drinking, older adults with AUD exhibited similar oculomotor tolerance on pro- and anti-saccade eye movements relative to their light-drinking counterparts. Given that these individuals also perceived less impairment during intoxication, they may be at risk for injury and harm when they engage in real-life drinking bouts. |
Sean Devine; Y. Doug Dong; Martin Sellier Silva; Mathieu Roy; A. Ross Otto Increased attention towards progress information near a goal state Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, pp. 1–9, 2025. @article{Devine2025,A growing body of evidence across psychology suggests that (cognitive) effort exertion increases in proximity to a goal state. For instance, previous work has shown that participants respond more quickly, but not less accurately, when they near a goal—as indicated by a filling progress bar. Yet it remains unclear when over the course of a cognitively demanding task do people monitor progress information: Do they continuously monitor their goal progress over the course of a task, or attend more frequently to it as they near their goal? To answer this question, we used eye-tracking to examine trial-by-trial changes in progress monitoring as participants completed blocks of an attentionally demanding oddball task. Replicating past work, we found that participants increased cognitive effort exertion near a goal, as evinced by an increase in correct responses per second. More interestingly, we found that the rate at which participants attended to goal progress information—operationalized here as the frequency of gazes towards a progress bar—increased steeply near a goal state. In other words, participants extracted information from the progress bar at a higher rate when goals were proximal (versus distal). In exploratory analysis of tonic pupil diameter, we also found that tonic pupil size increased sharply as participants approached a goal state, mirroring the pattern of gaze. These results support the view that people attend to progress information more as they approach a goal. |
Edan Daniel-Hertz; Jewelia K. Yao; Sidney Gregorek; Patricia M. Hoyos; Jesse Gomez An eccentricity gradient reversal across high-level visual cortex Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{DanielHertz2025,Human visual cortex contains regions selectively involved in perceiving and recognizing ecologically important visual stimuli such as people and places. Located in the ventral temporal lobe, these regions are organized consistently relative to cortical folding, a phenomenon thought to be inherited from how centrally or peripherally these stimuli are viewed with the retina. While this eccentricity theory of visual cortex has been one of the best descriptions of its functional organization, whether or not it accurately describes visual processing in all category-selective regions is not yet clear. Through a combination of behavioral and functional MRI measurements in 27 participants (17 females), we demonstrate that a limb-selective region neighboring well-studied face-selective regions shows tuning for the visual periphery in a cortical region originally thought to be centrally biased. We demonstrate that the spatial computations performed by the limb-selective region are consistent with visual experience and in doing so, make the novel observation that there may in fact be two eccentricity gradients, forming an eccentricity reversal across high-level visual cortex. These data expand the current theory of cortical organization to provide a unifying principle that explains the broad functional features of many visual regions, showing that viewing experience interacts with innate wiring principles to drive the location of cortical specialization. |
Jiahong Cui; Wenbo Yu; Lei Hu; Yuxuan Wang; Zhihan Liu The effect of transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) over bilateral parietal cortex in visual cross-modal conflicts Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Cui2025,In complex sensory environments, visual cross-modal conflicts often affect auditory performance. The inferior parietal cortex (IPC) is involved in processing visual conflicts, namely when cognitive control processes such as inhibitory control and working memory are required. This study investigated the effect of bilateral IPC tRNS on reducing visual cross-modal conflicts and explored whether its efficacy is dependent on the conflict type. Forty-four young adults were randomly allocated to receive either active tRNS (100–640 Hz, 2-mA for 20 min) or sham stimulation. Participants repeatedly performed tasks in three phases: before, during, and after stimulation. Results showed that tRNS significantly enhanced task accuracy across both semantic and non-semantic conflicts compared to sham, as well as a greater benefit in semantic conflict after stimulation. Correlation analyses indicated that individuals with lower baseline performance benefited more from active tRNS during stimulation in the non-semantic conflict task. There were no significant differences between groups in reaction time for each conflict type task. These findings provide important evidence for the use of tRNS in reducing visual cross-modal conflicts, particularly in suppressing semantic distractors, and highlight the critical role of bilateral IPC in modulating visual cross-modal conflicts. |
Gabriela Cruz; María Melcón; Leonardo Sutandi; Matias M. Palva; Satu Palva; Gregor Thut Oscillatory brain activity in the canonical alpha-band conceals distinct mechanisms in attention Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 1–17, 2025. @article{Cruz2025,Brain oscillations in the alpha-band (8-14 Hz) have been linked to specific processes in attention and perception. In particular, decreases in posterior alpha-amplitude are thought to reflect activation of perceptually relevant brain areas for target engagement, while alpha-amplitude increases have been associated with inhibition for distractor suppression. Traditionally, these alpha-changes have been viewed as two facets of the same process. However, recent evidence calls for revisiting this interpretation. Here, we recorded MEG/EEG in 32 participants (19 females) during covert visuospatial attention shifts (spatial cues) and two control conditions (neutral cue, no-attention cue), while tracking fixational eye movements. In disagreement with a single, perceptually relevant alpha-process, we found the typical alpha-modulations contra- and ipsilateral to the attention focus to be triple dissociated in their timing, topography, and spectral features: Ipsilateral alpha-increases occurred early, over occipital sensors, at a high alpha-frequency (10–14 Hz) and were expressed during spatial attention (alpha spatial cue > neutral cue). In contrast, contralateral alpha-decreases occurred later, over parietal sensors, at a lower alpha-frequency (7–10 Hz) and were associated with attention deployment in general (alpha spatial and neutral cue < no-attention cue). Additionally, the lateralized early alpha-increases but not alpha-decreases during spatial attention coincided in time with directionally biased microsaccades. Overall, this suggests that the attention-related early alpha-increases and late alpha-decreases reflect distinct, likely reflexive versus endogenously controlled attention mechanisms. We conclude that there is more than one perceptually relevant posterior alpha-oscillation, which need to be dissociated for a detailed account of their roles in perception and attention. |
Arianna Compostella; Marta Tagliani; Maria Vender; Denis Delfitto 2025. @book{Compostella2025,In this study, we examine how implicit statistical learning (ISL) interacts with the cognitive bias of the alternation advantage in serial reaction time (SRT) tasks. Our aim was to disentangle perceptual from motor aspects of learning, as well as to shed light on the cognitive sources of this alternation effect. We developed a manual (Study 1) and an oculomotor (Study 2) two-choice SRT task, with visual stimuli following the regularities of two binary artificial grammars (Fibonacci and its modification Skip). While these grammars share some deterministic transitional regularities, they differ in their probabilistic transitional regularities and distributional properties. The pattern of manual RTs in Study 1 provide evidence for ISL, showing that subjects learned the deterministic and probabilistic transitions in the two grammars. We also found a bias toward alternation (vs. repetition) in correspondence to non-deterministic points, regardless of their statistical properties in the grammars. Study 2 provides further evidence for both ISL and the alternation advantage, in terms of shorter manual RTs and higher accuracy rates of anticipatory eye movements. Saccadic responses preceding stimulus onset allow us to argue for the perceptual nature of ISL: participants detected regularities in the string by forming S-S associations based on the sequence of the perceived stimuli. Moreover, we propose that shifts in visuospatial attention preceding oculomotor programming play a role in the occurrence of the alternation advantage, and that such an effect is driven by the spatial location of the stimulus. These findings are also discussed with respect to the presence of two (possibly interacting) parsing strategies: statistical generalizations on the string vs. local hierarchical reconstruction. |
Alasdair D. F. Clarke; Amelia R. Hunt Learn more from your data with asymptotic regression Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, pp. 1–18, 2025. @article{Clarke2025,All measures of behavior have a temporal context. Changes in behavior over time often take a similar form: monotonically decreasing or increasing toward an asymptote. Whether these behavioral dynamics are the object of study or a nuisance variable, their inclusion in models of data makes conclusions more complete, robust, and well-specified, and can contribute to theory development. Here, we demonstrate that asymptotic regression is a relatively simple tool that can be applied to repeated-measures data to estimate three parameters: starting point, rate of change, and asymptote. Each of these parameters has a meaningful interpretation in terms of ecological validity, behavioral dynamics, and performance limits, respectively. They can also be used to help decide how many trials to include in an experiment and as a principled approach to reducing noise in data. We demonstrate the broad utility of asymptotic regression for modeling the effect of the passage of time within a single trial and for changes over trials of an experiment, using two existing data sets and a set of new visual search data. An important limit of asymptotic regression is that it cannot be applied to data that are stationary or change nonmonotonically. But for data that have performance changes that progress steadily toward an asymptote, as many behavioral measures do, it is a simple and powerful tool for describing those changes. Public |
Jui‐Tai T. Chen; Yi Hsuan Chang; Cesar Barquero; Moeka Mong Jia Teo; Nai Wen Kan; Chin An Wang Microsaccade behavior associated with inhibitory control in athletes in the antisaccade task Journal Article In: Psychology of Sport and Exercise, vol. 78, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Chen2025a,The ability to achieve a state of readiness before upcoming tasks, known as a preparatory set, is critical for athletic performance. Here, we investigated these preparatory processes associated with inhibitory control using the anti-saccade paradigm, in which participants are instructed, prior to target appearance, either to automatically look at the target (pro-saccade) or to suppress this automatic response and intentionally look in the opposite direction (anti-saccade). We focused on microsaccadic eye movements that happen before saccade responses in either pro- or anti-saccade tasks, as these microsaccades reflect ongoing preparatory processes during saccade planning before execution. We hypothesized that athletes, compared to non-athletes, would demonstrate better preparation, given research generally indicating higher inhibitory control in athletes. Our findings showed that microsaccade rates decreased before target appearance, with lower rates observed during anti-saccade preparation compared to pro-saccade preparation. However, microsaccade rates and metrics did not differ significantly between athletes and non-athletes. Moreover, reduced microsaccade rates were associated with improved task performance in non-athletes, leading to higher accuracy and faster saccade reaction times (SRTs) in trials without microsaccades. For athletes, only SRTs were affected by microsaccade occurrence. Moreover, the modulation of microsaccadic inhibition on accuracy was more pronounced in non-athletes compared to athletes. In conclusion, while microsaccade responses were modulated by task preparation, differences between athletes and non-athletes were non-significant. These findings, for the first time, highlight the potential of using microsaccades as an online objective index to study preparatory sets in sports science research. |
He Chen; Jun Kunimatsu; Tomomichi Oya; Yuri Imaizumi; Yukiko Hori; Masayuki Matsumoto; Yasuhiro Tsubo; Okihide Hikosaka; Takafumi Minamimoto; Yuji Naya; Hiroshi Yamada Formation of brain-wide neural geometry during visual item recognition in monkeys Journal Article In: iScience, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 1–17, 2025. @article{Chen2025,Neural dynamics are thought to reflect computations that relay and transform information in the brain. Previous studies have identified the neural population dynamics in many individual brain regions as a trajectory geometry, preserving a common computational motif. However, whether these populations share particular geometric patterns across brain-wide neural populations remains unclear. Here, by mapping neural dynamics widely across temporal/frontal/limbic regions in the cortical and subcortical structures of monkeys, we show that 10 neural populations, including 2,500 neurons, propagate visual item information in a stochastic manner. We found that visual inputs predominantly evoked rotational dynamics in the higher-order visual area, TE, and its downstream striatum tail, while curvy/straight dynamics appeared frequently downstream in the orbitofrontal/hippocampal network. These geometric changes were not deterministic but rather stochastic according to their respective emergence rates. Our meta-analysis results indicate that visual information propagates as a heterogeneous mixture of stochastic neural population signals in the brain. |
Yi Hsuan Chang; Rachel Yep; Chin An Wang In: Psychophysiology, vol. 62, pp. 1–22, 2025. @article{Chang2025,Pupil size is a non-invasive index for autonomic arousal mediated by the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine (LC-NE) system. While pupil size and its derivative (velocity) are increasingly used as indicators of arousal, limited research has investigated the relationships between pupil size and other well-known autonomic responses. Here, we simultaneously recorded pupillometry, heart rate, skin conductance, pulse wave amplitude, and respiration signals during an emotional face–word Stroop task, in which task-evoked (phasic) pupil dilation correlates with LC-NE responsivity. We hypothesized that emotional conflict and valence would affect pupil and other autonomic responses, and trial-by-trial correlations between pupil and other autonomic responses would be observed during both tonic and phasic epochs. Larger pupil dilations, higher pupil size derivative, and lower heart rates were observed in the incongruent condition compared to the congruent condition. Additionally, following incongruent trials, the congruency effect was reduced, and arousal levels indexed by previous-trial pupil dilation were correlated with subsequent reaction times. Furthermore, linear mixed models revealed that larger pupil dilations correlated with higher heart rates, higher skin conductance responses, higher respiration amplitudes, and lower pulse wave amplitudes on a trial-by-trial basis. Similar effects were seen between positive and negative valence conditions. Moreover, tonic pupil size before stimulus presentation significantly correlated with all other tonic autonomic responses, whereas tonic pupil size derivative correlated with heart rates and skin conductance responses. These results demonstrate a trial-by-trial relationship between pupil dynamics and other autonomic responses, highlighting pupil size as an effective real-time index for autonomic arousal during emotional conflict and valence processing. |
Yuqing Cai; Christoph Strauch; Stefan Van der Stigchel; Antonia F. Ten Brink; Frans W. Cornelissen; Marnix Naber Mapping simulated visual field defects with movie-viewing pupil perimetry Journal Article In: Graefe's Archive for Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology, pp. 1–10, 2025. @article{Cai2025,Purpose: Assessing the quality of the visual field is important for the diagnosis of ophthalmic and neurological diseases and, consequently, for rehabilitation. Visual field defects (VFDs) are typically assessed using standard automated perimetry (SAP). However, SAP requires participants to understand instructions, maintain fixation and sustained attention, and provide overt responses. These aspects make SAP less suitable for very young or cognitively impaired populations. Here we investigate the feasibility of a new and less demanding form of perimetry. This method assesses visual sensitivity based on pupil responses while performing the perhaps simplest task imaginable: watching movies. Method: We analyzed an existing dataset, with healthy participants (n = 70) freely watching movies with or without gaze-contingent simulated VFDs, either hemianopia (left- or right-sided) or glaucoma (large nasal arc, small nasal arc, and tunnel vision). Meanwhile, their gaze and pupil size were recorded. Using a recently published toolbox (Open-DPSM), we modeled the relative contribution of visual events to the pupil responses to indicate relative visual sensitivity across the visual field and to dissociate between conditions with and without simulated VFDs. Result: Conditions with and without simulated VFDs could be dissociated, with an AUC ranging from 0.85 to 0.97, depending on the specific simulated VFD condition. In addition, the dissociation was better when including more movies in the modeling but the model with as few movies as 10 movies was sufficient for a good classification (AUC ranging from 0.84 to 0.96). Conclusion: Movie-viewing pupil perimetry is promising in providing complementary information for the diagnosis of VFDs, especially for those who are unable to perform conventional perimetry. |
Andrew M Burleson; Pamela E Souza The time course of cognitive effort during disrupted speech Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, pp. 1–18, 2025. @article{Burleson2025,Listeners often find themselves in scenarios where speech is disrupted, misperceived, or otherwise difficult to recognise. In these situations, many individuals report exerting additional effort to understand speech, even when repairing speech may be difficult or impossible. This investigation aimed to characterise cognitive efforts across time during both sentence listening and a post-sentence retention interval by observing the pupillary response of participants with normal to borderline-normal hearing in response to two interrupted speech conditions: sentences interrupted by gaps of silence or bursts of noise. The pupillary response serves as a measure of the cumulative resources devoted to task completion. Both interruption conditions resulted in significantly greater levels of pupil dilation than the uninterrupted speech condition. Just prior to the end of a sentence, trials periodically interrupted by bursts of noise elicited greater pupil dilation than the silent-interrupted condition. Compared to the uninterrupted condition, both interruption conditions resulted in increased dilation after sentence end but before repetition, possibly reflecting sustained processing demands. Understanding pupil dilation as a marker of cognitive effort is important for clinicians and researchers when assessing the additional effort exerted by listeners with hearing loss who may use cochlear implants or hearing aids. Even when successful perceptual repair is unlikely, listeners may continue to exert increased effort when processing misperceived speech, which could cause them to miss upcoming speech or may contribute to heightened listening fatigue. |
Laurence Bruggeman; Evan Kidd; Rachel Nordlinger; Anne Cutler Incremental processing in a polysynthetic language (Murrinhpatha) Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 257, pp. 1–7, 2025. @article{Bruggeman2025,Language processing is rapidly incremental, but evidence bearing upon this assumption comes from very few languages. In this paper we report on a study of incremental processing in Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic Australian language, which expresses complex sentence-level meanings in a single verb, the full meaning of which is not clear until the final morph. Forty native Murrinhpatha speakers participated in a visual world eyetracking experiment in which they viewed two complex scenes as they heard a verb describing one of the scenes. The scenes were selected so that the verb describing the target scene had either no overlap with a possible description of the competitor image, or overlapped from the start (onset overlap) or at the end of the verb (rhyme overlap). The results showed that, despite meaning only being clear at the end of the verb, Murrinhpatha speakers made incremental predictions that differed across conditions. The findings demonstrate that processing in polysynthetic languages is rapid and incremental, yet unlike in commonly studied languages like English, speakers make parsing predictions based on information associated with bound morphs rather than discrete words. |
Rossella Breveglieri; Riccardo Brandolani; Stefano Diomedi; Markus Lappe; Claudio Galletti; Patrizia Fattori Role of the medial posterior parietal cortex in orchestrating attention and reaching Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Breveglieri2025,The interplay between attention, alertness, and motor planning is crucial for our manual interactions. To investigate the neural bases of this interaction and challenge the views that attention cannot be disentangled from motor planning, we instructed human volunteers of both sexes to plan and execute reaching movements while attending to the target, while attending elsewhere, or without constraining attention. We recorded reaction times to reach initiation and pupil diameter and interfered with the functions of the medial posterior parietal cortex (mPPC) with online repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to test the causal role of this cortical region in the interplay between spatial attention and reaching. We found that mPPC plays a key role in the spatial association of reach planning and covert attention. Moreover, we have found that alertness, measured by pupil size, is a good predictor of the promptness of reach initiation only if we plan a reach to attended targets, and mPPC is causally involved in this coupling. Different from previous understanding, we suggest that mPPC is neither involved in reach planning per se, nor in sustained covert attention in the absence of a reach plan, but it is specifically involved in attention functional to reaching. |
Martina Bovo; Sebastián Moyano; Giulia Calignano; Eloisa Valenza; María Ángeles Ballesteros-Duperon; María Rosario Rueda The modulating effect of gestational age on attentional disengagement in toddlers Journal Article In: Infant Behavior and Development, vol. 78, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Bovo2025,Gestational Age (GA) at birth plays a crucial role in identifying potential vulnerabilities to long-term difficulties in cognitive and behavioral development. The present study aims to explore the influence of gestational age on the efficiency of early visual attention orienting, as a potential marker for the development of specific high-level socio-cognitive skills. We administered the Gap-Overlap task to measure the attentional orienting and disengagement performance of 16-month-olds born between the 34th and 41st weeks of gestation. Our findings indicate that GA might be a significant predictor of attentional disengagement performance, with lower GAs associated with slower orienting of visual attention in the gap condition. Additionally, we discuss a possible influence of endogenous attention control on disengagement accuracy at this age, particularly among full-term infants. Overall, the findings highlight the role of GA as a key factor in evaluating early visual attention development, acting as a marker for detecting early vulnerabilities. |
Floortje G. Bouwkamp; Floris P. Lange; Eelke Spaak Spatial predictive context speeds up visual search by biasing local attentional competition Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 28–42, 2025. @article{Bouwkamp2025,The human visual system is equipped to rapidly and implicitly learn and exploit the statistical regularities in our environment. Within visual search, contextual cueing demonstrates how implicit knowledge of scenes can improve search performance. This is commonly interpreted as spatial context in the scenes becoming predictive of the target location, which leads to a more efficient guidance of attention during search. However, what drives this enhanced guidance is unknown. First, it is under debate whether the entire scene (global context) or more local context drives this phenomenon. Second, it is unclear how exactly improved attentional guidance is enabled by target enhancement and distractor suppression. In the present magnetoencephalography experiment, we leveraged rapid invisible frequency tagging to answer these two outstanding questions. We found that the improved performance when searching implicitly familiar scenes was accompanied by a stronger neural representation of the target stimulus, at the cost specifically of those distractors directly surrounding the target. Crucially, this biasing of local attentional competition was behaviorally relevant when searching familiar scenes. Taken together, we conclude that implicitly learned spatial predictive context improves how we search our environment by sharpening the attentional field. |
Cemre Baykan; Alexander C. Schütz Electroencephalographic responses to the number of objects in partially occluded and uncovered scenes Journal Article In: Journal of Nognitive neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 227–238, 2025. @article{Baykan2025,Perceptual completion is ubiquitous when estimating properties such as the shape, size, or number of objects in partially occluded scenes. Behavioral experiments showed that the number of hidden objects is underestimated in partially occluded scenes compared with an estimation based on the density of visible objects and the amount of occlusion. It is still unknown at which processing level this (under)estimation of the number of hidden objects occurs. We studied this question using a passive viewing task in which observers viewed a game board that was initially partially occluded and later was uncovered to reveal its hidden parts. We simultaneously measured the electroencephalographic responses to the partially occluded board presentation and its uncovering. We hypothesized that if the underestimation is a result of early sensory processing, it would be observed in the activities of P1 and N1, whereas if it is because of higher level processes such as expectancy, it would be reflected in P3 activities. Our data showed that P1 amplitude increased with numerosity in both occluded and uncovered states, indicating a link between P1 and simple stimulus features. The N1 amplitude was highest when both the initially visible and uncovered areas of the board were completely filled with game pieces, suggesting that the N1 component is sensitive to the overall Gestalt. Finally, we observed that P3 activity was reduced when the density of game pieces in the uncovered parts matched the initially visible parts, implying a relationship between the P3 component and expectation mismatch. Overall, our results suggest that inferences about the number of hidden items are reflected in high-level processing. |
Pablo A. Barrionuevo; Alexander C. Schütz; Karl R. Gegenfurtner Increased brightness assimilation in rod vision Journal Article In: iScience, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Barrionuevo2025,Our visual system uses contextual cues to estimate the brightness of surfaces: brightness can shift toward (assimilation) or away from (contrast) the brightness of the surroundings. We investigated brightness induction at different light levels and found a potential influence of rod photoreceptors on brightness induction. We then used a novel tetrachromatic display to generate stimuli differentially exciting rods or cones at a fixed light adaptation level. Under rod vision, brightness assimilation was enhanced while brightness contrast was not altered in comparison to cone vision. We ruled out that this effect was mediated by the low resolution of night vision. Our findings suggest that rod vision affects the high-level interpretation of visual scenes that results in differences in brightness assimilation but not contrast. Our results imply that the visual system employs more perceptual inferences under rod vision than under cone vision to solve visual ambiguities in complex spatial displays. |
Emma L. Axelsson; Jessica S. Horst; Samantha L. Playford; Amanda I. Winiger Toddlers' looking behaviours during referent selection and relationships with immediate and delayed retention Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 141, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Axelsson2025,The current study investigates whether children's attempts to solve referential ambiguity is best explained as a process-of-elimination or a novelty bias. We measured 2.5-year-old children's pointing and eye movements during referent selection trials and assessed whether this changes across repeated exposures. We also tested children's retention of novel words and how much focusing on novel targets during referent selection supports immediate and delayed retention as well as the effect of hearing the words ostensively named after referent selection. Time course analyses of children's looking during referent selection indicated that soon after noun onsets, in familiar target trials there was a greater focus on targets relative to chance, but in novel target trials, children focussed on targets less than chance, suggesting an initial focus on competitors. Children also took longer to focus on and point to novel compared to familiar targets. Thus, this converging evidence suggests referent selection is best described as a process-of-elimination. Ostensive naming also led to faster pointing at novel targets in subsequent trials and better delayed retention than the non-ostensive condition. In addition, a greater focus on novel targets during referent selection was associated with better immediate retention for the ostensive naming condition, but better delayed retention for the non-ostensive condition. Therefore, a focus on novelty may supplement weaker encoding, facilitating later retention. |
Ralph Andrews; Michael Melnychuk; Sarah Moran; Teigan Walsh; Sophie Boylan; Paul Dockree Paced breathing associated with pupil diameter oscillations at the same rate and reduced lapses in attention Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 1–22, 2025. @article{Andrews2025,A dynamical systems model proposes that respiratory, locus coeruleus—noradrenaline (LC-NA), and cortical attentional systems interact, producing emergent states of attention. We tested a prediction that fixing respiratory pace (versus spontaneous respiration) stabilizes oscillations in pupil diameter (LC-NA proxy) and attentional state. Primary comparisons were between ‘Instructed Breath' (IB) and ‘No Instructed Breath' (NIB) groups. Secondarily, we investigated the effects of shifting respiratory frequency in the IB group from 0.15 to 0.1–0.15 Hz in Experiment 1 (n = 55) and 0.15–0.1 Hz only in Experiment 2 (n = 48) (replication). In the Paced Auditory Cue Entrainment (PACE) task, participants heard two auditory tones, alternating higher and lower pitches, cycling continuously. Tones acted as a breath guide for IB and an attention monitor for both groups. Participants gave rhythmic mouse responses to the transition points between tones (left for high-to-low, right for low-to-high). We derived accuracy of mouse click timing (RTm), variability in click timing (RTVL), and counts of erroneously inverting the left/right rhythm (IRs and Switches). Despite no differences between groups in RTm or RTVL, IB committed significantly fewer IRs and switches, indicating less lapses in attention during paced breathing. Differences in behavioral metrics were present across tone cycle frequencies but not exclusive to IB, so breath frequency did not appear to have a specific effect. Pupil diameter oscillations in IB closely tracked the frequency of the instructed breathing, implicating LC-NA activity as being entrained by the breath intervention. We conclude that pacing respiratory frequency did stabilize attention, possibly through stabilizing fluctuations in LC-NA. |
Elena Allegretti; Giorgia D'Innocenzo; Moreno I. Coco In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 1–20, 2025. @article{Allegretti2025,The complex interplay between low- and high-level mechanisms governing our visual system can only be fully understood within ecologically valid naturalistic contexts. For this reason, in recent years, substantial efforts have been devoted to equipping the scientific community with datasets of realistic images normed on semantic or spatial features. Here, we introduce VISIONS, an extensive database of 1136 naturalistic scenes normed on a wide range of perceptual and conceptual norms by 185 English speakers across three levels of granularity: isolated object, whole scene, and object-in-scene. Each naturalistic scene contains a critical object systematically manipulated and normed regarding its semantic consistency (e.g., a toothbrush vs. a flashlight in a bathroom) and spatial position (i.e., left, right). Normative data are also available for low- (i.e., clarity, visual complexity) and high-level (i.e., name agreement, confidence, familiarity, prototypicality, manipulability) features of the critical object and its embedding scene context. Eye-tracking data during a free-viewing task further confirms the experimental validity of our manipulations while theoretically demonstrating that object semantics is acquired in extra-foveal vision and used to guide early overt attention. To our knowledge, VISIONS is the first database exhaustively covering norms about integrating objects in scenes and providing several perceptual and conceptual norms of the two as independently taken. We expect VISIONS to become an invaluable image dataset to examine and answer timely questions above and beyond vision science, where a diversity of perceptual, attentive, mnemonic, or linguistic processes could be explored as they develop, age, or become neuropathological. |
Blair Aitken; Luke A. Downey; Serah Rose; Brooke Manning; Thomas R. Arkell; Brook Shiferaw; Amie C. Hayley In: Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental, vol. 40, pp. 1–8, 2025. @article{Aitken2025,ABSTRACT Objective: To examine the effect of a low dose (10 mg) of methylphenidate on cognitive performance, visuospatial working memory (VSWM) and gaze behaviour capabilities in healthy adults. Methods: This randomised, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled and crossover study examined the effects of 10 mg methylphe- nidate on cognitive performance, VSWM and gaze behaviour. Fixation duration and rate, gaze transition entropy, and stationary gaze entropy were used to quantify visual scanning efficiency in 25 healthy adults (36% female, mean +/- SD age = 33.5 +/- 7.8 years |
Maurits Adam; Birgit Elsner; Norbert Zmyj Perspective matters in goal-predictive gaze shifts during action observation: Results from 6-, 9-, and 12-month-olds and adults Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 249, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Adam2025,Research on goal-predictive gaze shifts in infancy so far has mostly focused on the effect of infants' experience with observed actions or the effect of agency cues that the observed agent displays. However, the perspective from which an action is presented to the infants (egocentric vs. allocentric) has received only little attention from researchers despite the fact that the natural observation of own actions is always linked to an egocentric perspective, whereas the observation of others' actions is often linked to an allocentric perspective. The current study investigated the timing of 6-, 9-, and 12-month-olds' goal-predictive gaze behavior, as well as that of adults, during the observation of simple human grasping actions that were presented from either an egocentric or allocentric perspective (within-participants design). The results showed that at 6 and 9 months of age, the infants predicted the action goal only when observing the action from the egocentric perspective. The 12-month-olds and adults, in contrast, predicted the action in both perspectives. The results therefore are in line with accounts proposing an advantage of egocentric versus allocentric processing of social stimuli, at least early in development. This study is among the first to show this egocentric bias already during the first year of life. |
Mohamad Abbass; Benjamin Corrigan; Renée Johnston; Roberto Gulli; Adam Sachs; Jonathan C. Lau; Julio Martinez-Trujillo Prefrontal cortex neuronal ensembles dynamically encode task features during associative memory and virtual navigation Journal Article In: Cell Reports, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 1–23, 2025. @article{Abbass2025,Neuronal populations expand their information-encoding capacity using mixed selective neurons. This is particularly prominent in association areas such as the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), which integrate information from multiple sensory systems. However, during conditions that approximate natural behaviors, it is unclear how LPFC neuronal ensembles process space- and time-varying information about task features. Here, we show that, during a virtual reality task with naturalistic elements that requires associative memory, individual neurons and neuronal ensembles in the primate LPFC dynamically mix unconstrained features of the task, such as eye movements, with task-related visual features. Neurons in dorsal regions show more selectivity for space and eye movements, while ventral regions show more selectivity for visual features, representing them in a separate subspace. In summary, LPFC neurons exhibit dynamic and mixed selectivity for unconstrained and constrained task elements, and neural ensembles can separate task features in different subspaces. |
2024 |
Carolin Zsigo; Ellen Greimel; Regine Primbs; Jürgen Bartling; Gerd Schulte-Körne; Lisa Feldmann Frontal alpha asymmetry during emotion regulation in adults with lifetime major depression Journal Article In: Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 552–566, 2024. @article{Zsigo2024,Emotion regulation (ER) often is impaired in current or remitted major depression (MD), although the extent of the deficits is not fully understood. Recent studies suggest that frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) could be a promising electrophysiological measure to investigate ER. The purpose of this study was to investigate ER differences between participants with lifetime major depression (lifetime MD) and healthy controls (HC) for the first time in an experimental task by using FAA. We compared lifetime MD (n = 34) and HC (n = 25) participants aged 18–24 years in (a) an active ER condition, in which participants were instructed to reappraise negative images and (b) a condition in which they attended to the images while an EEG was recorded. We also report FAA results from an independent sample of adolescents with current MD (n = 36) and HC adolescents (n = 38). In the main sample, both groups were able to decrease self-reported negative affect in response to negative images through ER, without significant group differences. We found no differences between groups or conditions in FAA, which was replicated within the independent adolescent sample. The lifetime MD group also reported less adaptive ER in daily life and higher difficulty of ER during the task. The lack of differences between in self-reported affect and FAA between lifetime MD and HC groups in the active ER task indicates that lifetime MD participants show no impairments when instructed to apply an adaptive ER strategy. Implications for interventional aspects are discussed. |
Carolin Zsigo; Lisa Feldmann; Frans Oort; Charlotte Piechaczek; Jürgen Bartling; Martin Schulte-Rüther; Christian Wachinger; Gerd Schulte-Körne; Ellen Greimel Emotion regulation training for adolescents with major depression: Results from a randomized controlled trial Journal Article In: Emotion, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 975–991, 2024. @article{Zsigo2024a,Difficulties in emotion regulation (ER) are thought to contribute to the development and maintenance of major depression (MD) in adolescents. In healthy adults, a task-based training of ER has previously proven effective to reduce stress, but no such studies are available for MD. It is also unclear whether findings can be generalized onto adolescent populations. The final sample consisted of n = 70 adolescents with MD, who were randomized to a task-based ER training (n = 36) or a control training (n = 34). Across four sessions, the ER group was trained to downregulate negative affect to negative images via reappraisal, while the control group was instructed to attend the images. Rumination, stress-, and affect-related measures were assessed as primary outcomes, behavioral and neurophysiological responses (late positive potential, LPP), as secondary outcomes. The trial was preregistered at clinicaltrials.gov (NCT03957850). While there was no significant differential effect of the ER training on primary outcomes, we found small to moderate effects on rumination in the ER group, but not the control group. During reappraisal (compared to attend), the ER group showed an unexpected increase of the LPP during the first, but not during later training sessions. Although replication in large, multicenter trials is needed, our findings on effect sizes suggest that ER training might be promising to decrease rumination in adolescent MD. The LPP increase at the first session may represent cognitive effort, which was successfully reduced over the sessions. Future studies should research whether training effects transfer to daily life and are durable over a longer time period. |
Artyom Zinchenko; Markus Conci; Hermann J. Müller; Thomas Geyer Environmental regularities mitigate attentional misguidance in contextual cueing of visual search Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 50, no. 5, pp. 699–711, 2024. @article{Zinchenko2024,Visual search is faster when a fixed target location is paired with a spatially invariant (vs. randomly changing) distractor configuration, thus indicating that repeated contexts are learned, thereby guiding attention to the target (contextual cueing [CC]). Evidence for memory-guided attention has also been revealed with electrophysiological (electroencephalographic [EEG]) recordings, starting with an enhanced early posterior neg- ativity (N1pc), which signals a preattentive bias toward the target, and, subsequently, attentional and postselective components, such as the posterior contralateral negativity (PCN) and contralateral delay activ- ity (CDA), respectively. Despite effective learning, relearning of previously acquired contexts is inflexible: The CC benefits disappear when the target is relocated to a new position within an otherwise invariant context and corresponding EEG correlates are diminished. The present study tested whether global statistical properties that induce predictions going beyond the immediate invariant layout can facilitate contextual relearning. Global statistical regularities were implemented by presenting repeated and nonrepeated displays in separate streaks (mini blocks) of trials in the relocation phase, with individual displays being presented in a fixed and thus predictable order. Our results revealed a significant CC effect (and an associated modulation of the N1pc, PCN, and CDA components) during initial learning. Critically, the global statistical regularities in the relocation phase also resulted in a reliable CC effect, thus revealing effective relearning with predictive streaks. Moreover, this relearning was reflected in an enhanced PCN amplitude for repeated relative to non- repeated contexts. Temporally ordered contexts may thus adapt memory-based guidance of attention, par- ticularly the allocation of covert attention in the visual display. |
Annika Ziereis; Anne Schacht Additive effects of emotional expression and stimulus size on the perception of genuine and artificial facial expressions: An ERP study Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Ziereis2024,Seeing an angry individual in close physical proximity can not only result in a larger retinal representation of that individual and an enhanced resolution of emotional cues, but may also increase motivation for rapid visual processing and action preparation. The present study investigated the effects of stimulus size and emotional expression on the perception of happy, angry, non-expressive, and scrambled faces. We analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral responses of N = 40 participants who performed a naturalness classification task on real and artificially created facial expressions. While the emotion-related effects on accuracy for recognizing authentic expressions were modulated by stimulus size, ERPs showed only additive effects of stimulus size and emotional expression, with no significant interaction with size. This contrasts with previous research on emotional scenes and words. Effects of size were present in all included ERPs, whereas emotional expressions affected the N170, EPN, and LPC, irrespective of size. These results imply that the decoding of emotional valence in faces can occur even for small stimuli. Supra-additive effects in faces may necessitate larger size ranges or dynamic stimuli that increase arousal. |
Corey M. Ziemba; Robbe L. T. Goris; Gabriel M. Stine; Richard K. Perez; Eero P. Simoncelli; J. Anthony Movshon Neuronal and behavioral responses to naturalistic texture images in macaque monkeys Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 42, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Ziemba2024,The visual world is richly adorned with texture, which can serve to delineate important elements of natural scenes. In anesthetized macaque monkeys, selectivity for the statistical features of natural texture is weak in V1, but substantial in V2, suggesting that neuronal activity in V2 might directly support texture perception. To test this, we investigated the relation between single cell activity in macaque V1 and V2 and simultaneously measured behavioral judgments of texture. We generated stimuli along a continuum between naturalistic texture and phase-randomized noise and trained two macaque monkeys to judge whether a sample texture more closely resembled one or the other extreme. Analysis of responses revealed that individual V1 and V2 neurons carried much less information about texture naturalness than behavioral reports. However, the sensitivity of V2 neurons, especially those preferring naturalistic textures, was significantly closer to that of behavior compared with V1. The firing of both V1 and V2 neurons predicted perceptual choices in response to repeated presentations of the same ambiguous stimulus in one monkey, despite low individual neural sensitivity. However, neither population predicted choice in the second monkey. We conclude that neural responses supporting texture perception likely continue to develop downstream of V2. Further, combined with neural data recorded while the same two monkeys performed an orientation discrimination task, our results demonstrate that choice-correlated neural activity in early sensory cortex is unstable across observers and tasks, untethered from neuronal sensitivity, and thus unlikely to reflect a critical aspect of the formation of perceptual decisions. Significance statement As visual signals propagate along the cortical hierarchy, they encode increasingly complex aspects of the sensory environment and likely have a more direct relationship with perceptual experience. We replicate and extend previous results from anesthetized monkeys differentiating the selectivity of neurons along the first step in cortical vision from area V1 to V2. However, our results further complicate efforts to establish neural signatures that reveal the relationship between perception and the neuronal activity of sensory populations. We find that choice-correlated activity in V1 and V2 is unstable across different observers and tasks, and also untethered from neuronal sensitivity and other features of nonsensory response modulation. |
Jiating Zhu; Karen J. Tian; Marisa Carrasco; Rachel N. Denison Temporal attention amplifies stimulus information in fronto-cingulate cortex at an intermediate processing stage Journal Article In: PNAS Nexus, vol. 3, no. 12, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Zhu2024d,The human brain faces significant constraints in its ability to process every item in a sequence of stimuli. Voluntary temporal attention can selectively prioritize a task-relevant item over its temporal competitors to alleviate these constraints. However, it remains unclear when and where in the brain selective temporal attention modulates the visual representation of a prioritized item. Here, we manipulated temporal attention to successive stimuli in a two-target temporal cueing task, while controlling for temporal expectation with fully predictable stimulus timing. We used magnetoencephalography and time-resolved decoding to track the spatiotemporal evolution of stimulus representations in human observers. We found that temporal attention enhanced the representation of the first target around 250 ms after target onset, in a contiguous region spanning left frontal cortex and cingulate cortex. The results indicate that voluntary temporal attention recruits cortical regions beyond the ventral stream at an intermediate processing stage to amplify the representation of a target stimulus. This routing of stimulus information to anterior brain regions may provide protection from interference in visual cortex by a subsequent stimulus. Thus, voluntary temporal attention may have distinctive neural mechanisms to support specific demands of the sequential processing of stimuli. |
Jiahui Zhu; Jinhao Li; Li Zhou; Lingzi Xu; Chengcheng Pu; Bingjie Huang; Qi Zhou; Yunhan Lin; Yajing Tang; Liu Yang; Chuan Shi Eye movements as predictor of cognitive improvement after cognitive remediation therapy in patients with schizophrenia Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychiatry, vol. 15, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Zhu2024b,Aim: Baseline cognitive functions of patients predicted the efficacy of cognitive remediation therapy (CRT), but results are mixed. Eye movement is a more objective and advanced assessment of cognitive functions than neuropsychological testing. We aimed to investigate the applicability of eye movements in predicting cognitive improvement after patients with schizophrenia were treated with CRT. Methods: We recruited 79 patients with schizophrenia to complete 8 weeks of CRT and assessed their cognitive improvement outcomes. Eye movements were assessed by prosaccades, antisaccades, and free-viewing tasks at baseline, and neuropsychological tests in four cognitive domains were assessed before and after treatment to calculate treatment outcomes. Predictors of demographic information, clinical characteristics, and eye movement measures at baseline on cognitive improvement outcomes were analyzed using logistic regression analysis. We further compared the predictive performance between eye movement measurements and neuropsychological test regarding the effect of CRT on cognitive improvement, and explored factors that could be affect the treatment outcomes in different cognitive domains. Results: As operationally defined, 33 patients showed improved in cognition (improved group) and 46 patients did not (non-improved group) after CRT. Patients with schizophrenia being employed, lower directional error rate in antisaccade task, and lower the gap effect (i.e., the difference in saccadic latency between the gap condition and overlap condition) in prosaccade task at baseline predicted cognitive improvement in CRT. However, performance in the free-viewing task not associated with cognitive improvement in patients in CRT. Our results show that eye-movement prediction model predicted the effect of CRT on cognitive improvement in patients with schizophrenia better than neuropsychological prediction model in CRT. In addition, baseline eye-movements, cognitive reserve, antipsychotic medication dose, anticholinergic cognitive burden change, and number of training sessions were associated with improvements in four cognitive domains. Conclusion: Eye movements as a non-invasiveness, objective, and sensitive method of evaluating cognitive function, and combined saccadic measurements in pro- and anti-saccades tasks could be more beneficial than free-viewing task in predicting the effect of CRT on cognitive improvement in patients with schizophrenia. |
Fangfang Zhu; Yun Pan; Zhongling Pi; Jiumin Yang In: Active Learning in Higher Education, no. 199, pp. 1–23, 2024. @article{Zhu2024a,Finding effective ways to improve students' learning from video lectures will not only improve online education efficacy, it will also play an important role in the digital transformation of education. Generating written explanations has shown some benefits for learning, and peer presence may be an implementation-related boundary condition. This study tested the impacts of virtual peer presence (presence vs. absence) and generative tasks (generating explanations vs. no generation) on students' learning in a video-based learning context. Students' attention, meta-comprehension accuracy, motivation, cognitive load, learning achievements, and explanation characteristics were measured. Results showed some benefits of having a virtual peer, and of generating written explanations on students' learning. Moreover, mediating analyses revealed the mediating role of motivation between peer presence and learning achievement, and moderated mediating analyses revealed the moderating role of explanation characteristics between peer presence and motivation. Our findings not only extend the understanding of the positive effects of generating written explanations in video-based learning contexts, they also provide implications for improving students' learning from video lectures as well as optimizing online video lectures. |
Dandan Zhu; Kaiwei Zhang; Kun Zhu; Nana Zhang; Weiping Ding; Guangtao Zhai; Xiaokang Yang From discrete representation to continuous modeling: A novel audio-visual saliency prediction model with implicit neural representations Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, vol. 8, no. 6, pp. 4059–4074, 2024. @article{Zhu2024,In the era of deep learning, audio-visual saliency prediction is still in its infancy due to the complexity of video signals and the continuous correlation in the temporal dimension. Most existing approaches treat videos as 3D grids of RGB values and model them using discrete neural networks, leading to issues such as video content-agnostic and sub-optimal feature representation ability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel dynamic-aware audio-visual saliency (DAVS) model based on implicit neural representations (INRs). The core of our proposed DAVS model is to build an effective mapping by exploiting a parametric neural network that maps space-time coordinates to the corresponding saliency values. Specifically, our model incorporates an INR-based video generator that decomposes videos into image, motion, and audio feature vectors, learning video content-adaptive features via a parametric neural network. This generator efficiently encodes videos, naturally models continuous temporal dynamics, and enhances feature representation capability. Furthermore, we introduce a parametric audio-visual feature fusion strategy in the saliency prediction procedure, enabling intrinsic interactions between modalities and adaptively integrating visual and audio cues. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, our proposed DAVS model demonstrates promising performance and intriguing properties in audio-visual saliency prediction. |
Yan Bang Zhou; Shun Jie Ruan; Kun Zhang; Qing Bao; Hong Zhi Liu Time pressure effects on decision-making in intertemporal loss scenarios: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Zhou2024b,This study utilized eye-tracking techniques to investigate decision-making behavior in intertemporal loss scenarios under both time pressure and no time pressure conditions. Results revealed shorter decision-making times and decreased large later (LL) option selection frequency under time pressure. Participants under time pressure exhibited reduced Mean Fixation Duration (MFD) and Search Measure (SM) values, indicating altered information processing. Mediation analyses confirmed that task choice outcomes were influenced by SM and MFD, suggesting a shift towards heuristic decision-making under time pressure. |
Li Zhou; Fuyi Yang; Valerie Benson In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 635–644, 2024. @article{Zhou2024a,Studies from free-viewing tasks report that children with autism spectrum condition (ASC) exhibit an attentional bias for circumscribed interest (CI) objects (e.g., vehicles) over non-CI objects (e.g., furniture). This atypical preference has led researchers to hypothesise that ASC children would be more distracted by CI-related objects than non-CI-related objects. The current study aimed to explore this issue using a remote distractor paradigm. We found longer saccade latencies for centrally presented distractors in ASC, suggesting delayed endogenous disengagement. Additionally, higher error rates and fewer corrective saccades in ASC indicated poorer attentional control. Neither latencies nor errors were modulated by stimulus types but increased dwell time for CI-related objects over non-CI-related objects in ASC, demonstrated some support for the CI attentional bias reported in previous free-viewing studies. The findings are discussed in relation to how task demands in basic orienting paradigms might mask any CI-related preference bias in children with ASC. |
Junyi Zhou; Min Lin; Wenxin Xu In: Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 1084–1095, 2024. @article{Zhou2024,The relationship among baseline pupil size, fixation stability, and inhibitory control were examined in this study. Participants performed a baseline eye measure in which they were instructed to stare at a fixation dot on screen for 2 min. Following the baseline eye measure, participants completed an antisaccade task to measure inhibitory control ability. We found a correlation between baseline pupil size variability and inhibitory control, as well as between fixation stability and inhibitory control. We showed that participants with better inhibitory control exhibited larger variability in pupil size, and those with better fixation stability showed superior inhibitory control ability. Overall, our results indicate that there are significant correlations between inhibitory control and baseline pupil size, as well as between inhibitory control and fixation stability. |
Weixi Zheng; Jie Zhang; Anbang Chendu; Yan Wang; Xiaoyi Wang; Hongwei Sun; Liping Jia; Dexiang Zhang Effect of cognitive style on text topic structure processing: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Current Psychology, pp. 27216–27224, 2024. @article{Zheng2024b,This study employed an eye-tracking methodology to explore the impact of cognitive style on the processing of text topic structure among colleges, achieved by manipulating cognitive style and sentence type. Readers' cognitive styles were divided into field-dependent and field-independent categories using the Embedded Figure Test. The dependent variables include first-pass and second-pass fixation duration, corresponding fixation counts, and verification scores after reading each text. The results of the study indicate that participants devoted longer fixation duration and made more fixation counts on headings during the first-pass reading, devoted longer fixation duration, and made more fixation counts on topic sentences during the second-pass readings. The results also show that field-dependent readers exhibited longer fixation duration and more fixation count during the first-pass reading, but they obtained lower verification scores than field-independent readers. These findings imply that their reading outcomes differ, while field-dependent and field-independent readers allocate considerable attention to text topic structure. |
Lei Zheng; Nico Marek; Natalia Melnik; Stefan Pollmann Contextual cueing—Eye movements in rotated and recombined displays Journal Article In: Frontiers in Cognition, vol. 3, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Zheng2024a,Contextual cueing leads to improved efficiency in visual search resulting from the extraction of spatial regularities in repeated visual stimuli. Previous research has demonstrated the independent contributions of global configuration and spatial position to contextual cueing. The present study aimed to investigate whether learned spatial configuration or individual locations would elicit fixation patterns resembling those observed in the original displays. We found that search guidance based on either local or global spatial context, by combining distractor locations from two learned displays or rotating displays, kept not only search time facilitation intact, in agreement with previous studies, but also enabled search with less fixations and more direct scan paths to the target. Fixation distribution maps of recombined or rotated displays were more similar to the original displays than random new displays. However, for rotated displays this was only true when the rotation angle was taken into account. Overall, this shows an astonishingly flexible use of the oculomotor system for search in incompletely repeated displays. |
Haohua Zheng; Man Luo; Yihan Wang; Yangyang Wei Multi-sensory interaction and spatial perception in urban microgreen spaces: A focus on vision, auditory, and olfaction Journal Article In: Sustainability, vol. 16, no. 20, pp. 1–33, 2024. @article{Zheng2024,As important recreational spaces for urban residents, urban microgreen parks enhance the urban living environment and alleviate psychological pressure on residents. The visual, auditory, and olfactory senses are crucial forms of perception in human interaction with nature, and the sustainable perceptual design of miniature green parks under their interaction has become a recent research hotspot. This study aimed to investigate the effects of the visual, acoustic, and olfactory environments (e.g., aromatic green vegetation) on human perception in miniature green parks. Participants were evenly divided into eight groups, including single-sensory groups, multi-sensory interaction groups, and a control group. Eye-tracking technology, blood pressure monitoring, and the Semantic Differential (SD) scales and Profile of Mood State (POMS) were used to assess the effectiveness of physical and mental perception recovery in each group. The results revealed that in an urban microgreen space environment with relatively low ambient noise, visual–auditory, visual–olfactory, and visual–auditory–olfactory interactive stimuli were more effective in promoting the recovery of visual attention than single visual stimuli. Additionally, visual–auditory–olfactory interactive stimuli were able to optimize the quality of spatial perception by using positive sensory inputs to effectively mask negative experiences. Simultaneously, environments with a high proportion of natural sounds had the strongest stimuli, and in the visual–auditory group, systolic blood pressure at S7 and heart rate at S9 significantly decreased (p < 0.05), with reductions of 18.60 mmHg and 20.15 BPM, respectively. Aromatic olfactory sources were more effective in promoting physical and mental relaxation compared to other olfactory sources, with systolic blood pressure reductions of 24.40 mmHg (p < 0.01) for marigolds, 23.35 mmHg (p < 0.01) for small-leaved boxwood, and 27.25 mmHg (p < 0.05) for camphor trees. Specific auditory and olfactory conditions could guide visual focus, such as birdsong directing attention to trees, insect sounds drawing attention to herbaceous plants, floral scents attracting focus to flowers, and leaf scents prompting observation of a wider range of natural vegetation. In summary, significant differences exist between single-sensory experiences and multi-sensory modes of spatial perception and interaction in urban microgreen parks. Compared to a silent and odorless environment, the integration of acoustic and olfactory elements broadened the scope of visual attention, and In the visual–auditory–olfactory interactive perception, the combination of natural sounds and aromatic camphor tree scents had the best effect on attention recovery, thereby improving the quality of spatial perception in urban microgreen parks. |
Ziyi Zhao; Chunxiao Zhao; Lizu Lai; Congrong Shi; Xu Li; Shan Lu; Siyuan Guo; Zhihong Ren In: Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 1044–1054, 2024. @article{Zhao2024e,Objective: Both theoretical and empirical studies suggest that negative cognitive biases significantly influence the onset and persistence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. However, the interplay among these cognitive biases and their conjoint contribution to the long-term trajectory of posttraumatic stress symptoms remains underexplored. This study delves into the interplay among attention, appraisal, and memory biases within a provisional PTSD population and evaluates the predictive effects of two integrative models (weakest link, additive approach) on posttraumatic stress symptoms reported 2 months later. Method: Sixty Chinese participants (Mage = 20.17 |
Xing-Nan Zhao; Xing-Si Dong; Dan-Qing Jiang; Si Wu; Shi-Ming Tang; Cong Yu Population coding for figure-ground texture segregation in macaque V1 and V4 Journal Article In: Progress in Neurobiology, vol. 240, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Zhao2024d,Object recognition often involves the brain segregating objects from their surroundings. Neurophysiological studies of figure-ground texture segregation have yielded inconsistent results, particularly on whether V1 neurons can perform figure-ground texture segregation or just detect texture borders. To address this issue from a population perspective, we utilized two-photon calcium imaging to simultaneously record the responses of large samples of V1 and V4 neurons to figure-ground texture stimuli in awake, fixating macaques. The average response changes indicate that V1 neurons mainly detect texture borders, while V4 neurons are involved in figure-ground segregation. However, population analysis (SVM decoding of PCA-transformed neuronal responses) reveal that V1 neurons not only detect figure-ground borders, but also contribute to figure-ground texture segregation, although requiring substantially more principal components than V4 neurons to reach a 75 % decoding accuracy. Individually, V1/V4 neurons showing larger (negative/positive) figure-ground response differences contribute more to figure-ground segregation. But for V1 neurons, the contribution becomes significant only when many principal components are considered. We conclude that V1 neurons participate in figure-ground segregation primarily by defining the figure borders, and the poorly structured figure-ground information V1 neurons carry could be further utilized by V4 neurons to accomplish figure-ground segregation. |
Sijia Zhao; Claudia Contadini-Wright; Maria Chait Cross-modal interactions between auditory attention and oculomotor control Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 11, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Zhao2024c,Microsaccades are small, involuntary eye movements that occur during fixation. Their role is debated with recent hypotheses proposing a contribution to automatic scene sampling. Microsaccadic inhibition (MSI) refers to the abrupt suppression of microsaccades, typically evoked within 0.1 s after new stimulus onset. The functional significance and neural underpinnings of MSI are subjects of ongoing research. It has been suggested that MSI is a component of the brain's attentional re-orienting network which facilitates the allocation of attention to new environmental occurrences by reducing disruptions or shifts in gaze that could interfere with processing. The extent to which MSI is reflexive or influenced by top–down mechanisms remains debated. We developed a task that examines the impact of auditory top–down attention on MSI, allowing us to disentangle ocular dynamics from visual sensory processing. Participants (N = 24 and 27; both sexes) listened to two simultaneous streams of tones and were instructed to attend to one stream while detecting specific task “targets.” We quantified MSI in response to occasional task-irrelevant events presented in both the attended and unattended streams (frequency steps in Experiment 1, omissions in Experiment 2). The results show that initial stages of MSI are not affected by auditory attention. However, later stages (∼0.25 s postevent onset), affecting the extent and duration of the inhibition, are enhanced for sounds in the attended stream compared to the unattended stream. These findings provide converging evidence for the reflexive nature of early MSI stages and robustly demonstrate the involvement of auditory attention in modulating the later stages. |
Qingbai Zhao; Fang Guo; Xuemei Chen; Yan Chen; Zheng Liang; Quanlei Yu; Zhijin Zhou The advantage of novel solutions on subsequent memory in insight problems Journal Article In: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Zhao2024b,Insight during problem solving is beneficial to long-term memory formation. It has been shown to promote later memory for the solution; however, the reason for this memory effect is unclear.We used eye tracking to test the memory effect of insight on delayed recall (Experiment 1) and immediate recall (Experiment 2) when participants selected novel or normal answers to riddles. Both experiments adopted the learning-test paradigm of answer selection. In the learning phase, four alternative answers to a riddlewere presented on screen. Eye tracking recorded the fixation duration time on each alternative answer to evaluate the competition of thoughts in the process of problem solving. Delayed and immediate recall were assessed by asking the participants to provide the same answers to the riddles as they had in the learning phase. The results showed that (a) Whether in immediate or delayed recall tasks, the accuracy was higher after selecting novel answers than normal answers, confirming the memory advantage of insight. This effect was more obvious in the delayed recall task. (b) There was a longer total fixation duration time when selecting a novel answer than a normal answer. This suggests that novel answers have an advantage in the competition of thoughts. (c) Compared with selecting normal answers, selecting novel answers involved significantly longer fixation on the target region of interest, and significantly less attention on the main interference region. The results of this research suggest that the competitive advantage of novel thinking in problem solving may be an important reason why insight promotes memory. |
Chenyang Zhao; Janet H. Hsiao; Antoni B. Chan Gradient-based instance-specific visual explanations for object specification and object discrimination Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 46, no. 9, pp. 5967–5985, 2024. @article{Zhao2024,We propose the gradient-weighted Object Detector Activation Maps (ODAM), a visual explanation technique for interpreting the predictions of object detectors. Utilizing the gradients of detector targets flowing into the intermediate feature maps, ODAM produces heat maps that show the influence of regions on the detector's decision for each predicted attribute. Compared to previous works on classification activation maps (CAM), ODAM generates instance-specific explanations rather than class-specific ones. We show that ODAM is applicable to one-stage, two-stage, and transformer-based detectors with different types of detector backbones and heads, and produces higher-quality visual explanations than the state-of-the-art in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. We discuss two explanation tasks for object detection: 1) object specification: what is the important region for the prediction? 2) object discrimination: which object is detected? Aiming at these two aspects, we present a detailed analysis of the visual explanations of detectors and carry out extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed ODAM. Furthermore, we investigate user trust on the explanation maps, how well the visual explanations of object detectors agrees with human explanations, as measured through human eye gaze, and whether this agreement is related with user trust. Finally, we also propose two applications, ODAM-KD and ODAM-NMS, based on these two abilities of ODAM. ODAM-KD utilizes the object specification of ODAM to generate top-down attention for key predictions and instruct the knowledge distillation of object detection. ODAM-NMS considers the location of the model's explanation for each prediction to distinguish the duplicate detected objects. A training scheme, ODAM-Train, is proposed to improve the quality on object discrimination, and help with ODAM-NMS. |
Yue Zhang; Yeyingzi Guo; Peixing Wei; Zhengbin He; Songlin Yi; Guangjie Zhao Effect of changes in surface visual properties of heat-treated wood on the psychological preference Miscellaneous 2024. @misc{Zhang2024p,Heat treatment of wood is an attractive, environmentally friendly modification, which can change surface visual properties of wood including color and grain, but it is unclear how heat-treated wood is perceived and evaluated compared with untreated wood. In this paper, Chinese fir was heat-treated at 160, 180, 200, or 220 °C for 2 or 4 h. The changes of wood surface color and grain contrast were measured. A subjective questionnaire and eye-tracking technology were used for psychological evaluation. The results showed that changes in the visual properties of heat-treated wood had a significant effect on psychological preference— heat-treated wood was generally more preferred than the untreated, particularly at 200 °C for 4 h. Grain contrast and hue played an important role in the preference for heat-treated wood. The preference gave people the positive psychological impression of warmth, weight, cost, prevalence, and comfort. Eye-tracking analysis showed that Chinese fir heat-treated at about 200 °C with high hue value and clear grain contrast was easier to gain more visual attention. The results would have a high technical reference value for the heat-treated wood in product visual design. |
Yue Zhang; Nicholas Gaspelin Salience effects on attentional selection are enabled by task relevance Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 50, no. 11, pp. 1131–1142, 2024. @article{Zhang2024o,Attention is a limited resource that must be carefully controlled to prevent distraction. Much research has demonstrated that distraction can be prevented by proactively suppressing salient stimuli to prevent them from capturing attention. It has been suggested, however, that prior studies showing evidence of suppression may have used stimuli that were not truly salient. This claim has been difficult to test because there are currently no agreed-upon methods to demonstrate that an object is salient. The current study aims to help resolve this by introducing a new technique to test the role of salience in attentional capture. Low- and high-salience singletons were generated via a manipulation of color contrast. An initial experiment then verified the manipulation of salience using a search task where the color singleton was the target and could only be found via its bottom-up popout. High-salience singletons were found much more easily than low-salience singletons, suggesting that salience powerfully influenced attention when task relevant. A following experiment then used the same stimulus displays but adapted the task so that the singletons were task-irrelevant distractors. Both low- and high-salience singletons were suppressed, suggesting neither was able to capture attention. These results challenge purely stimulus-driven accounts by showing that improving salience only enhances attentional allocation in situations where the object is also task relevant. The results are instead consistent with the signal suppression hypothesis, which predicts that task-irrelevant singletons can be suppressed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved). |
Yuan Zhang; Matteo Valsecchi; Karl R. Gegenfurtner; Jing Chen The execution of saccadic eye movements suppresses visual processing of both color and luminance in the early visual cortex of humans Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 131, no. 6, pp. 1156–1167, 2024. @article{Zhang2024n,Our eyes execute rapid, directional movements known as saccades, occurring several times per second, to focus on objects of interest in our environment. During these movements, visual sensitivity is temporarily reduced. Despite numerous studies on this topic, the underlying mechanism remains elusive, including a lingering debate on whether saccadic suppression affects the parvocellular visual pathway. To address this issue, we conducted a study employing steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) elicited by chromatic and luminance stimuli while observers performed saccadic eye movements. We also employed an innovative analysis pipeline to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio, yielding superior results compared to the previous method. Our findings revealed a clear suppression effect on SSVEP signals during saccades compared to fixation periods. Notably, this suppression effect was comparable for both chromatic and luminance stimuli. We went further to measure the suppression effect across various contrast levels, which enabled us to model SSVEP responses with contrast response functions. The results suggest that saccades primarily reduce response gain without significantly affecting contrast gain and that this reduction applies uniformly to both chromatic and luminance pathways. In summary, our study provides robust evidence that saccades similarly suppress visual processing in both the parvocellular and magnocellular pathways within the human early visual cortex, as indicated by SSVEP responses. The observation that saccadic eye movements impact response gain rather than contrast gain implies that they influence visual processing through a multiplicative mechanism. |
Yu Zhang; Chao Ma; Haiming Li; Leonardo Assumpção; Yi Liu Sophisticated perspective-takers are distinctive: Neural idiosyncrasy of functional connectivity in the mentalizing network Journal Article In: iScience, vol. 27, no. 12, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Zhang2024m,Naive perspective-takers often perceive the social world in a simplistic and uniform way, whereas sophisticated ones recognize the diversity and complexity of others' minds. This commonly accepted distinction points to a possibility of greater inter-individual variability in mentalizing for sophisticated than naive perspective-takers, a difference previously overlooked in research. In the current study, participants were asked to watch a mentalizing-related movie and their neural responses, interpretations of the characters' mental states, and eye-gaze trajectories were recorded. The results provide robust and converging evidence that the neural connectomic features within the mentalizing network, eye-gaze trajectories, and interpretations of others' mental states exhibit greater inter-individual variability among sophisticated perspective-takers compared to naive ones, supporting that sophisticated perspective-takers are more distinctive while naive ones are more similar. These findings deepen our understanding of mentalizing by highlighting the idiosyncrasy and homogeneity of neural collaboration and behavioral manifestations across varying levels of perspective-taking sophistication. |
Yili Zhang; Tengfei Wang; Menglei Chen; Hai Lou; Jiangchuan Ye; Jiahui Shi; Xu Wen Effects of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise on cognitive fatigue relief: A randomised self-controlled study Journal Article In: International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 1419–1437, 2024. @article{Zhang2024t,Although it was reported both rest and physical activity can alleviate cognitive fatigue to some extent, there is no direct scientific evidence determining which approach is more effective. This study aimed to investigate the effect of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise on the alleviation of cognitive fatigue. A 30-min TloadDback task was used to induce cognitive fatigue in 20 healthy adults, and 12-min quiet rest and moderate-intensity aerobic exercise were performed in random order. During the cognitive task, standard deviation of the NN interval (SDNN), total frequency (TP, 0–0.4 Hz) and very low frequency (VLF, 0–0.15 Hz) of heart rate variability increased significantly. The blink duration and number, fixation number, saccade amplitude and number increased significantly with time, while fixation duration and pupil size decreased significantly. After 12-min intervention protocols, the participants' feeling of fatigue, vigour and boredom recovered significantly. The recovery of fixation duration was better after quiet rest, while the pupil size was significantly larger after aerobic exercise. It was found that both quiet rest and aerobic exercise can alleviate cognitive fatigue, but aerobic exercise may be more effective in the recovery of arousal levels. |
Yi Zhang; Zhongling Pi; Ke Xu; Yun Pan; Jiumin Yang The interactive effects of drawing task, prompt format, and visual aids on video-based learning: Attention and drawing accuracy as mediators Journal Article In: Active Learning in Higher Education, no. 199, pp. 1–21, 2024. @article{Zhang2024l,This study investigated the effects of open- and closed-book learning conditions either accompanied by visual aids or without on learners' attention, drawing accuracy, and learning performance. Participants were 127 undergraduate learners randomly assigned to view either an open- or closed-book prompt, who then watched either a video lecture accompanied by visual aids or one without (i.e. visuals provided vs. no visuals). The results showed that for learners who were provided with visual aids, compared to the open-book condition, those in the closed-book condition demonstrated higher eye blink rate as well as improved immediate and delayed test scores. However, this advantage was not observed in the condition with no visual materials. Mediation analysis showed that increased immediate test scores in the visuals provided condition was due partly to improved drawing accuracy. Multiple mediation analyses showed that the open-book with visuals provided condition led to lower eye blink rate, increased fixation count, and improved drawing accuracy, which collectively resulted in decreased immediate test performance. These findings have implications for educators and instructional designers regarding how to tailor effective learning strategies; specifically, educators could consider using closed-book learning conditions with visual aids to enhance learners' attention and improve their learning performance. |
Yi Zhang; Caixia Liu; Yana Xing; Zhongling Pi; Jiumin Yang How does drawing influence the effectiveness of oral self-explanation versus instructional explanation in video learning? Journal Article In: British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 1189–1208, 2024. @article{Zhang2024s,This study investigated the effects of two types of oral explanations (ie, self-explanation vs. instructional explanation) and drawing activity (no drawing vs. drawing) on video learning outcomes. These outcomes were measured by visual attention to the video (indexed by fixation time on text and diagram areas), explanation quality (indexed by personal references, concepts, and elaborations), drawing quality, behaviour patterns and overall learning performance gain. A total of 116 undergraduate and graduate students watched a 4-min video on the human body's respiratory system. They were randomly assigned to one of four conditions (explanation generation: self-explanation vs. instructional explanation × drawing activity: no drawing vs. drawing). Results indicated that without a drawing requirement, students in the self-explanation condition displayed fewer personal references and exhibited a lower learning performance gain than those in the instructional explanation condition. Conversely, when drawing was required, self-explanation students demonstrated higher drawing quality and better learning performance gain. Additionally, students in the drawing condition directed more attention to the diagram area than those in the no drawing condition. These findings suggest that in video learning (1) educators should encourage students to produce oral instructional explanations and (2) if the goal is for students to generate self-explanations, they should also be prompted to draw to bolster their self-explanation efforts. |
Xiaomeng Zhang; Jason A. Aimone; Abdelaziz Alsharawy; Flora Li; Sheryl Ball; Alec Smith The effects of task difficulty and presentation format on eye movements in risky choice Journal Article In: Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, vol. 3, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Zhang2024j,This study investigates the process of risky choice using eye tracking. We manipulate the complexity and presentation of lottery choices while measuring eye movements. In particular, we measure the frequencies of information collection procedures associated with established theories of risky choice, namely, expected utility theory and component comparison theory. These choice process patterns are sensitive to the difficulty of calculations and the presentation format of lotteries. Participants appear to transition between decision-making procedures depending on how lottery choices are presented and their complexity. They also attend to payoffs as the primary feature considered during component comparisons. Our findings emphasize the influence of information presentation on decision-making processes and decisions. |
Sheng Hui Zhang; Xing Nan Zhao; Dan Qing Jiang; Shi Ming Tang; Cong Yu Ocular dominance-dependent binocular combination of monocular neuronal responses in macaque V1 Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 13, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Zhang2024i,Primates rely on two eyes to perceive depth, while maintaining stable vision when either one eye or both eyes are open. Although psychophysical and modeling studies have investigated how monocular signals are combined to form binocular vision, the underlying neuronal mechanisms, particularly in V1 where most neurons exhibit binocularity with varying eye preferences, remain poorly understood. Here, we used two-photon calcium imaging to compare the monocular and binocular responses of thousands of simultaneously recorded V1 superficial-layer neurons in three awake macaques. During monocular stimulation, neurons preferring the stimulated eye exhibited significantly stronger responses compared to those preferring both eyes. However, during binocular stimulation, the responses of neurons preferring either eye were suppressed on the average, while those preferring both eyes were enhanced, resulting in similar neuronal responses irrespective of their eye preferences, and an overall response level similar to that with monocular viewing. A neuronally realistic model of binocular combination, which incorporates ocular dominance-dependent divisive interocular inhibition and binocular summation, is proposed to account for these findings. |
Sheng Hui Zhang; Shi Ming Tang; Cong Yu Testing Hubel and Wiesel's "ice-cube" model of functional maps at cellular resolution in macaque V1 Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 34, no. 12, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Zhang2024h,Hubel and Wiesel's ice-cube model proposed that V1 orientation and ocular dominance functional maps intersect orthogonally to optimize wiring efficiency. Here, we revisited this model and additional arrangements at both cellular and pixel levels in awake macaques using two-photon calcium imaging. The recorded response fields of view were similar in size to hypercolumns, each containing up to 2,000 identified neurons and representing full periods of orientation preferences and ocular dominance. We estimated each neuron/pixel's orientation, ocular dominance, and spatial frequency preferences, constructed respective functional maps, computed geometric gradients of feature preferences, and calculated intersection angles among these gradients. At the cellular level, the intersection angles among functional maps were nearly evenly distributed. Nonetheless, pixel-based maps after Gaussian smoothing displayed orientation-ocular dominance and orientation-spatial frequency orthogonality, as well as ocular dominance-spatial frequency parallelism, in alignment with previous results, even though the trends were weak and highly variable. However, these Gaussian smoothing effects were not observed in cellular maps, indicating that the pixel-based trends may not accurately represent the relationships among feature-tuning properties of V1 neurons. We suggest that the widely distributed intersections among cellular maps can ensure that multiple stimulus features are represented within a hypercolumn, and no pair of features is represented with the least economical wiring (e.g. parallel intersections). |
Qian Zhang; Jinfeng Ding; Zhenyu Zhang; Xiaohong Yang; Yufang Yang The effect of congruent emotional context in emotional word processing during discourse comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Neurolinguistics, pp. 1–18, 2024. @article{Zhang2024g,This study examined the effect of emotional context on the semantic memory of subsequent emotional words during discourse comprehension in two eye-tracking experiments. Four-sentence discourses were used as experimental materials. The first three sentences established an emotional or neutral context, while the fourth contained an emotional target word consistent with the preceding emotional context's valence. The discourses were presented twice using the text change paradigm, where the target words were replaced with strongly - or weakly-related words during the second presentation. Thus, four conditions were included in the present study: Emotional-strongly-related, Emotional-weakly-related, Neutral- strongly-related and Neutral-weakly-related. In Experiment 1, negative contexts and negative target words were used, whereas in Experiment 2, positive contexts and positive target words were used. The results revealed a semantic relatedness effect, whereby the strongly-related words have lower change detection accuracy, longer reading times and more fixations in both Experiments 1 and 2. Furthermore, across both experiments, the magnitude of the semantic relatedness effect was greater in the emotionally congruent contexts than in the neutral contexts. These results suggest that emotional context could increase efforts to change the discrimination of subsequent words and demonstrate an important role of emotional context on semantic memory during discourse processing. |
Qi Zhang; Yun Sun; Lei Zheng; Yuhan Xu; Lingnuo Wang Food attention bias and Delboeuf illusion: Joint effect of calorie content and plate size on visual attention Journal Article In: Food Quality and Preference, vol. 120, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Zhang2024f,Plate size causes the Delboeuf illusion, and impacts food craving and food consumption. However, the underlying cognitive mechanism of the Delboeuf illusion remains unknown. This research adopted the food attention processing theory to gain an in-depth understanding of how the Delboeuf illusion impacts attention orientation, and to examine whether this effect varies between high- and low-calorie foods. Forty women completed a food-house task with eye-tracking, and evaluated the palatability and healthiness attributes of each food. The results showed that high-calorie (versus low-calorie) foods and small (versus large) plates were more capable of capturing attention. Notably, there was a joint effect of calorie content and plate size on food attention bias, suggesting that the Delboeuf illusion's effect on food attentional bias differs according to calorie content. Interestingly, there was a moderated mediation effect of plate size, with the mediating effect of perceived healthiness on the relationship between calorie content and food attention bias when foods were placed on a small plate, but not on a large plate. However, we observed an attention bias towards high- versus low-calorie foods through the mediating effect of perceived palatability, irrespective of plate size. Our findings suggest that high-calorie foods, whether placed on a small or large plate, automatically attract attention due to their palatability. However, low-calorie foods are more capable of attracting attention when placed on a small plate, indicating that the Delboeuf illusion caused by plate size enhances the perceived healthiness of low-calorie foods. |
Li Zhang; Li Zhou; Lichao Kang; Yuening Xu; Hong Jiang; Valerie Benson Attentional processing of preserved face and scrambled face distractors in preschool children with autism spectrum condition Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 617–634, 2024. @article{Zhang2024e,The current study investigated attentional processing of preserved neutral face and scrambled neutral face distractors at both involuntary and voluntary orienting levels in children with and without autism spectrum condition (ASC). The findings suggest similar influences of face configuration on reflexive orienting in both groups but reveal group differences in voluntary disengagement from face-related distractors. The ASC group exhibited difficulties in disengaging from the central neutral faces, and the TD group showed longer latencies for scrambled faces. These group differences suggest inefficiency in adopting a global face processing strategy at the voluntary attentional level in ASC. We discuss how the observed effects might impact upon the development of social communication skills in ASC. |
Hui Zhang; Feng Liang; Fen Wang; Na Feng; Congcong Yan; Cathrine N. Hewwett; Hui Chen Re-examining our evolutionary propensities toward snakes: Insights from children's inattentional blindness Journal Article In: Perception, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Zhang2024c,The purpose of this study was to investigate the divergent viewpoints regarding fearful stimuli in young children by analyzing variations in eye movement tracking and detection rates when confronted with the sudden appearance of either snakes or lizards. A total of 137 five to six-year-old Chinese children (43.8% male) participated in the study, which utilized the inattentional blindness paradigm. The results indicated that young children did not display any attentional bias toward snakes when compared with lizards, as evidenced by their detection rates and eye movement tracking. Interestingly, the children fixated on lizards earlier than snakes. These findings suggest that the notion of an evolution bias toward ancestral threats may not be as credible as previously believed. |
Han Zhang; Kevin F. Miller; John Jonides How does mind-wandering affect distractor suppression? Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, pp. 1–18, 2024. @article{Zhang2024b,The current study examined whether the suppression of overt attention to a salient distractor requires attentional resources. In a feature-search task, participants searched for a constant shape among different shapes while ignoring a uniquely coloured distractor. Trial-by-trial fluctuations in attentional resources were assessed via thought probes that elicited mind-wandering reports and via pre-trial pupil sizes. The results show that initial eye movements to the distractor were suppressed regardless of the availability of attentional resources. However, when mind-wandering, the presence of the distractor prolonged target looking time. Thus, the initial deployment of overt attention in this task does not require attentional resources and can proceed automatically, presumably due to strong selection history. Nonetheless, the distractor might still disrupt later processing stages, an effect exacerbated by mind-wandering. These results also suggest that initial eye movements do not fully reflect the extent of distractor interference during the entire course of visual search. |
Han Zhang; Tessa R. Abagis; Clara J. Steeby; John Jonides Lingering on distraction: Examining distractor rejection in adults with ADHD Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Zhang2024a,Effective visual search relies on reactively disengaging from distractors when the features of the distractors are unpredictable. Does this ability differ between adults with and without Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)?. Participants (36 with ADHD, 46 non-ADHD) completed the additional-singleton task, in which they searched for a unique shape while a uniquely coloured distractor unpredictably appeared on half of the trials. The distractor delayed manual response times in both groups, with no significant group difference. Both groups also demonstrated similar oculomotor capture effects, as indicated by the landing position of initial fixations. However, when initial fixations did land on the distractor, participants with ADHD tended to “linger” on the distractor with additional fixations and longer duration before disengaging from it, compared to those without ADHD. These results suggest that ADHD is associated with deficits in reactively disengaging from distractions rather than deficits in avoiding being captured in the first place. |
Mengdie Zhai; Hongxiao Wu; Yajie Wang; Yu Liao; Wenfeng Feng Sound reduces saccadic chronostasis illusion Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 215, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Zhai2024,The saccadic chronostasis illusion refers to the duration overestimation of the first visual stimulation after saccadic eye movement, which is also known as “stopped clock illusion.” The present study investigated whether saccadic chronostasis would be observed in the auditory modality and whether the saccade-induced time dilation in the visual modality would be reduced by a synchronously presented sound. In each trial, a unisensory visual stimulus, unisensory sound, or bimodal audio-visual stimulus with a duration of 200–800 ms (probe stimulus) was presented at the saccade target location and temporally around the offset of the saccade, followed by a unisensory visual or auditory standard stimulus for a fixed 500 ms. Participants were required to identify which of the two stimuli (probe or standard) presented in the target modality (visual or auditory) was perceived as longer. The results showed that no saccadic chronostasis was observed in the auditory modality, regardless of whether the sound was presented alone or synchronously accompanied by a visual stimulus. Interestingly, the magnitude of the saccadic chronostasis illusion was reduced by the synchronously presented sound. Moreover, the combined effect of the saccade and sound on visual time perception fits well with the standard scalar model, and the weight of the cross-modal effect was higher than that of saccadic visual time dilation. These results suggest that sound dominates vision in time processing during saccades and linearly modulates saccadic chronostasis, which follows the Scalar Expectancy Theory. |
Kristina Zeljic; Joshua A. Solomon; Michael J. Morgan Individual differences in direction-selective motion adaptation revealed by change-detection performance Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 225, pp. 1–7, 2024. @article{Zeljic2024,The motion aftereffect (MAE) and motion adaptation in general are usually considered to be universal phenomena. However, in a preliminary study using a bias-free measure of the MAE we found some individuals who showed at best a weak effect of adaptation. These same individuals also performed poorly in a “change detection“ test of motion adaptation based on visual search, leading to the conjecture that there is a bimodality in the population with respect to motion adaptation. The present study tested this possibility by screening 102 participants on two versions of the change-detection task while also considering potential confounding factors including eye movements, practice-based improvements, and deficits in visual search ability. The 5 strongest and the 5 weakest change detectors were selected for further testing of motion detection and contrast detection after adaptation. Data showed an inverse association between change-detection ability and performance in the motion-detection task. We extend previous findings by also showing i) the weakest change detectors exhibit less direction selectivity in their contrast thresholds after adapting to drifting gratings and ii) the ability to detect change in motion direction correlates with the ability to detect change in spatial orientation. Group differences between the strongest and weakest change detectors cannot be attributed to a lack of practice, nor can they be explained by poor fixation ability. Our results suggest genuine individual differences in the degree to which adaptation is specific to stimulus orientation and direction of motion. |
Yordanka Zafirova; Anna Bognár; Rufin Vogels Configuration-sensitive face-body interactions in primate visual cortex Journal Article In: Progress in Neurobiology, vol. 232, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Zafirova2024,Traditionally, the neural processing of faces and bodies is studied separately, although they are encountered together, as parts of an agent. Despite its social importance, it is poorly understood how faces and bodies interact, particularly at the single-neuron level. Here, we examined the interaction between faces and bodies in the macaque inferior temporal (IT) cortex, targeting an fMRI-defined patch. We recorded responses of neurons to monkey images in which the face was in its natural location (natural face-body configuration), or in which the face was mislocated with respect to the upper body (unnatural face-body configuration). On average, the neurons did not respond stronger to the natural face-body configurations compared to the summed responses to their faces and bodies, presented in isolation. However, the neurons responded stronger to the natural compared to the unnatural face-body configurations. This configuration effect was present for face- and monkey-centered images, did not depend on local feature differences between configurations, and was present when the face was replaced by a small object. The face-body interaction rules differed between natural and unnatural configurations. In sum, we show for the first time that single IT neurons process faces and bodies in a configuration-specific manner, preferring natural face-body configurations. |
Nadira Yusif Rodriguez; Aarit Ahuja; Debaleena Basu; Theresa H. McKim; Theresa M. Desrochers Different subregions of monkey lateral prefrontal cortex respond to abstract sequences and their components Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 47, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{YusifRodriguez2024,Sequential information permeates daily activities, such as when watching for the correct series of buildings to determine when to get off the bus or train. These sequences include periodicity (the spacing of the buildings), the identity of the stimuli (the kind of house), and higher-order more abstract rules that may not depend on the exact stimulus (e.g., house, house, house, business). Previously, we found that the posterior fundus of area 46 in the monkey lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) responds to rule changes in such abstract visual sequences. However, it is unknown if this region responds to other components of the sequence, i.e., image periodicity and identity, in isolation. Further, it is unknown if this region dissociates from other, more ventral LPFC subregions that have been associated with sequences and their components. To address these questions, we used awake functional magnetic resonance imaging in three male macaque monkeys during two no-report visual tasks. One task contained abstract visual sequences, and the other contained no visual sequences but maintained the same image periodicity and identities. We found the fundus of area 46 responded only to abstract sequence rule violations. In contrast, the ventral bank of area 46 responded to changes in image periodicity and identity, but not changes in the abstract sequence. These results suggest a functional specialization within anatomical substructures of LPFC to signal different kinds of stimulus regularities. This specialization may provide key scaffolding to identify abstract patterns and construct complex models of the world for daily living. |
Lei Yuan; Miriam Novack; David Uttal; Steven Franconeri Language systematizes attention: How relational language enhances relational representation by guiding attention Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 243, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Yuan2024,Language can affect cognition, but through what mechanism? Substantial past research has focused on how labeling can elicit categorical representation during online processing. We focus here on a particularly powerful type of language-relational language-and show that relational language can enhance relational representation in children through an embodied attention mechanism. Four-year-old children were given a color-location conjunction task, in which they were asked to encode a two-color square, split either vertically or horizontally (e.g., red on the left, blue on the right), and later recall the same configuration from its mirror reflection. During the encoding phase, children in the experimental condition heard relational language (e.g., "Red is on the left of blue"), while those in the control condition heard generic non-relational language (e.g., "Look at this one, look at it closely"). At recall, children in the experimental condition were more successful at choosing the correct relational representation between the two colors compared to the control group. Moreover, they exhibited different attention patterns as predicted by the attention shift account of relational representation (Franconeri et al., 2012). To test the sustained effect of language and the role of attention, during the second half of the study, the experimental condition was given generic non-relational language. There was a sustained advantage in the experimental condition for both behavioral accuracies and signature attention patterns. Overall, our findings suggest that relational language enhances relational representation by guiding learners' attention, and this facilitative effect persists over time even in the absence of language. Implications for the mechanism of how relational language can enhance the learning of relational systems (e.g., mathematics, spatial cognition) by guiding attention will be discussed. |
Qiuchen Yu; Jiangfeng Gou; Yan Li; Zhongling Pi; Jiumin Yang Introducing support for learner control: Temporal and organizational cues in instructional videos Journal Article In: British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 933–956, 2024. @article{Yu2024b,Instructional videos risk overloading learners' limited working memory resources due to the transient information effect. Learner control is one way to mitigate this concern, but has shown almost zero overall effect and considerable heterogeneity. Consequently, it is essential to identify when learner control is most beneficial. The present study examined the influence of cues on learners' behaviour, cognitive process, metacognition and learning performance in an interactive learning environment. Employing a 2 (temporal cues: without vs. with) × 2 (organizational cues: without vs. with) between-subject design, 117 participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: no cues, temporal cues, organizational cues and temporal cues + organizational cues. Among these, temporal cues (ie, progress bar) serve as time-related signals designed to regulate pacing, and organizational cues (ie, table of contents) provide a structural framework for the content. Significant cueing effects were observed for both cue types at germane cognitive load and transfer. Notably, our results indicate that organizational cues effectively guide learners' attention towards the underlying structure, thus promoting cognitive processing. These unique benefits are evident in improved topic recall, retention and monitoring accuracy. Importantly, combined temporal cues and organizational cues were seen to not only allow learners to exhibit more engagement behaviours (ie, skimming) but also assist learners in accurately judging their learning. These findings strongly support the recommendation to use cues to enhance the effectiveness of learner control. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Instructional videos may overload limited working memory resources due to the transient information effect. The overall effect of including learner control within educational technology was almost zero (g = 0.05) but showed higher heterogeneity. It is unclear whether embedding various cues in an instructional video improves the effectiveness of learner control. What this paper adds Both temporal and organizational cues aided in increasing learners' germane cognitive load and enhancing their transfer. Organizational cues helped learners understand the underlying structure, thus facilitating deeper cognitive processing, improved metacognition and ultimately boosted learning performance. Combined temporal and organizational cues lead to engagement behaviours and accurate self-monitoring. Implications for practice and/or policy Providing instructional support is important in assisting learners with the complexities of learner-controlled instruction. Embedding cues help learners process the content deeply by giving learners control over the instructional video. |
Kairui Yu; Junzhen Guo; Zhenjie Xu; Feiyang Shi; Xiaoqian Yu; Fang Fang; Yingying Wang Processing of fearful faces exhibits characteristics of subcortical functions Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 153, no. 5, pp. 1374–1387, 2024. @article{Yu2024a,A subcortical pathway is thought to have evolved to facilitate fear information transmission, but direct evidence for its existence in humans is lacking. In recent years, rapid, preattentive, and preconscious fear processing has been demonstrated, providing indirect support for the existence of the subcortical pathway by challenging the necessity of canonical cortical pathways in fear processing. However, direct support also requires evidence for the involvement of subcortical regions in fear processing. To address this issue, here we investigate whether fear processing reflects the characteristics of the subcortical structures in the hypothesized subcortical pathway. Using a monocular/dichoptic paradigm, Experiment 1 demonstrated a same-eye advantage for fearful but not neutral face processing, suggesting that fear processing relied on monocular neurons existing mainly in the subcortex. Experiments 2 and 3 further showed insensitivity to short-wavelength stimuli and a nasal–temporal hemifield asymmetry in fear processing, both of which were functional characteristics of the superior colliculus, a key hub of the subcortical pathway. Furthermore, all three experiments revealed a low spatial frequency selectivity of fear processing, consistent with magnocellular input via subcortical neurons. These results suggest a selective involvement of subcortical structures in fear processing, which, together with the indirect evidence for automatic fear processing, provides a more complete picture of the existence of a subcortical pathway for fear processing in humans. |
Gongchen Yu; Leor N. Katz; Christian Quaia; Adam Messinger; Richard J. Krauzlis Short-latency preference for faces in primate superior colliculus depends on visual cortex Journal Article In: Neuron, vol. 112, no. 16, pp. 2814–2822, 2024. @article{Yu2024,Face processing is fundamental to primates and has been extensively studied in higher-order visual cortex. Here, we report that visual neurons in the midbrain superior colliculus (SC) of macaque monkeys display a preference for images of faces. This preference emerges within 40 ms of stimulus onset—well before “face patches” in visual cortex—and, at the population level, can be used to distinguish faces from other visual objects with accuracies of ∼80%. This short-latency face preference in SC depends on signals routed through early visual cortex because inactivating the lateral geniculate nucleus, the key relay from retina to cortex, virtually eliminates visual responses in SC, including face-related activity. These results reveal an unexpected circuit in the primate visual system for rapidly detecting faces in the periphery, complementing the higher-order areas needed for recognizing individual faces. |
Masatoshi Yoshida; Kenichiro Miura; Michiko Fujimoto; Hidenaga Yamamori; Yuka Yasuda; Masao Iwase; Ryota Hashimoto Visual salience is affected in participants with schizophrenia during free-viewing Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Yoshida2024a,Abnormalities in visual exploration affect the daily lives of patients with schizophrenia. For example, scanpath length during free-viewing is shorter in schizophrenia. However, its origin and its relevance to symptoms are unknown. Here we investigate the possibility that abnormalities in eye movements result from abnormalities in visual or visuo-cognitive processing. More specifically, we examined whether such abnormalities reflect visual salience in schizophrenia. Eye movements of 82 patients and 252 healthy individuals viewing natural and/or complex images were examined using saliency maps for static images to determine the contributions of low-level visual features to salience-guided eye movements. The results showed that the mean value for orientation salience at the gazes of the participants with schizophrenia were higher than that of the healthy control subjects. Further analyses revealed that orientation salience defined by the L + M channel of the DKL color space is specifically affected in schizophrenia, suggesting abnormalities in the magnocellular visual pathway. By looking into the computational stages of the visual salience, we found that the difference between schizophrenia and healthy control emerges at the earlier stage, suggesting functional decline in early visual processing. These results suggest that visual salience is affected in schizophrenia, thereby expanding the concept of the aberrant salience hypothesis of psychosis to the visual domain. |
Atsushi Yoshida; Okihide Hikosaka Involvement of neurons in the nonhuman primate anterior striatum in proactive inhibition Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 49, pp. 1–20, 2024. @article{Yoshida2024,Behaving as desired requires selecting the appropriate behavior and inhibiting the selection of inappropriate behavior. This inhibitory function involves multiple processes, such as reactive and proactive inhibition, instead of a single process. In this study, two male macaque monkeys were required to perform a task in which they had to sequentially select (accept) or refuse (reject) a choice. Neural activity was recorded from the anterior striatum, which is considered to be involved in behavioral inhibition, focusing on the distinction between proactive and reactive inhibitions. We identified neurons with significant activity changes during the rejection of bad objects. Cluster analysis revealed three distinct groups, of which only one showed increased activity during object rejection, suggesting its involvement in proactive inhibition. This activity pattern was consistent irrespective of the rejection method, indicating a role beyond saccadic suppression. Furthermore, minimal activity changes during the fixation task indicated that these neurons were not primarily involved in reactive inhibition. In conclusion, these findings suggest that the anterior striatum plays a crucial role in cognitive control and orchestrates goal-directed behavior through proactive inhibition, which may be critical in understanding the mechanisms of behavioral inhibition dysfunction that occur in patients with basal ganglia disease. |
Jane Yook; Hinze Hogendoorn; Gereon R. Fink; Simone Vossel; Ralph Weidner When visual attention is divided in the flash-lag effect Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 24, no. 9, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Yook2024,The flash-lag effect (FLE) occurs when a flash's position seems to be delayed relative to a continuously moving object, even though both are physically aligned. Although several studies have demonstrated that reduced attention increases FLE magnitude, the precise mechanism underlying these attention-dependent effects remains elusive. In this study, we investigated the influence of visual attention on the FLE by manipulating the level of attention allocated to multiple stimuli moving simultaneously in different locations. Participants were cued to either focus on one moving stimulus or split their attention among two, three, or four moving stimuli presented in different quadrants. We measured trial-wise FLE to explore potential changes in the magnitude of perceived displacement and its trial-to-trial variability under different attention conditions. Our results reveal that FLE magnitudes were significantly greater when attention was divided among multiple stimuli compared with when attention was focused on a single stimulus, suggesting that divided attention considerably augments the perceptual illusion. However, FLE variability, measured as the coefficient of variation, did not differ between conditions, indicating that the consistency of the illusion is unaffected by divided attention. We discuss the interpretations and implications of our findings in the context of widely accepted explanations of the FLE within a dynamic environment. |
Artturi Ylinen; Minna Hannula-Sormunen; Jake McMullen; Erno Lehtinen; Patrik Wikman; Kimmo Alho Attenuated processing of task-irrelevant speech and other auditory stimuli: fMRI evidence from arithmetic tasks Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 60, pp. 7124–7147, 2024. @article{Ylinen2024,When performing cognitive tasks in noisy conditions, the brain needs to maintain task performance while additionally controlling the processing of task-irrelevant and potentially distracting auditory stimuli. Previous research indicates that a fundamental mechanism by which this control is achieved is the attenuation of task-irrelevant processing, especially in conditions with high task demands. However, it remains unclear whether the processing of complex naturalistic sounds can be modulated as easily as that of simpler ones. To address this issue, the present fMRI study examined whether activity related to task-irrelevant meaningful speech is attenuated similarly as that related to meaningless control sounds (nonsense speech and noise-vocoded, unintelligible sounds). The sounds were presented concurrently with three numerical tasks varying in difficulty: an easy control task requiring no calculation, a ‘routine' arithmetic calculation task and a more demanding ‘creative' arithmetic task, where solutions are generated to reach a given answer. Consistent with their differing difficulty, the tasks activated fronto-parieto-temporal regions parametrically (creative > routine > control). In bilateral auditory regions, activity related to the speech stimuli decreased as task demands increased. Importantly, however, the attenuation was more pronounced for meaningful than nonsense speech, demonstrating that distractor type can strongly modulate the extent of the attenuation. This also suggests that semantic processing may be especially susceptible to attenuation under conditions with increased task demands. Finally, as this is the first study to utilize the ‘creative' arithmetic task, we conducted exploratory analyses to examine its potential in assessing neural processes involved in mathematical problem-solving beyond routine arithmetic. |
Yang Yiling; Johanna Klon Lipok; Katharine Shapcott; Andreea Lazar; Wolf Singer Dynamic fading memory and expectancy effects in the monkey primary visual cortex Journal Article In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 121, no. 8, pp. 2024, 2024. @article{Yiling2024,In order to investigate the involvement of the primary visual cortex (V1) in working memory (WM), parallel, multisite recordings of multi-unit activity were obtained from monkey V1 while the animals performed a delayed match-to-sample (DMS) task. During the delay period, V1 population firing rate vectors maintained a lingering trace of the sample stimulus that could be reactivated by intervening impulse stimuli that enhanced neuronal firing. This fading trace of the sample did not require active engagement of the monkeys in the DMS task and likely reflects the intrinsic dynamics of recurrent cortical networks in lower visual areas. This renders an active, attention-dependent involvement of V1 in the maintenance of WM contents unlikely. By contrast, population responses to the test stimulus depended on the probabilistic contingencies between sample and test stimuli. Responses to tests that matched expectations were reduced which agrees with concepts of predictive coding. |
Yang Yiling; Johanna Klon-Lipok; Wolf Singer Joint encoding of stimulus and decision in monkey primary visual cortex Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 1–6, 2024. @article{Yiling2024a,We investigated whether neurons in monkey primary visual cortex (V1) exhibit mixed selectivity for sensory input and behavioral choice. Parallel multisite spiking activity was recorded from area V1 of awake monkeys performing a delayed match-to-sample task. The monkeys had to make a forced choice decision of whether the test stimulus matched the preceding sample stimulus. The population responses evoked by the test stimulus contained information about both the identity of the stimulus and with some delay but before the onset of the motor response the forthcoming choice. The results of subspace identification analysis indicate that stimulus-specific and decision-related information coexists in separate subspaces of the high-dimensional population activity, and latency considerations suggest that the decision-related information is conveyed by top-down projections. |
Jianqiang Ye; Yubin Zheng; Min Zhan; Yiling Zhou; Long Li; Dimei Chen Characteristics of pre-service chemistry teachers' mechanistic reasoning in organic chemistry tasks: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Research in Science Education, pp. 1–20, 2024. @article{Ye2024,Organic chemistry is challenging for novices as it involves a large quantity of organic reactions. Effective learning requires not only profound theoretical knowledge but also the ability to reason about causal mechanisms. This study investigated pre-service chemistry teachers' mechanistic reasoning and the implicit cognitive process. Participants (N = 33) were asked to complete three tasks, which required them to explain chemical phenomena or analyze chemical reactions. This work analyzed the components involved in participants' explanations based on the discourse analysis framework and evaluated the mechanistic reasoning by identifying the causal relationship between different components. An eye-tracking method was employed to recognize the mental activity underlying participants' performance. Four parameters, percentage of dwell time, percentage of fixation count, heat maps, and average pupil size, were used to conduct quantitative analyses on the data collected from the eye-tracker. Each parameter on predefined areas of interest was compared to identify the information that participants paid more attention to and bore more cognitive load while reasoning. The results revealed that pre-service chemistry teachers demonstrate four different types of reasoning in organic chemistry tasks: descriptive, relational, simple causal, and mechanistic reasoning. Pre-service chemistry teachers were more concerned with key information and symbolic representations. It was symbolic representations that increased cognitive load. |
Amit Yashar; Marisa Carrasco When periphery rules: Enhanced sampling weights of the visual periphery in crowding across dimensions Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Yashar2024,Crowding, our inability to identify a feature or object – the target – due to its proximity to adjacent features or objects – flankers – exhibits a notable inner-outer asymmetry. This asymmetry is characterized by the outer flanker – more peripheral – creating stronger interference than the inner one – closer to the fovea. But crowding is not uniform across different feature dimensions. For example, in the case of orientation, this asymmetry reflects misreport errors: observers are more likely to misidentify the outer flanker as the target than the inner one. However, for spatial frequency (SF), observers tend to average the features of the target and flankers (Yashar et al., 2019). Here, we investigated whether and how the inner-outer asymmetry manifests across various feature dimensions: Gabor orientation and SF, as well as T-shape tilt and color. We reanalyzed continuous estimation reports data published by Yashar et al. (2019), focusing on a previously unanalyzed factor: the relative position of each flanker (inner vs. outer). We fit probabilistic models that assign variable weights to each flanker. Our analysis revealed that observers predominantly misreport the outer flanker as the target with Gabor orientation and T-shape tilt stimuli, and slightly so with color stimuli, whereas with Gabor SF, observers perform a weighted average of all features but also with a bias towards the outer flanker over the inner one. These findings suggest that an increased weighting on the more peripheral items is a general characteristic of crowding in peripheral vision. |
Panpan Yao; David Hall; Hagit Borer; Linnaea Stockall Dutch–Mandarin learners' online use of syntactic cues to anticipate mass vs. count interpretations Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 803 –831, 2024. @article{Yao2024c,It remains unclear whether late second language learners (L2ers) can acquire sufficient knowledge about unique-to-L2 constructions through implicit learning to build anticipations during real-time processing. To tackle this question, we conducted a visual world paradigm experiment to investigate high-proficiency late first-language Dutch second-language Mandarin Chinese learners' online processing of syntactic cues to count vs. mass interpretations in Chinese which are unique-to-L2 and never explicitly taught. The results showed that late Dutch–Mandarin learners were sensitive to a mass-biased syntactic cue in real-time processing, and exhibited some native-like anticipatory behaviour. These findings indicate that late L2ers can acquire unique-to-L2 constructions through implicit learning, and can automatically use this knowledge to make predictions. |
Fangshu Yao; Xiaoyue Chang; Bin Zhou; Wen Zhou Olfaction modulates cortical arousal independent of perceived odor intensity and pleasantness Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 299, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Yao2024a,Throughout history, various odors have been harnessed to invigorate or relax the mind. The mechanisms underlying odors' diverse arousal effects remain poorly understood. We conducted five experiments (184 participants) to investigate this issue, using pupillometry, electroencephalography, and the attentional blink paradigm, which exemplifies the limit in attentional capacity. Results demonstrated that exposure to citral, compared to vanillin, enlarged pupil size, reduced resting-state alpha oscillations and alpha network efficiency, augmented beta-gamma oscillations, and enhanced the coordination between parietal alpha and frontal beta-gamma activities. In parallel, it attenuated the attentional blink effect. These effects were observed despite citral and vanillin being comparable in perceived odor intensity, pleasantness, and nasal pungency, and were unlikely driven by semantic biases. Our findings reveal that odors differentially alter the small-worldness of brain network architecture, and thereby brain state and arousal. Furthermore, they establish arousal as a unique dimension in olfactory space, distinct from intensity and pleasantness. |
Bo Yao; Graham G. Scott; Gillian Bruce; Ewa Monteith-Hodge; Sara C. Sereno Emotion processing in concrete and abstract words: Evidence from eye fixations during reading Journal Article In: Cognition and Emotion, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Yao2024,We replicated and extended the findings of Yao et al. [(2018). Differential emotional processing in concrete and abstract words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(7), 1064–1074] regarding the interaction of emotionality, concreteness, and imageability in word processing by measuring eye fixation times on target words during normal reading. A 3 (Emotion: negative, neutral, positive) × 2 (Concreteness: abstract, concrete) design was used with 22 items per condition, with each set of six target words matched across conditions in terms of word length and frequency. Abstract (e.g. shocking, reserved, fabulous) and concrete (e.g. massacre, calendar, treasure) target words appeared (separately) within contextually neutral, plausible sentences. Sixty-three participants each read all 132 experimental sentences while their eye movements were recorded. Analyses using Gamma generalised linear mixed models revealed significant effects of both Emotion and Concreteness on all fixation measures, indicating faster processing for emotional and concrete words. Additionally, there was a significant Emotion × Concreteness interaction which, critically, was modulated by Imageability in early fixation time measures. Emotion effects were significantly larger in higher-imageability abstract words than in lower-imageability ones, but remained unaffected by imageability in concrete words. These findings support the multimodal induction hypothesis and highlight the intricate interplay of these factors in the immediate stages of word processing during fluent reading. |
Beier Yao; Martin Rolfs; Rachael Slate; Dominic Roberts; Jessica Fattal; Eric D. Achtyes; Ivy F. Tso; Vaibhav A. Diwadkar; Deborah Kashy; Jacqueline Bao; Katharine N. Thakkar Abnormal oculomotor corollary discharge signaling as a trans-diagnostic mechanism of psychosis Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 631–641, 2024. @article{Yao2024b,Background and Hypothesis: Corollary discharge (CD) signals are “copies” of motor signals sent to sensory areas to predict the corresponding input. They are a posited mechanism enabling one to distinguish actions generated by oneself vs external forces. Consequently, altered CD is a hypothesized mechanism for agency disturbances in psychosis. Previous studies have shown a decreased influence of CD signals on visual perception in individuals with schizophrenia—particularly in xthose with more severe positive symptoms. We therefore hypothesized that altered CD may beatrans-diagnosticmechanismof psychosis. StudyDesign: We examined oculomotor CD (using the blanking task) in 49 participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (SZ), 36 bipolar participants with psychosis (BPP), and 40 healthy controls (HC). Participants made a saccade to a visual target. Upon saccade initiation, the target disappeared and reappeared at a horizontally displaced position. Participants indicated the direction of displacement. With intact CD, participants can make accurate perceptual judgements. Otherwise, participants may use saccade landing site as a proxy of pre-saccadic target to inform perception. Thus, multi-level modeling was used to examine the influence of target displacement and saccade landing site on displacement judgements. Study Results: SZ and BPP were equally less sensitive to target displacement than HC. Moreover, regardless of diagnosis, SZ and BPP with more severe positive symptoms were more likely to rely on saccade landing site. Conclusions: These results suggest that altered CD may be a trans-diagnostic mechanism of psychosis. |
Zhou Yang; Jia Wen Zhu; Lin Su; Ming Jie Xiong; Todd Jackson The gaze biases towards pain-related information during the late stages predict the persistence of chronic pain: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica Sinica, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 44–60, 2024. @article{Yang2024d,Pain-related attention biases have a crucial role in the development and maintenance of chronic pain. Previous meta-analyses have demonstrated that individuals with chronic pain exhibit a sustained attentional biases toward pain-related stimuli. Several studies have also highlighted associations between the maintenance of pain-related attention biases and poorer long-term chronic pain outcomes. However, traditional measures used in previous studies including total fixation or duration indexes, cannot capture the dynamic nature of attention or variability in attentional processes between individuals. Some researchers have suggested that the attentional biases associated with chronic pain may exist at different stages of attention processing. Therefore, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamic nature of visual attention biases toward pain-related stimuli and their potential predictive effects on responses to chronic pain, this study employed a time window segmentation analysis of eye movement data. Additionally, real pain stimuli were utilized in the visual task to elicit more authentic responses. GPower3.1 was utilized to estimate the required sample size for this study; 49 participants were needed to detect an effect size (f) of 0.17 with a significance level (α) of 0.05 and a power of 95%. A total of 94 participants (69 women) experiencing chronic musculoskeletal pain (e.g., neck pain, shoulder pain, or low back pain), were recruited for this study. During the experiment, participants completed two tasks while their eye movements were recorded using an Eyelink 1000 eye tracker. The eye tracker had a sampling rate of 500 Hz, a spatial accuracy greater than 0.5°, and a resolution of 0.01° in the pupil-tracking mode. After receiving instructions, participants began the first task comprising 16 pairs of pain-neutral pictures and 16 pairs of neutral-neutral pictures, each measuring 11 cm × 10 cm. The viewing angle of each picture was 8.99° × 8.17°. In this task, picture pairs were displayed for 2000 ms, during which participants were instructed to freely view the pictures. Following the disappearance of the stimuli, a detection point appeared at the location of one of the pictures, and participants had to quickly and accurately judge the location of the detection point. Task 2 was identical to Task 1, exception that, no detection point was presented following the offset of picture pairs; instead, there was a possibility that an actual somatosensory pain stimulus would be delivered. Specifically, participants had a 25% chance of receiving a painful stimulus after each pain-neutral picture pair appeared while there was no chance a painful stimulus delivery after neutral-neutral picture pairs appeared. Participants were instructed to quickly and accurately determine whether or not they experienced a painful stimulus. At the start of the experiment, baseline data was collected, including the participants' chronic pain grade, pain catastrophizing scale scores, center for epidemiologic studies depression scores, and demographic information. Additionally, after a period of 6 months, the experimenters followed up with the participants to gather information on their chronic pain intensity and interference. Task 1 results revealed patients with chronic pain displayed attentional biases toward pain-related stimuli during the first three epochs (0~500 ms, 500~1000 ms, and 1000~1500 ms). In Task 2, which incorporated real pain stimuli, participants exhibited attentional biases toward pain cues during all four epochs (0~500 ms, 500~1000 ms, 1000~1500 ms, and 1500~2000 ms). By examining the magnitude of attentional biases across the four time windows in the two tasks, it was evident that attentional biases toward pain-related stimuli in patients with chronic pain were imbalanced. Attention was engaged in the first epoch of stimulus presentation (0~500 ms), reached its peak during the second epoch (500~1000 ms), and then gradually decreased during the third and fourth epochs (1000~1500 ms and 1500~2000 ms). Further analysis revealed that attentional biases toward pain-related stimuli during the third and fourth epochs (1000~1500 ms and 1500~2000 ms) of both tasks independently predicted the maintenance of chronic pain intensity and interference levels at a six month follow-up. These effects were maintained even after controlling for baseline levels of pain intensity and interference and other baseline correlates of follow-up outcomes. The present study represents the first attempt to examine the impact of attentional bias towards pain-related stimuli on the maintenance of dysfunctional chronic pain outcomes from a dynamic perspective. These findings offer an explanation and valuable insights into attentional training, which holds significant importance in enhancing chronic pain management. Moving forward, training individuals to redirect their attention away from pain and associated cues during the later stages of attention may prove to be an effective approach for alleviating suffering due to chronic pain. |
Xiaozhi Yang; Chris Retzler; Ian Krajbich; Roger Ratcliff; Marios G. Philiastides Attention to brand labels affects, and is affected by, evaluations of product attractiveness Journal Article In: Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, vol. 2, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Yang2024c,When considering whether to purchase consumer products, people consider both the items' attractiveness and their brand labels. Brands may affect the decision process through various mechanisms. For example, brand labels may provide direct support for their paired products, or they may indirectly affect choice outcomes by changing the way that people evaluate and compare their options. To examine these possibilities, we combined computational modeling with an eye-tracking experiment in which subjects made clothing choices with brand labels either present or absent. Subjects' choices were consistent with both the attractiveness of the clothing items and, to a smaller extent, the appeal of the brands. In line with the direct support mechanism, subjects who spent more time looking at the brands were more likely to choose the options with the preferred brands. When a clothing item was more attractive, subjects were more likely to look longer at the associated brand label, but not vice versa. In line with indirect mechanisms, in the presence of brand labels subjects exerted more caution and showed marginally less attentional bias in their choices. This research sheds light on the interplay between gaze and choice in decisions involving brand information, indicating that brands have both direct and indirect influences on choice. |
Tianqi Yang; Yaning Guo; Xianyang Xiuchao Wang; Shengjun Wu; Xianyang Xiuchao Wang; Hui Wang; Xufeng Liu The influence of representational gravity on spatial orientation: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Current Psychology, vol. 43, no. 16, pp. 14485–14493, 2024. @article{Yang2024f,Spatial orientation is a fundamental subject in aviation psychology. The influence of representational gravity can lead to systematic errors during uniform linear motion. However, it remains unclear whether representational gravity during motion can affect spatial orientation. In this study, college students from Xi'an, China were recruited to participate in an experiment based on the Spatial Visualization Dynamic Test. We compared the accuracy of spatial orientation estimation and eye movement indices when the main direction of spatial orientation was in the lower right versus when it was in the upper right. The results revealed that individuals were prone to overestimate the adjustment angle when the main direction of spatial orientation was in the lower right, and underestimate the adjustment angle when the main direction of spatial orientation was in the upper right; the average pupil size was significantly larger when the main direction of spatial orientation was in the lower right than that when the main direction of spatial orientation was in the upper right. In conclusion, spatial orientation in motion was influenced by representational gravity, and when representational gravity aligned with the main direction of spatial orientation, it led to increased cognitive resource consumption. |
Ruyi Yang; Peng Zhao; Liyang Wang; Chenli Feng; Chen Peng; Zhexuan Wang; Yingying Zhang; Minqian Shen; Kaiwen Shi; Shijun Weng; Chunqiong Dong; Fu Zeng; Tianyun Zhang; Xingdong Chen; Shuiyuan Wang; Yiheng Wang; Yuanyuan Luo; Qingyuan Chen; Yuqing Chen; Chunhui Chengyong Jiang; Shanshan Jia; Zhaofei Yu; Jian Liu; Fei Wang; Su Jiang; Wendong Xu; Liang Li; Gang Wang; Xiaofen Mo; Gengfeng Zheng; Aihua Chen; Xingtao Zhou; Chunhui Chengyong Jiang; Yuanzhi Yuan; Biao Yan; Jiayi Zhang Assessment of visual function in blind mice and monkeys with subretinally implanted nanowire arrays as artificial photoreceptors Journal Article In: Nature Biomedical Engineering, vol. 8, no. 8, pp. 1018–1039, 2024. @article{Yang2024e,Retinal prostheses could restore image-forming vision in conditions of photoreceptor degeneration. However, contrast sensitivity and visual acuity are often insufficient. Here we report the performance, in mice and monkeys with induced photoreceptor degeneration, of subretinally implanted gold-nanoparticle-coated titania nanowire arrays providing a spatial resolution of 77.5 μm and a temporal resolution of 3.92 Hz in ex vivo retinas (as determined by patch-clamp recording of retinal ganglion cells). In blind mice, the arrays allowed for the detection of drifting gratings and flashing objects at light-intensity thresholds of 15.70–18.09 μW mm–2, and offered visual acuities of 0.3–0.4 cycles per degree, as determined by recordings of visually evoked potentials and optomotor-response tests. In monkeys, the arrays were stable for 54 weeks, allowed for the detection of a 10-μW mm–2 beam of light (0.5° in beam angle) in visually guided saccade experiments, and induced plastic changes in the primary visual cortex, as indicated by long-term in vivo calcium imaging. Nanomaterials as artificial photoreceptors may ameliorate visual deficits in patients with photoreceptor degeneration. |
Kaihui Yang; Junwei Han; Guangyu Guo; Chaowei Fang; Yingzi Fan; Lechao Cheng; Dingwen Zhang Progressive adapting and pruning: Domain-incremental learning for saliency prediction Journal Article In: ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, vol. 20, no. 8, pp. 1–19, 2024. @article{Yang2024b,Saliency prediction (SAP) plays a crucial role in simulating the visual perception function of human beings. In practical situations, humans can quickly grasp saliency extraction in new image domains. However, current SAP methods mainly concentrate on training models in single domains, which do not effectively handle diverse content and styles present in real-world images. As a result, it would be of great significance if SAP models could efficiently adjust to new image domains. To this end, this article aims to design SAP models that can imitate the incremental learning ability of human beings on multiple image domains and name domain-incremental saliency prediction (DISAP). To make a tradeoff between preventing the forgetting of historical domains and achieving high performance on new domains, we propose a progressively updated domain incremental encoder. This encoder consists of a domain-sharing branch and a domain-specific branch. The domain-sharing branch includes a feature selection mechanism to preserve crucial parameters after fine-tuning the model on each current domain. The remaining parameters are reserved to absorb knowledge from future domains. Furthermore, to capture the unique characteristics of each domain with relatively low computational overhead, we introduce a lightweight design to construct the domain-specific branch, enabling effective adaptation to new domains. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple domain-incremental learning settings formed by four saliency prediction datasets, including Salicon, MIT1003, the art subset of CAT2000, and WebSal. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods significantly. The code is available at https://github.com/KaIi-github/DIL4SAP. |
Jingyi Yang; Elizabeth L. Saionz; Matthew R. Cavanaugh; Berkeley K. Fahrenthold; Michael D. Melnick; Duje Tadin; Farran Briggs; Marisa Carrasco; Krystel R. Huxlin Limited restoration of contrast sensitivity with training after v1 damage in humans Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Yang2024a,Stroke damage to the primary visual cortex (V1) causes severe visual deficits, which benefit from perceptual retraining. However, whereas training with high-contrast stimuli can locally restore orientation and motion direction discrimination abilities at trained locations, it only partially restores luminance contrast sensitivity (CS). Recent work revealed that high-contrast discrimination abilities may be preserved in the blind field of some patients early after stroke. Here, we asked if CS for orientation and direction discrimination is similarly preserved inside the blind field, to what extent, and whether it could benefit from a visual training intervention. Thirteen subacute patients (<3 months post-V1 stroke) and 12 chronic patients (>6 months post-V1 stroke) were pretested and then trained to discriminate either orientation or motion direction of Gabor patches of progressively lower contrasts as their performance improved. At baseline, more subacute than chronic participants could correctly discriminate the orientation of high-contrast Gabors in their blind field, but all failed to perform this task at lower contrasts, even when 10 Hz flicker or motion direction were added. Training improved CS in a greater portion of subacute than that of chronic participants, but no one attained normal CS, even when stimuli contained flicker or motion. We conclude that, unlike the near-complete training-induced restoration of high-contrast visual discrimination abilities, V1 damage in adulthood may severely limit the residual visual system's ability to regain normal CS. Our results support the notion that CS involves different neural substrates and computations than those required for orientation and direction discrimination in V1-damaged visual systems. |
Haojun Yang; Xiaojie Wei; Kailing Huang; Zhongling Wu; Qiong Zhang; Shirui Wen; Quan Wang; Li Feng Features of attention network impairment in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy: Evidence from eye-tracking and electroencephalogram Journal Article In: Epilepsy and Behavior, vol. 157, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Yang2024,Aim: To explore multiple features of attention impairments in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Methods: A total of 93 patients diagnosed with TLE at Xiangya Hospital during May 2022 and December 2022 and 85 healthy controls were included in this study. Participants were asked to complete neuropsychological scales and attention network test (ANT) with recording of eye-tracking and electroencephalogram. Results: All means of evaluation showed impaired attention functions in TLE patients. ANT results showed impaired orienting (p < 0.001) and executive control (p = 0.041) networks. Longer mean first saccade time (p = 0.046) and more total saccadic counts (p = 0.035) were found in eye-tracking results, indicating abnormal alerting and orienting networks. Both alerting, orienting and executive control networks were abnormal, manifesting as decreased amplitudes (N1 & P3, p < 0.001) and extended latency (P3 |
Jumpei Yamashita; Hiroki Terashima; Makoto Yoneya; Kazushi Maruya; Haruo Oishi; Takatsune Kumada Pupil trend reflects suboptimal alertness maintenance over 10 s in vigilance and working memory performance: An exploratory study Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 11, no. 12, pp. 1–17, 2024. @article{Yamashita2024,Maintaining concentration on demanding cognitive tasks, such as vigilance (VG) and working memory (WM) tasks, is crucial for successful task completion. Previous research suggests that internal concentration maintenance fluctuates, potentially declining to suboptimal states, which can influence trial-by-trial performance in these tasks. However, the timescale of such alertness maintenance, as indicated by slow changes in pupil diameter, has not been thoroughly investigated. This study explored whether "pupil trends"-which selectively signal suboptimal tonic alertness maintenance at various timescales-negatively correlate with trial-by-trial performance in VG and WM tasks. Using the psychomotor vigilance task (VG) and the visual-spatial two-back task (WM), we found that human pupil trends lasting over 10 s were significantly higher in trials with longer reaction times, indicating poorer performance, compared with shorter reaction time trials, which indicated better performance. The attention network test further validated that these slow trends reflect suboptimal states related to (tonic) alertness maintenance rather than suboptimal performance specific to VG and WM tasks, which is more associated with (phasic) responses to instantaneous interference. These findings highlight the potential role of detecting and compensating for nonoptimal states in VG and WM performance, significantly beyond the 10 s timescale. Additionally, the findings suggest the possibility of estimating human concentration during various visual tasks, even when rapid pupil changes occur due to luminance fluctuations. |
Leyla Yahyaie; Reza Ebrahimpour; Abbas Koochari Pupil size variations reveal information about hierarchical decision-making processes Journal Article In: Cognitive Computation, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 1049–1060, 2024. @article{Yahyaie2024,Introduction: Pupil size is a well-known indicator of low-level decision-making processes. However, it is unclear whether these involuntary eye data can represent information about the interwoven processes of hierarchical decision-making. In hierarchical decisions, high-level decision-making depends on the process of making low-level decisions, and the result of these interwoven processes is determined by feedback. Therefore, the exact cause of negative feedback is unclear, as it may be the result of low-level, high-level, or both low- and high-level incorrect decisions. In this study, we investigated the characteristics of eye data (pupil diameter) in the interwoven processes of hierarchical decision-making. Methods: We designed a hierarchical psychophysical experiment in which participants were asked to report their low- and high-level decisions and their confidence simultaneously on one of the colored bars. Participants received correct feedback in a trial when reporting both decisions correctly. During the experiment, the eye data of the participants were recorded by an eye-tracking device. Results: Our findings suggest that pupil size conveys information about high-level decisions as well. Furthermore, this study shows that three parameters (introduced in previous studies), negative feedback in successive trials, stimulus strength (uniformity with confidence), and decision urgency, are all represented in pupil size. Conclusion: The findings support the idea that involuntary eye data are influenced by decision-making-related brain activity in decision-making processes and not just visual stimulus features. |
Xiaojuan Xue; Gilles Pourtois Modulatory effects of goal relevance on emotional attention reveal that fear has a distinct value Journal Article In: Cognition and Emotion, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Xue2024a,Threat-related stimuli can capture attention. However, it remains debated whether this capture is automatic or not. To address this question, we compared attentional biases to emotional faces using a dot-probe task (DPT) where emotion was never goal-relevant (Experiment 1) or made directly task-relevant by means of induction trials (Experiments 2–3). Moreover, the contingency between the DPT and induction trials was either partial (Experiment 2) or full (Experiment 3). Eye-tracking was used to ascertain that the emotional cue and the subsequent target were processed with peripheral vision. Experiments 1 and 2 both showed that negative faces captured attention, with faster target processing when it appeared on the same side as the preceding fearful face (i.e. fear-valid trials) compared to the opposite side where the neutral face was shown (i.e. fear-invalid trials), but also when it appeared on the side of the preceding neutral face (i.e. happy-invalid trials) compared to the happy face (i.e. happy-valid trials). Importantly, this preferential spatial orienting to negative emotion was not observed in Experiment 3, where the goal relevance of emotion was high. However, in that experiment, fearful faces produced a specific attentional bias during the DPT, which was mostly driven by the induction trials themselves. |
Shutian Xue; Antonio Fernández; Marisa Carrasco Featural representation and internal noise underlie the eccentricity effect in contrast sensitivity Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 13, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Xue2024,Human visual performance for basic visual dimensions (e.g., contrast sensitivity and acuity) peaks at the fovea and decreases with eccentricity. The eccentricity effect is related to the larger visual cortical surface area corresponding to the fovea, but it is unknown if differential feature tuning contributes to this eccentricity effect. Here, we investigated two system-level computations underlying the eccentricity effect: featural representation (tuning) and internal noise. Observers (both sexes) detected a Gabor embedded in filtered white noise which appeared at the fovea or one of four perifoveal locations. We used psychophysical reverse correlation to estimate the weights assigned by the visual system to a range of orientations and spatial frequencies (SFs) in noisy stimuli, which are conventionally interpreted as perceptual sensitivity to the corresponding features. We found higher sensitivity to task-relevant orientations and SFs at the fovea than that at the perifovea, and no difference in selectivity for either orientation or SF. Concurrently, we measured response consistency using a double-pass method, which allowed us to infer the level of internal noise by implementing a noisy observer model. We found lower internal noise at the fovea than that at the perifovea. Finally, individual variability in contrast sensitivity correlated with sensitivity to and selectivity for task-relevant features as well as with internal noise. Moreover, the behavioral eccentricity effect mainly reflects the foveal advantage in orientation sensitivity compared with other computations. These findings suggest that the eccentricity effect stems from a better representation of task-relevant features and lower internal noise at the fovea than that at the perifovea. |