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2024 |
Alexandra M. Spaeth; Stephan Koenig; Jonas Everaert; Julia A. Glombiewski; Tobias Kube Are depressive symptoms linked to a reduced pupillary response to novel positive information?—An eye tracking proof-of-concept study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Spaeth2024,Introduction: Depressive symptoms have been linked to difficulties in revising established negative beliefs in response to novel positive information. Recent predictive processing accounts have suggested that this bias in belief updating may be related to a blunted processing of positive prediction errors at the neural level. In this proof-of-concept study, pupil dilation in response to unexpected positive emotional information was examined as a psychophysiological marker of an attenuated processing of positive prediction errors associated with depressive symptoms. Methods: Participants (N = 34) completed a modified version of the emotional Bias Against Disconfirmatory Evidence (BADE) task in which scenarios initially suggest negative interpretations that are later either confirmed or disconfirmed by additional information. Pupil dilation in response to the confirmatory and disconfirmatory information was recorded. Results: Behavioral results showed that depressive symptoms were related to difficulties in revising negative interpretations despite disconfirmatory positive information. The eye tracking results pointed to a reduced pupil response to unexpected positive information among people with elevated depressive symptoms. Discussion: Altogether, the present study demonstrates that the adapted emotional BADE task can be appropriate for examining psychophysiological aspects such as changes in pupil size along with behavioral responses. Furthermore, the results suggest that depression may be characterized by deviations in both behavioral (i.e., reduced updating of negative beliefs) and psychophysiological (i.e., decreased pupil dilation) responses to unexpected positive information. Future work should focus on a larger sample including clinically depressed patients to further explore these findings. |
Eelke Spaak; Floortje G. Bouwkamp; Floris P. Lang Perceptual foundation and extension to phase tagging for rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) Eelke Journal Article In: Imaging Neuroscience, vol. 2, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Spaak2024,Recent years have seen the emergence of a visual stimulation protocol called Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging (RIFT) in cognitive neuroscience. In RIFT experiments, visual stimuli are presented at a rapidly and sinusoidally oscillating luminance, using high refresh rate projection equipment. Such stimuli result in strong steady-state responses in visual cortex, measurable extracranially using EEG or MEG. The high signal-to-noise ratio of these neural signals, combined with the alleged invisibility of the manipulation, make RIFT a potentially promising technique to study the neural basis of visual processing. In this study, we set out to resolve two fundamental, yet still outstanding, issues regarding RIFT; as well as to open up a new avenue for taking RIFT beyond frequency tagging per se. First, we provide robust evidence that RIFT is indeed subjectively undetectable, going beyond previous anecdotal reports. Second, we demonstrate that full-amplitude luminance or contrast manipulation offer the best tagging results. Third and finally, we demonstrate that, in addition to frequency tagging, phase tagging can reliably be used in RIFT studies, opening up new avenues for constructing RIFT experiments. Together, this provides a solid foundation for using RIFT in visual cognitive neuroscience. |
Teresa Sousa; Alexandre Sayal; João V. Duarte; Gabriel N. Costa; Miguel Castelo-Branco A human cortical adaptive mutual inhibition circuit underlying competition for perceptual decision and repetition suppression reversal Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 285, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Sousa2024,A model based on inhibitory coupling has been proposed to explain perceptual oscillations. This 'adapting reciprocal inhibition' model postulates that it is the strength of inhibitory coupling that determines the fate of competition between percepts. Here, we used an fMRI-based adaptation technique to reveal the influence of neighboring neuronal populations, such as reciprocal inhibition, in motion-selective hMT+/V5. If reciprocal inhibition exists in this region, the following predictions should hold: 1. stimulus-driven response would not simply decrease, as predicted by simple repetition-suppression of neuronal populations, but instead, increase due to the activity from adjacent populations; 2. perceptual decision involving competing representations, should reflect decreased reciprocal inhibition by adaptation; 3. neural activity for the competing percept should also later on increase upon adaptation. Our results confirm these three predictions, showing that a model of perceptual decision based on adapting reciprocal inhibition holds true. Finally, they also show that the net effect of the well-known repetition suppression phenomenon can be reversed by this mechanism. |
Yishai Sorek; Tal Nahari; Yoni Pertzov Artistic expertise and free viewing of modern art Journal Article In: Art and Perception, vol. 12, pp. 346–379, 2024. @article{Sorek2024,Visual art and vision science had long been intertwined, both revealing and sharing countless insights on human vision over their respective histories. Deep artistic experiences and extensive artistic knowledge are often associated with "artistic expertise,"which in vision science traditionally echoes visual expertise from other professional domains (e.g., medicine, sports, driving). However, unlike other visual domains, artistic experiences involve more spontaneous and imaginative aspects, and no explicit success parameters. We hypothesized that viewing of artworks would lead to nuanced effects of expertise that may differ from other types of visual expertise. In our study, art experts and non-experts observed modern paintings and were free to view them within a relatively long time window. Higher expertise in art was associated with viewing modern paintings for significantly longer durations, and liking the paintings significantly more. However, contrary to other visual expertise studies, eye movement patterns exhibited little to no effect of artistic expertise. Based on these findings, we suggest a recontextualization of visual artistic expertise and discuss potential research directions, alongside methodological challenges in the experimental design. |
Yingjie Song; Zhi Liu; Gongyang Li; Jiawei Xie; Qiang Wu; Dan Zeng; Lihua Xu; Tianhong Zhang; Jijun Wang EMS: A large-scale eye movement dataset, benchmark, and new model for schizophrenia recognition Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Song2024,Schizophrenia (SZ) is a common and disabling mental illness, and most patients encounter cognitive deficits. The eye-tracking technology has been increasingly used to characterize cognitive deficits for its reasonable time and economic costs. However, there is no large-scale and publicly available eye movement dataset and benchmark for SZ recognition. To address these issues, we release a large-scale Eye Movement dataset for SZ recognition (EMS), which consists of eye movement data from 104 schizophrenics and 104 healthy controls (HCs) based on the free-viewing paradigm with 100 stimuli. We also conduct the first comprehensive benchmark, which has been absent for a long time in this field, to compare the related 13 psychosis recognition methods using six metrics. Besides, we propose a novel mean-shift-based network (MSNet) for eye movement-based SZ recognition, which elaborately combines the mean shift algorithm with convolution to extract the cluster center as the subject feature. In MSNet, first, a stimulus feature branch (SFB) is adopted to enhance each stimulus feature with similar information from all stimulus features, and then, the cluster center branch (CCB) is utilized to generate the cluster center as subject feature and update it by the mean shift vector. The performance of our MSNet is superior to prior contenders, thus, it can act as a powerful baseline to advance subsequent study. To pave the road in this research field, the EMS dataset, the benchmark results, and the code of MSNet are publicly available at https://github.com/YingjieSong1/EMS. |
Olga Solaja; Davide Crepaldi The role of morphology in novel word learning: A registered report Journal Article In: Royal Society Open Science, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 1–30, 2024. @article{Solaja2024,The majority of the new words that we learn every day as adults are morphologically complex; yet, we do not know much about the role of morphology in novel word learning. In this study, we tackle this issue by comparing the learning of: (i) suffixed novel words (e.g. flibness); (ii) novel words that end in non-morphological, but frequent letter chunks (e.g. fliban); and (iii) novel words with non-morphological, low-frequency endings (e.g. flibov). Words are learned incidentally through sentence reading, while the participants' eye movements are monitored. We show that morphology has a facilitatory role compared with the other two types of novel words, both during learning and in a post-learning recognition memory task. We also showed that participants attributed meaning to word parts (if flibness is a state of happiness, then flib must mean happy), but this process was not specifically triggered by the presence of a suffix (flib must also mean happy in fliban and flibov), thus suggesting that the brain tends to assume similar meanings for similar words and word parts. |
Maverick E. Smith; Lester C. Loschky; Heather R. Bailey Eye movements and event segmentation: Eye movements reveal age-related differences in event model updating Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 180–187, 2024. @article{Smith2024b,People spontaneously segment continuous ongoing actions into sequences of events. Prior research found that gaze similarity and pupil dilation increase at event boundaries and that older adults segmentmore idiosyncratically than do young adults.We used eye tracking to explore age-related differences in gaze similarity (i.e., the extent to which individuals look at the same places at the same time as others) and pupil dilation at event boundaries. Older and young adults watched naturalistic videos of actors performing everyday activities while we tracked their eye movements. Afterward, they segmented the videos into subevents. Replicating prior work, we found that pupil size and gaze similarity increased at event boundaries. Thus, there were fewer individual differences in eye position at boundaries.We also found that young adults had higher gaze similarity than older adults throughout an entire video and at event boundaries. This study is the first to show that age-related differences in how people parse continuous everyday activities into events may be partially explained by individual differences in gaze patterns. Those who segment less normatively may do so because they fixate less normative regions. Results have implications for future interventions designed to improve encoding in older adults. |
Eleanor S. Smith; Trevor J. Crawford The inhibitory effect of a recent distractor: singleton vs. multiple distractors Journal Article In: Experimental Brain Research, vol. 242, no. 7, pp. 1745–1759, 2024. @article{Smith2024,In the complex interplay between sensory and cognitive processes, the brain must sift through a flood of sensory data to pinpoint relevant signals. This selective mechanism is crucial for the effective control of behaviour, by allowing organisms to focus on important tasks and blocking out distractions. The Inhibition of a Recent Distractor (IRD) Task examines this selection process by exploring how inhibiting distractors influences subsequent eye movements towards an object in the visual environment. In a series of experiments, research by Crawford et al. (2005a) demonstrated a delayed response to a target appearing at the location that was previously occupied by a distractor, demonstrating a legacy inhibition exerted by the distractor on the spatial location of the upcoming target. This study aimed to replicate this effect and to investigate any potential constraints when multiple distractors are presented. Exploring whether the effect is observed in more ecologically relevant scenarios with multiple distractors is crucial for assessing the extent to which it can be applied to a broader range of environments. Experiment 1 successfully replicated the effect, showing a significant IRD effect only with a single distractor. Experiments 2–5 explored a number of possible explanations for this phenomenon. |
Ielka Van Der Sluis; Hanna Mellema A recipe for success: The design, use, and effectiveness of multimodal online baking instructions Journal Article In: Multimodality & Society, pp. 1–70, 2024. @article{Sluis2024,This paper presents three studies on the design, use and effectiveness of multimodal online baking blogs that present cookie recipes in two forms: illustrated step-by-step Instructions with Pictures and printable text-only Recipe Cards. Firstly, a corpus study describes how authors combine text and pictures in 15 blogs. Secondly, an eye-tracking study was conducted to explore how 12 participants read and evaluate baking blogs and the Instructions with Pictures in them. Finally, a user study was conducted to explore how 4 teams of participants execute and evaluate either an Instruction with Pictures or a Recipe Card of a typical baking blog. Questionnaire data on the readers' and users' judgments of the comprehensibility, design and their (expected) performance of the instructions, as well as eye-tracker data and videos capturing the reading and baking practices were collected and analysed. Thus, the triangulation of exploratory studies displays how different research methodologies inform the relevance and evaluation of particular characteristics of multimodal presentations given the readers' and users' judgments as well as through objective measurements that provide complementary insights on multimodal baking instructions in terms of multimodal information presen- tation, reading strategies and situated use. wibble99 |
Oindrila Sinha; Taylor Rosenquist; Alyssa Fedorshak; John Kpankpa; Eliza Albenze; Cedrick T. Bonnet; Matteo Bertucco; Isaac Kurtzer; Tarkeshwar Singh Predictive posture stabilization before contact with moving objects: Equivalence of smooth pursuit tracking and peripheral vision Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 132, no. 3, pp. 695–709, 2024. @article{Sinha2024,Postural stabilization is essential to effectively interact with our environment. Humans preemptively adjust their posture to counteract impending disturbances, such as those encountered during interactions with moving objects, a phenomenon known as anticipatory postural adjustments (APAs). APAs are thought to be influenced by predictive models that incorporate object motion via retinal motion and extraretinal signals. Building on our previous work that examined APAs in relation to the perceived momentum of moving objects, here we explored the impact of object motion within different visual field sectors on the human capacity to anticipate motion and prepare APAs for contact between virtual moving objects and the limb. Participants interacted with objects moving toward them under different gaze conditions. In one condition, participants fixated on either a central point (central fixation) or left-right of the moving object (peripheral fixation), whereas in another, they followed the moving object with smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEMs). We found that APAs had the smallest magnitude in the central fixation condition and that no notable differences in APAs were apparent between the SPEM and peripheral fixation conditions. This suggests that the visual system can accurately perceive motion of objects in peripheral vision for posture stabilization. Using Bayesian model averaging, we also evaluated the contribution of different gaze variables, such as eye velocity and gain (ratio of eye and object velocity) and showed that both eye velocity and gain signals were significant predictors of APAs. Taken together, our study underscores the roles of oculomotor signals in the modulation of APAs. |
Sepehr Sima; Mehdi Sanayei Same principle, but different computations in representing time and space Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 18, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Sima2024,Time and space are two intertwined contexts that frame our cognition of the world and have shared mechanisms. A well-known theory on this case is “A Theory of Magnitude (ATOM)” which states that the perception of these two domains shares common mechanisms. However, evidence regarding shared computations of time and space is intermixed. To investigate this issue, we asked human subjects to reproduce time and distance intervals with saccadic eye movements in similarly designed tasks. We applied an observer model to both modalities and found underlying differences in the processing of time and space. While time and space computations are both probabilistic, adding priors to space perception minimally improved model performance, as opposed to time perception which was consistently better explained by Bayesian computations. We also showed that while both measurement and motor variability were smaller in distance than time reproduction, only the motor variability was correlated between them, as both tasks used saccadic eye movements for response. Our results suggest that time and space perception abide by the same algorithm but have different computational properties. |
Jack W. Silcox; Karen Bennett; Allyson Copeland; Sarah Hargus Ferguson; Brennan R. Payne The costs (and benefits?) of effortful listening for older adults: Insights from simultaneous electrophysiology, pupillometry, and memory Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 997–1020, 2024. @article{Silcox2024,Although the impact of acoustic challenge on speech processing and memory increases as a person ages, older adults may engage in strategies that help them compensate for these demands. In the current preregistered study, older adults (n = 48) listened to sentences—presented in quiet or in noise—that were high constraint with either expected or unexpected endings or were low constraint with unexpected endings. Pupillometry and EEG were simultaneously recorded, and subsequent sentence recognition and word recall were measured. Like young adults in prior work, we found that noise led to increases in pupil size, delayed and reduced ERP responses, and decreased recall for unexpected words. However, in contrast to prior work in young adults where a larger pupillary response predicted a recovery of the N400 at the cost of poorer memory performance in noise, older adults did not show an associated recovery of the N400 despite decreased memory performance. Instead, we found that in quiet, increases in pupil size were associated with delays in N400 onset latencies and increased recognition memory performance. In conclusion, we found that transient variation in pupil-linked arousal predicted trade-offs between real-time lexical processing and memory that emerged at lower levels of task demand in aging. Moreover, with increased acoustic challenge, older adults still exhibited costs associated with transient increases in arousal without the corresponding benefits. |
James Siklos-Whillans; Roxane J. Itier Effects of inversion and fixation location on the processing of face and house stimuli – a mass univariate analysis Journal Article In: Brain Topography, vol. 37, pp. 972–992, 2024. @article{SiklosWhillans2024,Most Event Related Potential studies investigating the time course of visual processing have focused mainly on the N170 component. Stimulus orientation affects the N170 amplitude for faces but not for objects, a finding interpreted as reflecting holistic/configural processing for faces and featural processing for objects. Furthermore, while recent studies suggest where on the face people fixate impacts the N170, fixation location effects have not been investigated in objects. A data-driven mass univariate analysis (all time points and electrodes) was used to investigate the time course of inversion and fixation location effects on the neural processing of faces and houses. Strong and widespread orientation effects were found for both faces and houses, from 100-350ms post-stimulus onset, including P1 and N170 components, and later, a finding arguing against a lack of holistic processing for houses. While no clear fixation effect was found for houses, fixation location strongly impacted face processing early, reflecting retinotopic mapping around the C2 and P1 components, and during the N170-P2 interval. Face inversion effects were also largest for nasion fixation around 120ms. The results support the view that facial feature integration (1) depends on which feature is being fixated and where the other features are situated in the visual field, (2) occurs maximally during the P1-N170 interval when fixation is on the nasion and (3) continues past 200ms, suggesting the N170 peak, where weak effects were found, might be an inflexion point between processes rather than the end of a feature integration into a whole process. |
Alayna Shoenfelt; Didem Pehlivanoglu; Tian Lin; Maryam Ziaei; David Feifel; Natalie C. Ebner Effects of chronic intranasal oxytocin on visual attention to faces vs. natural scenes in older adults Journal Article In: Psychoneuroendocrinology, vol. 164, pp. 1–7, 2024. @article{Shoenfelt2024,Aging is associated with changes in face processing, including desensitization to face cues like gaze direction and an attentional preference to faces with positive over negative emotional valence. A parallel line of research has shown that acute administration of oxytocin (OT) increases visual attention to social stimuli such as human faces. The current study examined effects of chronic OT administration among older adults on fixation duration to faces that varied in emotional expression, gaze direction, age, and sex. One hundred and twelve generally healthy older adults (aged 55–95 years) underwent a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, between-subject clinical trial in which they self-administered either OT or placebo (P) intranasally twice a day for 4 weeks. The behavioral task involved rating the trustworthiness of faces (i.e., social stimuli) and natural scenes (i.e., non-social control stimuli) during eye tracking and was conducted before and after the intervention. Fixation duration to both the faces and the natural scenes declined from pre- to post-intervention, however this decline was less pronounced among older adults in the OT compared to the P group for faces but not scenes. Further, face cues (emotional expression, gaze direction, age, sex) did not moderate the treatment effect. This study provides first evidence that chronic intranasal OT maintains salience of social cues over time in older adults, perhaps buffering effects of habituation. These findings enhance understanding of OT effects on social cognition among older adults, and would benefit from follow up with a young adult comparison group to directly speak to specificity of observed effects to older adults and reflection of the aging process. |
Mustafa Shirzad; James Van Riesen; Nikan Behboodpour; Matthew Heath 10-min exposure to a 2.5% hypercapnic environment increases cerebral blood blow but does not impact executive function Journal Article In: Life Sciences in Space Research, vol. 40, pp. 143–150, 2024. @article{Shirzad2024,Space travel and exploration are associated with increased ambient CO2 (i.e., a hypercapnic environment). Some work reported that the physiological changes (e.g., increased cerebral blood flow [CBF]) associated with a chronic hypercapnic environment contributes to a “space fog” that adversely impacts cognition and psychomotor performance, whereas other work reported no change or a positive change. Here, we employed the antisaccade task to evaluate whether transient exposure to a hypercapnic environment influences top-down executive function (EF). Antisaccades require a goal-directed eye movement mirror-symmetrical to a target and are an ideal tool for identifying subtle EF changes. Healthy young adults (aged 19–25 years) performed blocks of antisaccade trials prior to (i.e., pre-intervention), during (i.e., concurrent) and after (i.e., post-intervention) 10-min of breathing factional inspired CO2 (FiCO2) of 2.5% (i.e., hypercapnic condition) and during a normocapnic (i.e., control) condition. In both conditions, CBF, ventilatory and cardiorespiratory responses were measured. Results showed that the hypercapnic condition increased CBF, ventilation and end-tidal CO2 and thus demonstrated an expected physiological adaptation to increased FiCO2. Notably, however, null hypothesis and equivalence tests indicated that concurrent and post-intervention antisaccade reaction times were refractory to the hypercapnic environment; that is, transient exposure to a FiCO2 of 2.5% did not produce a real-time or lingering influence on an oculomotor-based measure of EF. Accordingly, results provide a framework that – in part – establishes the FiCO2 percentage and timeline by which high-level EF can be maintained. Future work will explore CBF and EF dynamics during chronic hypercapnic exposure as more direct proxy for the challenges of space flight and exploration. |
Dongping Shi; Qing Yu Distinct neural signatures underlying information maintenance and manipulation in working memory Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Shi2024a,Previous working memory research has demonstrated robust stimulus representations during memory maintenance in both voltage and alpha-band activity in electroencephalography. However, the exact functions of these 2 neural signatures have remained controversial. Here we systematically investigated their respective contributions to memory manipulation. Human participants either maintained a previously seen spatial location, or manipulated the location following a mental rotation cue over a delay. Using multivariate decoding, we observed robust location representations in low-frequency voltage and alpha-band oscillatory activity with distinct spatiotemporal dynamics: location representations were most evident in posterior channels in alpha-band activity, but were most prominent in the more anterior, central channels in voltage signals. Moreover, the temporal emergence of manipulated representation in central voltage preceded that in posterior alpha-band activity, suggesting that voltage might carry stimulus-specific source signals originated internally from anterior cortex, whereas alpha-band activity might ref lect feedback signals in posterior cortex received from higher-order cortex. Lastly, while location representations in both signals were coded in a low-dimensional neural subspace, location representation in central voltage was higher-dimensional and underwent a representational transformation that exclusively predicted memory behavior. Together, these results highlight the crucial role of central voltage in working memory, and support functional distinctions between voltage and alpha-band activity. |
Danni Shi; Andrea Révész; Ana Pellicer-Sánchez In: Language Learning, pp. 1–33, 2024. @article{Shi2024,This study investigated how repeating a video-lecture-based task affects second language (L2) learners' processing and incidental acquisition of technical vocabulary as well as the relationship between processing and lexical gains. The participants were 75 Chinese learners of L2 English. Thirty participants performed the task once (control group), whereas another 30 participants did the same task three times (repetition group). The two groups then completed unannounced vocabulary posttests. The remaining participants engaged in stimulated recall after performing the task once, twice, or three times. The repetition group made greater gains in vocabulary knowledge than the control group, and the repetition group's visual attention to the target words declined during repeated viewing. The amount of attention to the target words emerged as a predictor of delayed meaning recall, with task repetition decreasing the strength of this relationship. Stimulated-recall participants repeating the task reported increased awareness of specific aspects of the target words. |
Viral Sheth; Rebecca J. McLean; Zhanhan Tu; Sarim Ather; Irene Gottlob; Frank A. Proudlock Visual field deficits in albinism in comparison to idiopathic infantile nystagmus Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 65, no. 2, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Sheth2024,PURPOSE. This is the first systematic comparison of visual field (VF) deficits in people with albinism (PwA) and idiopathic infantile nystagmus (PwIIN) using static perimetry. We also compare best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) and optical coherence tomography measures of the fovea, parafovea, and circumpapillary retinal nerve fiber layer in PwA. METHODS. VF testing was performed on 62 PwA and 36 PwIIN using a Humphrey Field Analyzer (SITA FAST 24-2). Mean detection thresholds for each eye were calculated, along with quadrants and central measures. Retinal layers were manually segmented in the macular region. RESULTS. Mean detection thresholds were significantly lower than normative values for PwA (−3.10 ± 1.67 dB, P << 0.0001) and PwIIN (−1.70 ± 1.54 dB, P < 0.0001). Mean detection thresholds were significantly lower in PwA compared to PwIIN (P < 0.0001) and significantly worse for left compared to right eyes in PwA (P = 0.0002) but not in PwIIN (P = 0.37). In PwA, the superior nasal VF was significantly worse than other quadrants (P < 0.05). PwIIN appeared to show a mild relative arcuate scotoma. In PwA, central detection thresholds were correlated with foveal changes in the inner and outer retina. VF was strongly correlated to BCVA in both groups. CONCLUSIONS. Clear peripheral and central VF deficits exist in PwA and PwIIN, and static VF results need to be interpreted with caution clinically. Since PwA exhibit considerably lower detection thresholds compared to PwIIN, VF defects are unlikely to be due to nystagmus in PwA. In addition to horizontal VF asymmetry, PwA exhibit both vertical and interocular asymmetries, which needs further exploration. |
Orit Shdeour; Noam Tal-Perry; Moshe Glickman; Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg Exposure to temporal variability promotes subsequent adaptation to new temporal regularities Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 244, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Shdeour2024,Noise is intuitively thought to interfere with perceptual learning; However, human and machine learning studies suggest that, in certain contexts, variability may reduce overfitting and improve generalizability. Whereas previous studies have examined the effects of variability in learned stimuli or tasks, it is hitherto unknown what are the effects of variability in the temporal environment. Here, we examined this question in two groups of adult participants (N=40) presented with visual targets at either random or fixed temporal routines and then tested on the same type of targets at a new nearly-fixed temporal routine. Findings reveal that participants of the random group performed better and adapted quicker following a change in the timing routine, relative to participants of the fixed group. Corroborated with eye tracking and computational modeling, these findings suggest that prior exposure to temporal randomness promotes the formation of new temporal expectations and enhances generalizability in a dynamic environment. We conclude that noise plays an important role in promotion perceptual learning in the temporal domain: rather than interfering with the formation of temporal expectations, noise enhances them. This counterintuitive effect is hypothesized to be achieved through eliminating overfitting and promoting generalizability. |
Nino Sharvashidze; Matteo Valsecchi; Alexander C. Schütz Transsaccadic perception of changes in object regularity Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 24, no. 13, pp. 1–21, 2024. @article{Sharvashidze2024a,The visual system compensates for differences between peripheral and foveal vision using different mechanisms. Although peripheral vision is characterized by higher spatial uncertainty and lower resolution than foveal vision, observers reported objects to be less distorted and less blurry in the periphery than the fovea in a visual matching task during fixation (Valsecchi et al., 2018). Here, we asked whether a similar overcompensation could be found across saccadic eye movements and whether it would bias the detection of transsaccadic changes in object regularity. The blur and distortion levels of simple geometric shapes were manipulated in the Eidolons algorithm (Koenderink et al., 2017). In an appearance discrimination task, participants had to judge the appearance of blur (experiment 1) and distortion (experiment 2) separately before and after a saccade. Objects appeared less blurry before a saccade (in the periphery) than after a saccade (in the fovea). No differences were found in the appearance of distortion. In a change discrimination task, participants had to judge if blur (experiment 1) and distortion (experiment 2) either increased or decreased during a saccade. Overall, they showed a tendency to report an increase in both blur and distortion across saccades. The precision of the responses was improved by a 200-ms postsaccadic blank. Results from the change discrimination task of both experiments suggest that a transsaccadic decrease in regularity is more visible, compared to an increase in regularity. In line with the previous study that reported a peripheral overcompensation in the visual matching task, we found a similar mechanism, exhibiting a phenomenological sharpening of blurry edges before a saccade. These results generalize peripheral–foveal differences observed during fixation to the here tested dynamic, transsaccadic conditions where they contribute to biases in transsaccadic change detection. |
Nino Sharvashidze; Carolin Hübner; Alexander C. Schütz A bias in transsaccadic perception of spatial frequency changes Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 222, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Sharvashidze2024,Visual processing differs between the foveal and peripheral visual field. These differences can lead to different appearances of objects in the periphery and the fovea, posing a challenge to perception across saccades. Differences in the appearance of visual features between the peripheral and foveal visual field may bias change discrimination across saccades. Previously it has been reported that spatial frequency (SF) appears higher in the periphery compared to the fovea (Davis et al., 1987). In this study, we investigated the visual appearance of SF before and after a saccade and the discrimination of SF changes during saccades. In addition, we tested the contributions of pre- and postsaccadic information to change discrimination performance. In the first experiment, we found no differences in the appearance of SF before and after a saccade. However, participants showed a clear bias to report SF increases. Interestingly, a 200-ms postsaccadic blank improved the precision of the responses but did not affect the bias. In the second experiment, participants showed lower thresholds for SF increases than for decreases, suggesting that the bias in the first experiment was not just a response bias. Finally, we asked participants to discriminate the SF of stimuli presented before a saccade. Thresholds in the presaccadic discrimination task were lower than in the change discrimination task, suggesting that transsaccadic change discrimination is not merely limited by presaccadic discrimination in the periphery. The change direction bias might stem from more effective masking or overwriting of the presaccadic stimulus by the postsaccadic low SF stimulus. |
Elia Shahbazi; Timothy Ma; Martin Pernuš; Walter Scheirer; Arash Afraz Perceptography unveils the causal contribution of inferior temporal cortex to visual perception Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Shahbazi2024,Neurons in the inferotemporal (IT) cortex respond selectively to complex visual features, implying their role in object perception. However, perception is subjective and cannot be read out from neural responses; thus, bridging the causal gap between neural activity and perception demands independent characterization of perception. Historically, though, the complexity of the perceptual alterations induced by artificial stimulation of IT cortex has rendered them impossible to quantify. To address this old problem, we tasked male macaque monkeys to detect and report optical impulses delivered to their IT cortex. Combining machine learning with high-throughput behavioral optogenetics, we generated complex and highly specific images that were hard for the animal to distinguish from the state of being cortically stimulated. These images, named “perceptograms” for the first time, reveal and depict the contents of the complex hallucinatory percepts induced by local neural perturbation in IT cortex. Furthermore, we found that the nature and magnitude of these hallucinations highly depend on concurrent visual input, stimulation location, and intensity. Objective characterization of stimulation-induced perceptual events opens the door to developing a mechanistic theory of visual perception. Further, it enables us to make better visual prosthetic devices and gain a greater understanding of visual hallucinations in mental disorders. |
Sheer Shabat; Ayelet McKyton; Deena Elul; Devora Marks Ohana; Einav Nahmany; Eyal Banin; Netta Levin Intact high-level visual functions in congenital rod-monochromacy Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 18, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Shabat2024,High-level visual functions such as reading and face recognition rely on global processes, which are often insensitive to high spatial frequencies. However, it is unknown whether a sharp cone signal is necessary for the development of these skills or whether a blurry rod signal is sufficient. CNGA3/B3-achromatopsia is a congenital disease stemming from cone dysfunction, leading to rod-only vision characterized by nystagmus, impaired acuity, and complete color blindness. We tested reading and face recognition in CNGA3/B3-achromatopsia patients (ACHM) to determine whether a rod signal is sufficient for these skills to develop. We tested 10 ACHM and 10 controls in three experiments under dark and light conditions. Initially, we evaluated acuity along the eccentricity axis. Later, we tested reading speed and upright/inverted face matching accuracy while tracking participants' eye movements. Given that ACHM patients' acuity under light conditions resembled that of controls under dark conditions, we selected these conditions for comparison. Remarkably, ACHM reading speed, face recognition abilities, and susceptibility to face inversion were not inferior to those of controls. Additionally, ACHM patients exhibited similar eye movements to controls, focusing their attention on specific areas of words and faces that indicate expertise. Despite the evident low-level limitations, ACHM patients demonstrated notable high-level visual skills, suggesting that rod-only vision is sufficient for the development of proficient reading and face recognition. These findings not only corroborate empirical evidence for high-level vision models but also enrich the discussion regarding the reasons for high-level deficits observed in individuals who have gained sight late in life. |
Roni Setton; Jordana S. Wynn; Daniel L. Schacter Peering into the future: Eye movements predict neural repetition effects during episodic simulation Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 197, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Setton2024,Imagining future scenarios involves recombining different elements of past experiences into a coherent event, a process broadly supported by the brain's default network. Prior work suggests that distinct brain regions may contribute to the inclusion of different simulation features. Here we examine how activity in these brain regions relates to the vividness of future simulations. Thirty-four healthy young adults imagined future events with familiar people and locations in a two-part study involving a repetition suppression paradigm. First, participants imagined events while their eyes were tracked during a behavioral session. Immediately after, participants imagined events during MRI scanning. The events to be imagined were manipulated such that some were identical to those imagined in the behavioral session while others involved new locations, new people, or both. In this way, we could examine how self-report ratings and eye movements predict brain activity during simulation along with specific simulation features. Vividness ratings were negatively correlated with eye movements, in contrast to an often-observed positive relationship with past recollection. Moreover, fewer eye movements predicted greater involvement of the hippocampus during simulation, an effect specific to location features. Our findings suggest that eye movements may facilitate scene construction for future thinking, lending support to frameworks that spatial information forms the foundation of episodic simulation. |
Ulrike Senftleben; Martin Schoemann; Stefan Scherbaum Choice repetition bias in intertemporal choice: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 1–17, 2024. @article{Senftleben2024a,Intertemporal choices (i.e., the choice between a sooner available but smaller reward and a later available but larger reward) were initially thought to reflect stable preferences for immediate or delayed rewards. However, recently, it has been shown that intertemporal choices are influenced by factors such as context variables and attentional processes. Here, we investigate if another factor, the choice repetition bias, affects decision making and attentional processes in intertemporal choice. The choice repetition bias is characterized by the tendency to repeat previous choices and to be slower when switching to an alternative choice. In a series of two experiments (including a preregistered, eye-tracking study), we find that the choice repetition bias exists in intertemporal choice. We also find tentative support for an early attentional bias towards the favored attribute dimension of the previous choice; however, this effect disappears when taking the whole decision process into account. This finding raises interesting questions about the cognitive processes underlying the choice repetition bias. In addition, we successfully replicate other attentional effects from the intertemporal choice literature (e.g., more fixations on monetary dimension, gaze cascade effect). |
Ulrike Senftleben; Johanna Kruse; Stefan Scherbaum; Franziska M. Korb You eat with your eyes: Framing of food choice options affects decision conflict and visual attention in food choice task Journal Article In: Nutrients, vol. 16, no. 19, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Senftleben2024,Background/Objectives: Frequent poor dietary choices can have significant consequences. To understand the underlying decision-making processes, most food choice tasks present a binary choice between a tasty but less healthy option and a healthy but less tasty option. It is assumed that people come to a decision by trading off the respective health and taste values. However, it is unclear whether and to what extent food choice goes beyond this. Methods: We use a novel eye-tracking experiment where we compare a typical food choice task (image condition) with an abstract value-based decision-making task using pre-matched percentages of health and taste (text condition; e.g., 10% healthy and 80% tasty) in 78 participants. Results: We find a higher frequency of unhealthy choices and reduced response times in the image condition compared to the text condition, suggesting more impulsive decision making. The eye-tracking analysis shows that, in the text condition, the item corresponding to the subsequent choice receives more attention than the alternative option, whereas in the image condition this only applies to the healthy item. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that decision-making in typical food choice tasks goes beyond a mere value-based trade-off. These differences could be due to the involvement of different attentional processes in typical food choice tasks or due to the modality of stimulus presentation. These results could help to understand why people prefer tasty but unhealthy food options even when health is important to them. |
Yelda Semizer; Dian Yu; Ruth Rosenholtz Peripheral vision and crowding in mental maze-solving Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Semizer2024,Solving a maze effectively relies on both perception and cognition. Studying maze-solving behavior contributes to our knowledge about these important processes. Through psychophysical experiments and modeling simulations, we examine the role of peripheral vision, specifically visual crowding in the periphery, in mental maze-solving. Experiment 1 measured gaze patterns while varying maze complexity, revealing a direct relationship between visual complexity and maze-solving efficiency. Simulations of the maze-solving task using a peripheral vision model confirmed the observed crowding effects while making an intriguing prediction that saccades provide a conservative measure of how far ahead observers can perceive the path. Experiment 2 confirms that observers can judge whether a point lies on the path at considerably greater distances than their average saccade. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that peripheral vision plays a key role in mental maze-solving. |
Janahan Selvanayagam; Kevin D. Johnston; Stefan Everling Laminar dynamics of target selection in the posterior parietal cortex of the common marmoset Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 21, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Selvanayagam2024,The lateral intraparietal area (LIP) plays a crucial role in target selection and attention in primates, but the laminar microcircuitry of this region is largely unknown. To address this, we used ultra-high density laminar electrophysiology with Neuropixels probes to record neural activity in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) of two adult marmosets while they performed a simple visual target selection task. Our results reveal neural correlates of visual target selection in the marmoset, similar to those observed in macaques and humans, with distinct timing and profiles of activity across cell types and cortical layers. Notably, a greater proportion of neurons exhibited stimulus-related activity in superficial layers whereas a greater proportion of infragranular neurons exhibited significant postsaccadic activity. Stimulus-related activity was first observed in granular layer putative interneurons, whereas target discrimination activity emerged first in supragranular layers putative pyramidal neurons, supporting a canonical laminar circuit underlying visual target selection in marmoset PPC. These findings provide novel insights into the neural basis of visual attention and target selection in primates. |
Rosari Naveena Selvan; Minghao Cheng; Sophie Siestrup; Falko Mecklenbrauck; Benjamin Jainta; Jennifer Pomp; Anoushiravan Zahedi; Minija Tamosiunaite; Florentin Wörgötter; Ricarda I. Schubotz Updating predictions in a complex repertoire of actions and its neural representation Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 296, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Selvan2024,Even though actions we observe in everyday life seem to unfold in a continuous manner, they are automatically divided into meaningful chunks, that are single actions or segments, which provide information for the formation and updating of internal predictive models. Specifically, boundaries between actions constitute a hub for predictive processing since the prediction of the current action comes to an end and calls for updating of predictions for the next action. In the current study, we investigated neural processes which characterize such boundaries using a repertoire of complex action sequences with a predefined probabilistic structure. Action sequences consisted of actions that started with the hand touching an object (T) and ended with the hand releasing the object (U). These action boundaries were determined using an automatic computer vision algorithm. Participants trained all action sequences by imitating demo videos. Subsequently, they returned for an fMRI session during which the original action sequences were presented in addition to slightly modified versions thereof. Participants completed a post-fMRI memory test to assess the retention of original action sequences. The exchange of individual actions, and thus a violation of action prediction, resulted in increased activation of the action observation network and the anterior insula. At U events, marking the end of an action, increased brain activation in supplementary motor area, striatum, and lingual gyrus was indicative of the retrieval of the previously encoded action repertoire. As expected, brain activation at U events also reflected the predefined probabilistic branching structure of the action repertoire. At T events, marking the beginning of the next action, midline and hippocampal regions were recruited, reflecting the selected prediction of the unfolding action segment. In conclusion, our findings contribute to a better understanding of the various cerebral processes characterizing prediction during the observation of complex action repertoires. |
Werner Seitz; Artyom Zinchenko; Hermann J. Müller; Thomas Geyer In: Visual Cognition, pp. 1–22, 2024. @article{Seitz2024,Participants can learn to faster detect targets embedded in repeatedly encountered spatial arrangements of distractors–termed the “contextual cueing” (CC) effect. However, cueing is severely compromised following target relocation in an otherwise unchanged distractor arrangement. Previous research demonstrated that this re-location cost is due to persistent misguidance of search towards the original location. Since CC reflects top-down guidance of contextual memory, this misguidance is an instance of a “distraction” effect that operates from acquired memory, rather than being driven by salient but irrelevant stimuli in the display. While traditional accounts of CC emphasize the acquisition of search-guiding memory “templates” specific to particular displays, contextual learning also tunes attentional (oculomotor) scanning routines to the overall statistics of the display arrangements, yielding a context-unspecific LT “proceduralization” of search. Using reaction-time and oculomotor-scanning measures, we confirmed both mechanisms to contribute to initial contextual learning as well as the “distraction” effect produced by relocating the targets of repeated displays. We suspect that guidance and misguidance of search by repeated contexts involve two complementary LT mechanisms: procedural optimization of broad, i.e., display-generic, scanning routines, and learning of where to expect the target in specific repeated-context displays. |
Noor Seijdel; Jan Mathijs Schoffelen; Peter Hagoort; Linda Drijvers Attention drives visual processing and audiovisual integration during multimodal communication Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 10, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Seijdel2024,During communication in real-life settings, our brain often needs to integrate auditory and visual information and at the same time actively focus on the relevant sources of information, while ignoring interference from irrelevant events. The interaction between integration and attention processes remains poorly understood. Here, we use rapid invisible frequency tagging and magnetoencephalography to investigate how attention affects auditory and visual information processing and integration, during multimodal communication. We presented human participants (male and female) with videos of an actress uttering action verbs (auditory; tagged at 58 Hz) accompanied by two movie clips of hand gestures on both sides of fixation (attended stimulus tagged at 65 Hz; unattended stimulus tagged at 63 Hz). Integration difficulty was manipulated by a lower-order auditory factor (clear/degraded speech) and a higher-order visual semantic factor (matching/mismatching gesture). We observed an enhanced neural response to the attended visual information during degraded speech compared to clear speech. For the unattended information, the neural response to mismatching gestures was enhanced compared to matching gestures. Furthermore, signal power at the intermodulation frequencies of the frequency tags, indexing nonlinear signal interactions, was enhanced in the left frontotemporal and frontal regions. Focusing on the left inferior frontal gyrus, this enhancement was specific for the attended information, for those trials that benefitted from integration with a matching gesture. Together, our results suggest that attention modulates audiovisual processing and interaction, depending on the congruence and quality of the sensory input. |
Lisa Schwetlick; Matthias Kümmerer; Matthias Bethge; Ralf Engbert Potsdam data set of eye movement on natural scenes (DAEMONS) Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, pp. 1–6, 2024. @article{Schwetlick2024,The published dataset, named DAEMONS (data set for eye movement on natural scenes) comprises two parts: the stimulus images and the eye tracking experiment. The stimulus images are published at: https://osf.io/cn5yp/ as JPEG images (https://jpeg.org). There are two subsets, the images that were harvested from the plattform Flickr, and the Potsdam images, which were hand-collected by us. For each image we provide the photograph meta-data, as available. We also provide the image annotations in this folder. Second, the eye tracking experiment is available at: https://osf. io/ewyg7/. Here we publish saccade tables that include columns for identifying information such as subject, trial and image number, as well as the beginning and end times and endpoint coordinates of saccades. A more detailed description of the columns may be found in the folder. We also publish supplementary anonymized information about each subject, such as age, gender, visual acuity, and their answers to the questionnaire. Raw data will be archived and documented for future reference. The computer code for the experiment and the data processing pipeline will be published separately. |
Noëlle Schwendinger; Brigitte Charlotte Kaufmann; Dario Cazzoli; Thomas Nyffeler Vertical neglect towards the lower space after bilateral parietal strokes – A case study Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 181, pp. 155–164, 2024. @article{Schwendinger2024,While considerable knowledge has been acquired concerning the involvement of the parietal cortex in horizontal visuo-spatial attention, the understanding of its specific contribution to the vertical dimension remains limited. Here we present the exceptional case of a patient, who suffered from two consecutive ischemic strokes at the same location within the left and right Middle Cerebral Artery (MCA) territory, involving the superior parietal lobule, the supramarginal gyrus, and the angular gyrus. While the first left-hemispheric stroke led to a right-sided neglect, the consecutive stroke in the right hemisphere led to a left-sided neglect. In both cases, the horizontal visuo-spatial attentional bias resolved after a short time period. However, after the second stroke, the patient displayed a notable manifestation of vertical neglect for the right and the left lower visual space, as shown by means of a neuropsychological assessment with the Sensitive Neglect Test. Furthermore, video-oculography during Free Visual Exploration (FVE), comparing the patient's exploration behaviour against twenty age-matched healthy controls, confirmed the significant visuo-spatial attentional deficits for the lower visual space. In conclusion, the present case study illustrates that the parietal cortex controls visuo-spatial attention deployment towards the contralateral and, more prominently, towards the lower visual space. Therefore, the clinical evaluation of neglect symptoms should also take the vertical dimension into account. |
Sabrina Schwarzmeier; Andreas Obersteiner; Martha Wagner Alibali; Vijay Marupudi In: Journal of Mathematical Behavior, vol. 75, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Schwarzmeier2024,Adults and children are able to compare visually represented fractions. Past studies show that people are more efficient with continuous visualizations than with discretized ones, but the specific reasons are unclear. Presumably, continuous visualizations highlight magnitudes more directly, while discretized ones encourage less efficient strategies such as counting. In two experiments, adults and children compared the magnitudes of continuous and discretized tape diagrams of fractions. In both experiments, participants answered more accurately, faster, and with fewer eye saccades when the visualizations were continuous rather than discretized. Sequences of saccades indicated that participants used counting strategies less often with continuous than discretized diagrams. The results suggest that adults and children are more efficient with continuous than discretized visualizations because they use more efficient, magnitude-based strategies with continuous visualizations. The findings indicate that integrating continuous visualizations in classroom teaching more frequently could be beneficial for supporting students in developing fraction magnitude concepts. |
Inka Schmitz; Hanna Strauss; Ludwig Reinel; Wolfgang Einhäuser Attentional cueing: Gaze is harder to override than arrows Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 1–19, 2024. @article{Schmitz2024,Gaze is an important and potent social cue to direct others' attention towards specific locations. However, in many situations, directional symbols, like arrows, fulfill a similar purpose. Motivated by the overarching question how artificial systems can effectively communicate directional information, we conducted two cueing experiments. In both experiments, participants were asked to identify peripheral targets appearing on the screen and respond to them as quickly as possible by a button press. Prior to the appearance of the target, a cue was presented in the center of the screen. In Experiment 1, cues were either faces or arrows that gazed or pointed in one direction, but were non-predictive of the target location. Consistent with earlier studies, we found a reaction time benefit for the side the arrow or the gaze was directed to. Extending beyond earlier research, we found that this effect was indistinguishable between the vertical and the horizontal axis and between faces and arrows. In Experiment 2, we used 100% “counter-predictive” cues; that is, the target always occurred on the side opposite to the direction of gaze or arrow. With cues without inherent directional meaning (color), we controlled for general learning effects. Despite the close quantitative match between non-predictive gaze and non-predictive arrow cues observed in Experiment 1, the reaction-time benefit for counter-predictive arrows over neutral cues is more robust than the corresponding benefit for counter-predictive gaze. This suggests that–if matched for efficacy towards their inherent direction–gaze cues are harder to override or reinterpret than arrows. This difference can be of practical relevance, for example, when designing cues in the context of human-machine interaction. |
Martino Schettino; Marika Mauti; Chiara Parrillo; Ilenia Ceccarelli; Federico Giove; Antonio Napolitano; Cristina Ottaviani; Marialuisa Martelli; Cristina Orsini Resting-state brain activation patterns and network topology distinguish human sign and goal trackers Journal Article In: Translational Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Schettino2024,The "Sign-tracker/Goal-tracker" (ST/GT) is an animal model of individual differences in learning and motivational processes attributable to distinctive conditioned responses to environmental cues. While GT rats value the reward-predictive cue as a mere predictor, ST rats attribute it with incentive salience, engaging in aberrant reward-seeking behaviors that mirror those of impulse control disorders. Given its potential clinical value, the present study aimed to map such model onto humans and investigated resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging correlates of individuals categorized as more disposed to sign-tracking or goal-tracking behavior. To do so, eye-tracking was used during a translationally informed Pavlovian paradigm to classify humans as STs (n = 36) GTs (n = 35) or as Intermediates (n = 33), depending on their eye-gaze towards the reward-predictive cue or the reward location. Using connectivity and network-based approach, measures of resting state functional connectivity and centrality (role of a node as a hub) replicated preclinical findings, suggesting a major involvement of subcortical areas in STs, and dominant cortical involvement in GTs. Overall, the study strengthens the translational value of the ST/GT model, with important implications for the early identification of vulnerable phenotypes for psychopathological conditions such as substance use disorder. |
Annika E. Sauter; Adam Zabicki; Thomas Schüller; Juan Carlos Baldermann; Gereon R. Fink; Paola Mengotti; Simone Vossel Response and conflict expectations shape motor responses interactively Journal Article In: Experimental Brain Research, pp. 2599–2612, 2024. @article{Sauter2024,Efficient responses in dynamic environments rely on a combination of readiness and flexibility, regulated by anticipatory and online response control mechanisms. The latter are required when a motor response needs to be reprogrammed or when flanker stimuli induce response conflict and they are crucially modulated by anticipatory signals such as response and conflict expectations. The mutual influence and interplay of these control processes remain to be elucidated. Our behavioral study employed a novel combined response cueing/conflict task designed to test for interactive effects of response reprogramming and conflict resolution and their modulation by expectations. To this end, valid and invalid response cues were combined with congruent and incongruent target flankers. Expectations were modulated by systematically manipulating the proportions of valid versus invalid cues and congruent versus incongruent flanker stimuli in different task blocks. Reaction time and accuracy were assessed in thirty-one healthy volunteers. The results revealed response reprogramming and conflict resolution interactions for both behavioral measures, modulated by response and conflict expectations. Accuracy decreased disproportionally when invalidly cued targets with incongruent flankers were least expected. These findings support coordinated and partially overlapping anticipatory and online response control mechanisms within motor-cognitive networks. |
Tetsuya Sato; Austin Jackson; Yusuke Yamani Number of interrupting events influences response time in multitasking, but not trust in automation Journal Article In: International Journal of Aerospace Psychology, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 208–224, 2024. @article{Sato2024,Objective: The present study examined how the number of interrupting events (interruption load) influences the effect of task load on human-automation trust and resource allocation in a low-fidelity flight simulation environment. Background: Trust is one critical factor that influences successful human-automation interaction. In the previous research, operators reported lower trust scores and made fewer fixation toward an automated system, which assisted a task, when competing task in the same workspace demanded more attention from the operator. However, it is unclear whether human-automation trust is influenced by frequent shift of attention away from a task assisted by an automated signaling system. Methods: Participants concurrently performed a tracking task, a system monitoring task, and a communication task. An automated signaling system was employed to assist the system monitoring task with 70% reliability. Task load was manipulated by the difficulty of the tracking task while interruption load was manipulated by the varying the frequency of auditory messages in the communication task. Results: Results demonstrated an effect of task load on human-automation trust and resource allocation, replicating previous findings. Further, participants responded faster to an auditory message that occurred less frequently when performing a tracking task at the low difficulty level but automation trust did not vary. Conclusion: While operators reported higher trust levels to imperfect automation under lower task load, number of interrupting events does not influence their trust. |
András Sárközy; Jonathan E. Robinson; Gyula Kovács Motion-induced blindness shows spatial anisotropies in conscious perception Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Sarkoezy2024,Polar angle asymmetries (PAAs), the differences in perceptual experiences and performance across different regions of the visual field are present in various paradigms and tasks of visual perception. Currently, research in this area is sparse, particularly regarding the influence of PAAs during perceptual illusions, highlighting a gap in visual cognition studies. We aim to fill this gap by measuring PAAs across the visual field during an illusion applied to test conscious vision widely. Motion-induced blindness (MIB) is an illusion when a peripheral target disappears from consciousness as the result of a continuously moving background pattern. During MIB we separately measured the average disappearance time of peripheral targets in eight equidistant visual field positions. Our results indicate a significant variation in MIB disappearance times and frequencies as a function of target location. Specifically, we found shorter and fewer disappearances along the cardinal compared to oblique directions, and along the horizontal compared to the vertical meridian. Our results suggest specific consistencies between visual field asymmetries and conscious visual perception. |
Takanori Sano; Jun Shi; Hideaki Kawabata The differences in essential facial areas for impressions between humans and deep learning models: An eye-tracking and explainable AI approach Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, pp. 1–25, 2024. @article{Sano2024,This study explored the facial impressions of attractiveness, dominance and sexual dimorphism using experimental and computational methods. In Study 1, we generated face images with manipulated morphological features using geometric morphometrics. In Study 2, we conducted eye tracking and impression evaluation experiments using these images to examine how facial features influence impression evaluations and explored differences based on the sex of the face images and participants. In Study 3, we employed deep learning methods, specifically using gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM), an explainable artificial intelligence (AI) technique, to extract important features for each impression using the face images and impression evaluation results from Studies 1 and 2. The findings revealed that eye-tracking and deep learning use different features as cues. In the eye-tracking experiments, attention was focused on features such as the eyes, nose and mouth, whereas the deep learning analysis highlighted broader features, including eyebrows and superciliary arches. The computational approach using explainable AI suggests that the determinants of facial impressions can be extracted independently of visual attention. |
Rémi Sanchez; Anne-Catherine Catherine Tomei; Pascal Mamassian; Manuel Vidal; Andrea Desantis What the eyes, confidence, and partner's identity can tell about change of mind Journal Article In: Neuroscience of Consciousness, vol. 2024, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Sanchez2024,Perceptual confidence reflects the ability to evaluate the evidence that supports perceptual decisions. It is thought to play a critical role in guiding decision-making. However, only a few empirical studies have actually investigated the function of perceptual confidence. To address this issue, we designed a perceptual task in which participants provided a confidence judgment on the accuracy of their perceptual decision. Then, they viewed the response of a machine or human partner, and they were instructed to decide whether to keep or change their initial response. We observed that confidence predicted participants' changes of mind more than task difficulty and perceptual accuracy. Additionally, interacting with a machine, compared to a human, decreased confidence and increased participants tendency to change their initial decision, suggesting that both confidence and changes of mind are influenced by contextual factors, such as the identity of a partner. Finally, variations in confidence judgments but not change of mind were correlated with pre-response pupil dynamics, indicating that arousal changes are linked to confidence computations. This study contributes to our understanding of the factors influencing confidence and changes of mind and also evaluates the possibility of using pupil dynamics as a proxy of confidence. |
Jason M. Samonds; Martin Szinte; Carrie Barr; Anna Montagnini; Guillaume S. Masson; Nicholas J. Priebe Mammals achieve common neural coverage of visual scenes using distinct sampling behaviors Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Samonds2024,Most vertebrates use head and eye movements to quickly change gaze orientation and sample different portions of the environment with periods of stable fixation. Visual information must be integrated across fixations to construct a complete perspective of the visual environment. In concert with this sampling strategy, neurons adapt to unchanging input to conserve energy and ensure that only novel information from each fixation is processed. We demonstrate how adaptation recovery times and saccade properties interact and thus shape spatiotemporal tradeoffs observed in the motor and visual systems of mice, cats, marmosets, macaques, and humans. These tradeoffs predict that in order to achieve similar visual coverage over time, animals with smaller receptive field sizes require faster saccade rates. Indeed, we find comparable sampling of the visual environment by neuronal populations across mammals when integrating measurements of saccadic behavior with receptive field sizes and V1 neuronal den-sity. We propose that these mammals share a common statistically driven strategy of maintaining coverage of their visual environment over time calibrated to their respective visual system characteristics. |
Stephanie M. Saltzmann; Brandon Eich; Katherine C. Moen; Melissa R. Beck Activated long-term memory and visual working memory during hybrid visual search: Effects on target memory search and distractor memory Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 52, no. 8, pp. 2156–2171, 2024. @article{Saltzmann2024,In hybrid visual search, observers must maintain multiple target templates and subsequently search for any one of those targets. If the number of potential target templates exceeds visual working memory (VWM) capacity, then the target templates are assumed to be maintained in activated long-term memory (aLTM). Observers must search the array for potential targets (visual search), as well as search through memory (target memory search). Increasing the target memory set size reduces accuracy, increases search response times (RT), and increases dwell time on distractors. However, the extent of observers' memory for distractors during hybrid search is largely unknown. In the current study, the impact of hybrid search on target memory search (measured by dwell time on distractors, false alarms, and misses) and distractor memory (measured by distractor revisits and recognition memory of recently viewed distractors) was measured. Specifically, we aimed to better understand how changes in behavior during hybrid search impacts distractor memory. Increased target memory set size led to an increase in search RTs, distractor dwell times, false alarms, and target identification misses. Increasing target memory set size increased revisits to distractors, suggesting impaired distractor location memory, but had no effect on a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) distractor recognition memory test presented during the search trial. The results from the current study suggest a lack of interference between memory stores maintaining target template representations (aLTM) and distractor information (VWM). Loading aLTM with more target templates does not impact VWM for distracting information. |
Atena Sajedin; Sina Salehi; Hossein Esteky Information content and temporal structure of face selective local field potentials frequency bands in IT cortex Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Sajedin2024,Sensory stimulation triggers synchronized bioelectrical activity in the brain across various frequencies. This study delves into network-level activities, specifically focusing on local field potentials as a neural signature of visual category representation. Specifically, we studied the role of different local field potential frequency oscillation bands in visual stimulus category representation by presenting images of faces and objects to three monkeys while recording local field potential from inferior temporal cortex. We found category selective local field potential responses mainly for animate, but not inanimate, objects. Notably, face-selective local field potential responses were evident across all tested frequency bands, manifesting in both enhanced (above mean baseline activity) and suppressed (below mean baseline activity) local field potential powers. We observed four different local field potential response profiles based on frequency bands and face selective excitatory and suppressive responses. Low-frequency local field potential bands (1–30 Hz) were more prodominstaly suppressed by face stimulation than the high-frequency (30–170 Hz) local field potential bands. Furthermore, the low-frequency local field potentials conveyed less face category informtion than the high-frequency local field potential in both enhansive and suppressive conditions. Furthermore, we observed a negative correlation between face/object d-prime values in all the tested local field potential frequency bands and the anterior–posterior position of the recording sites. In addition, the power of low-frequency local field potential systematically declined across inferior temporal anterior–posterior positions, whereas high-frequency local field potential did not exhibit such a pattern. In general, for most of the above-mentioned findings somewhat similar results were observed for body, but not, other stimulus categories. The observed findings suggest that a balance of face selective excitation and inhibition across time and cortical space shape face category selectivity in inferior temporal cortex. |
Marina Saito; Kentaro Miyamoto; Ikuya Murakami Illumination by short-wavelength light inside the blind spot decreases light detectability Journal Article In: iScience, vol. 27, no. 9, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Saito2024,Although the optic disk corresponding to the blind spot contains no classical photoreceptors, it contains photopigment melanopsin. To clarify whether melanopsin is involved in light detection, we conducted detection tasks for light stimuli presented in the normal visual field, with and without another illumination inside the blind spot. We found that a blue blind-spot illumination decreased the light detectability on a dark background. This effect was replicable when it was determined immediately after the blind-spot illumination was turned off, suggesting the contribution of a sluggish system rather than scattering. Moreover, the aforementioned effect was not observed when the blind-spot illumination was in red, indicating wavelength specificity in favor of melanopsin's sensitivity profile. These findings suggest that melanopsin is activated by the blind-spot illumination and thereby interferes with light detection near the absolute threshold. Light detection originating from conventional photoreceptors is modulated by melanopsin-based computation presumably estimating a baseline noise level. |
Muhammet Ikbal Sahan; Roma Siugzdaite; Sebastiaan Mathôt; Wim Fias Attention-based rehearsal: Eye movements reveal how visuospatial information is maintained in working memory Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 50, no. 5, pp. 687–698, 2024. @article{Sahan2024,The human eye scans visual information through scan paths, series of fixations. Analogous to these scan paths during the process of actual “seeing,” we investaigated whether similar scan paths are also observed while subjects are “rehearsing” stimuli in visuospatial working memory. Participants performed a continuous recall task in which they rehearsed the precise location and color of three serially presented discs during a retention interval, and later reproduced either the precise location or the color of a single probed item. In two experiments, we varied the direction along which the items were presented and investigated whether scan paths during rehearsal followed the pattern of stimulus presentation during encoding (left-to-right in Experiment 1; left-to-right/right-to-left in Experiment 2). In both experiments, we confirmed that the eyes follow similar scan paths during encoding and rehearsal. Specifically, we observed that during rehearsal participants refixated the memorized locations they saw during encoding. Most interestingly, the precision with which these locations were refixated was associated with smaller recall errors. Assuming that eye position reflects the focus of attention, our findings suggest a functional contribution of spatial attention shifts to working memory and are in line with the hypothesis that maintenance of information in visuospatial working memory is supported by attention-based rehearsal. |
Christina Saalwirth; Maximilian Stefani; Marian Sauter; Wolfgang Mack Eye-tracking analysis of attentional disengagement in phobic and non-phobic individuals Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 86, no. 8, pp. 2643–2658, 2024. @article{Saalwirth2024,This study investigated threat-related attention biases using a new visual search paradigm with eye tracking, which allows for measuring attentional disengagement in isolation. This is crucial as previous studies have been unable to distinguish between engagement, disengagement, and behavioral freezing. Thirty-three participants (Mage = 28.75 years |
Noam Saadon-Grosman; Jingnan Du; Heather L. Kosakowski; Peter A. Angeli; Lauren M. DiNicola; Mark C. Eldaief; Randy L. Buckner Within-individual organization of the human cognitive cerebellum: Evidence for closely juxtaposed, functionally specialized regions Journal Article In: Science Advances, vol. 4037, pp. 1–17, 2024. @article{SaadonGrosman2024,The human cerebellum possesses multiple regions linked to cerebral association cortex. Here we mapped the cerebellum using precision functional MRI within individual participants (N=15), first estimating regions using connectivity and then prospectively testing functional properties using independent task data. Network estimates in all participants revealed a Crus I / II cerebellar megacluster of five higher-order association networks often with multiple, discontinuous regions for the same network. Seed regions placed within the megaclusters, including the disjointed regions, yielded spatially selective networks in the cerebral cortex. Compelling evidence for functional specialization within the cerebellar megaclusters emerged from the task responses. Reflecting functional distinctions found in the cerebrum, domain-flexible cerebellar regions involved in cognitive control dissociated from distinct domain-specialized regions with differential responses to language, social, and spatial / episodic task demands. These findings provide a clear demonstration that the cerebellum encompasses multiple zones dedicated to cognition, featuring juxtaposed regions specialized for distinct processing domains. |
Jason F. Rubinstein; Manish Singh; Eileen Kowler Bayesian approaches to smooth pursuit of random dot kinematograms: Effects of varying RDK noise and the predictability of RDK direction Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 131, no. 2, pp. 394–416, 2024. @article{Rubinstein2024,Smooth pursuit eye movements respond on the basis of both immediate and anticipated target motion, where anticipations may be derived from either memory or perceptual cues. To study the combined influence of both immediate sensory motion and anticipation, subjects pursued clear or noisy random dot kinematograms (RDKs) whose mean directions were chosen from Gaussian distributions with SDs = 10° (narrow prior) or 45° (wide prior). Pursuit directions were consistent with Bayesian theory in that transitions over time from dependence on the prior to near total dependence on immediate sensory motion (likelihood) took longer with the noisier RDKs and with the narrower, more reliable, prior. Results were fit to Bayesian models in which parameters representing the variability of the likelihood either were or were not constrained to be the same for both priors. The unconstrained model provided a statistically better fit, with the influence of the prior in the constrained model smaller than predicted from strict reliability-based weighting of prior and likelihood. Factors that may have contributed to this outcome include prior variability different from nominal values, low-level sensorimotor learning with the narrow prior, or departures of pursuit from strict adherence to reliability-based weighting. Although modifications of, or alternatives to, the normative Bayesian model will be required, these results, along with previous studies, suggest that Bayesian approaches are a promising framework to understand how pursuit combines immediate sensory motion, past history, and informative perceptual cues to accurately track the target motion that is most likely to occur in the immediate future. |
Cristina Rubino; Justin W. Andrushko; Shie Rinat; Adam T. Harrison; Lara A. Boyd Oculomotor functional connectivity associated with motor sequence learning Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 34, no. 11, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Rubino2024,Acquisition of learned motor sequences involves saccades directed toward the goal to gather visual information prior to reaching. While goal-directed actions involve both eye and hand movements, the role of brain areas controlling saccades during motor sequence learning is still unclear. This study aimed to determine whether resting-state functional connectivity of oculomotor regions is associated with behavioral changes resulting from motor sequence learning. We investigated connectivity between oculomotor control regions and candidate regions involved in oculomotor control and motor sequence learning. Twenty adults had brain scans before 3 days of motor task practice and after a 24-hour retention test, which was used to assess sequence-specific learning. During testing, both saccades and reaches were tracked. Stronger connectivity in multiple oculomotor regions prior to motor task practice correlated with greater sequence-specific learning for both saccades and reaches. A more negative connectivity change involving oculomotor regions from pre- to post-training correlated with greater sequence-specific learning for both saccades and reaches. Overall, oculomotor functional connectivity was associated with the magnitude of behavioral change resulting from motor sequence learning, providing insight into the function of the oculomotor system during motor sequence learning. |
Eliane Roy; Y. Doug Dong; A. Ross Otto; Jordan Axt Beyond first impressions: Investigating the influence of visual attention and cue availability in discriminatory behavior Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 114, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Roy2024,In many contexts, the magnitude of discrimination in social judgment is determined by the level of sensitivity and bias in evaluation. However, little is known about factors that shape these processes. Using a mock admissions task, we investigated how variation in the time spent processing non-diagnostic social information (e.g., a face communicating attractiveness) versus decision-relevant information (e.g., information about candidate's qualifications) differentially impacted sensitivity versus bias, using both correlational eye-tracking (Study 1) and experimental approaches (Studies 2–3). Higher sensitivity (i.e., less judgment errors) was consistently related to the amount of time participants viewed decision-relevant information. However, bias (i.e., selection leniency based on attractiveness) was unrelated to the amount of time participants chose to view or were allowed to view faces. Bias emerged when faces were shown for as little as 350 milliseconds. The ease with which social information is encoded suggests that merely limiting its' presentation is ineffective for reducing discrimination. |
Cristina Rovira-Gay; Marc Argilés; Clara Mestre; Valldeflors Vinuela-Navarro; Jaume Pujol Does the subjective response during the measurement of fusional reserves affect the clinical diagnosis? Journal Article In: Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics, vol. 44, pp. 1354–1362, 2024. @article{RoviraGay2024,Introduction: Fusional reserves differ with the method of measurement. The goal of this study was to compare the subjective and objective responses during the measurement of positive and negative fusional reserves using both step and ramp methods. Methods: A haploscopic system was used to measure fusional reserves. Eye movements were recorded using an EyeLink 1000 Plus eye tracker (SR Research). The stimulus disparity was changed to either mimic a prism bar (steps) or a Risley prism (ramp). Subjective responses were obtained by pressing a key on the keyboard, whereas objective break and recovery points were determined offline using a custom algorithm coded in Matlab. Results: Thirty-three adults participated in this study. For the ramp method, the subjective and objective responses were similar for the negative (break and recovery points (t(32) = −0.82 |
Nicolas Roth; Jasper McLaughlin; Klaus Obermayer; Martin Rolfs Gaze behavior reveals expectations of potential scene changes Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 35, no. 12, pp. 1350 –1363, 2024. @article{Roth2024,Even if the scene before our eyes remains static for some time, we might explore it differently compared with how we examine static images, which are commonly used in studies on visual attention. Here we show experimentally that the top-down expectation of changes in natural scenes causes clearly distinguishable gaze behavior for visually identical scenes. We present free-viewing eye-tracking data of 20 healthy adults on a new video dataset of natural scenes, each mapped for its potential for change (PfC) in independent ratings. Observers looking at frozen videos looked significantly more often at the parts of the scene with a high PfC compared with static images, with substantially higher interobserver coherence. This viewing difference peaked right before a potential movement onset. Established concepts like object animacy or salience alone could not explain this finding. Images thus conceal experience-based expectations that affect gaze behavior in the potentially dynamic real world. |
Majid Roshanaei; Zahra Bahmani; Kelsey Clark; Mohammad Reza Daliri; Behrad Noudoost Working memory expedites the processing of visual signals within the extrastriate cortex Journal Article In: iScience, vol. 27, no. 8, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Roshanaei2024,Working memory is the ability to maintain information in the absence of sensory input. In this study, we investigated how working memory benefits processing in visual areas. Using a measure of phase consistency to detect the arrival time of visual signals to the middle temporal (MT) area, we assessed the impact of working memory on the speed of sensory processing. We recorded from MT neurons in two monkeys during a spatial working memory task with visual probes. When the memorized location closely matches the receptive field center of the recording site, visual input arrives sooner, but if the memorized location does not match the receptive field center then the arrival of visual information is delayed. Thus, working memory expedites the arrival of visual input in MT. These results reveal that even in the absence of firing rate changes, working memory can still benefit the processing of information within sensory areas. |
Setareh Sadat Roshan; Naser Sadeghnejad; Fatemeh Sharifizadeh; Reza Ebrahimpour A neurocomputational model of decision and confidence in object recognition task Journal Article In: Neural Networks, vol. 175, pp. 1–19, 2024. @article{Roshan2024,How does the brain process natural visual stimuli to make a decision? Imagine driving through fog. An object looms ahead. What do you do? This decision requires not only identifying the object but also choosing an action based on your decision confidence. In this circumstance, confidence is making a bridge between seeing and believing. Our study unveils how the brain processes visual information to make such decisions with an assessment of confidence, using a model inspired by the visual cortex. To computationally model the process, this study uses a spiking neural network inspired by the hierarchy of the visual cortex in mammals to investigate the dynamics of feedforward object recognition and decision-making in the brain. The model consists of two modules: a temporal dynamic object representation module and an attractor neural network-based decision-making module. Unlike traditional models, ours captures the evolution of evidence within the visual cortex, mimicking how confidence forms in the brain. This offers a more biologically plausible approach to decision-making when encountering real-world stimuli. We conducted experiments using natural stimuli and measured accuracy, reaction time, and confidence. The model's estimated confidence aligns remarkably well with human-reported confidence. Furthermore, the model can simulate the human change-of-mind phenomenon, reflecting the ongoing evaluation of evidence in the brain. Also, this finding offers decision-making and confidence encoding share the same neural circuit. |
R. S. Rosenbaum; J. G. Halilova; S. Agnihotri; M. C. D'Angelo; G. Winocur; J. D. Ryan; M. Moscovitch Dramatic changes to well-known places go unnoticed Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 196, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Rosenbaum2024,How well do we know our city? It turns out, much more poorly than we might imagine. We used declarative memory and eye-tracking techniques to examine people's ability to detect modifications to real-world landmarks and scenes in Toronto locales with which they have had extensive experience. Participants were poor at identifying which scenes contained altered landmarks, whether the modification was to the landmarks' relative size, internal features, or relation to surrounding context. To determine whether an indirect measure would prove more sensitive, we tracked eye movements during viewing. Changes in overall visual exploration, but not to specific regions of change, were related to participants' explicit endorsement of scenes as modified. These results support the contention that very familiar landmarks are represented at a global or gist level, but not local or fine-grained, level. These findings offer a unified view of memory for gist across verbal and spatial domains, and across recent and remote memory, with implications for hippocampal-neocortical interactions. |
Sarah A. Rösch; Lennart Wünsche; Carsten Thiele; Therese Reinstaller; Tino Zähle; Kathrin Schag; Katrin E. Giel; Christian Plewnia; Johann Steiner; Florian Junne In: Journal of Eating Disorders, vol. 12, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Roesch2024,Background: Notwithstanding the documented short- and long-term weight loss and remission of physical and mental diseases following bariatric surgery, a significant proportion of patients fail to respond (fully) to treatment in terms of physical and mental health improvement. Mounting evidence links food-specific impulsivity, prefrontal cortex (PFC) hypoactivity and disrupted hormone secretion in bariatric surgery candidates to poorer post-surgical health outcomes. Neuromodulatory treatments like transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) uniquely target these neurobehavioral impairments. We present a pilot study protocol offering tDCS combined with an inhibitory control training and a structured psychosocial intervention to patients after bariatric surgery. Methods: A total of N = 20 patients are randomized to 6 sessions of verum or sham tDCS over the PFC, combined with an individualized food-specific inhibitory control training and a structured psychosocial intervention within 18 months after bariatric surgery (t0). Beyond acceptability, feasibility and satisfaction of the intervention, effects of verum versus sham tDCS on food-specific impulsivity and on secondary outcomes quality of life, general impulsivity and psychopathology, food-related cravings, eating disorder psychopathology, weight trajectory and endocrine markers are assessed 4 weeks (t1) and 3 months after the intervention (t2). Discussion: Results will provide information on the potential of combining tDCS with an inhibitory control training and a structured psychosocial intervention to enhance physical and mental outcomes after bariatric surgery. The present study may guide the development of future research with regard to tDCS as a brain-based intervention and of future post-surgical clinical programs, paving the way for randomized-controlled trials in larger samples. |
C. L. Rodríguez Deliz; Gerick M. Lee; Brittany N. Bushnell; Najib J. Majaj; J. Anthony Movshon; Lynne Kiorpes Development of radial frequency pattern perception in macaque monkeys Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 1–17, 2024. @article{RodriguezDeliz2024,Infant primates see poorly, and most perceptual functions mature steadily beyond early infancy. Behavioral studies on human and macaque infants show that global form perception, as measured by the ability to integrate contour information into a coherent percept, improves dramatically throughout the first several years after birth. However, it is unknown when sensitivity to curvature and shape emerges in early life or how it develops. We studied the development of shape sensitivity in 18 macaques, aged 2 months to 10 years. Using radial frequency stimuli, circular targets whose radii are modulated sinusoidally, we tested monkeys' ability to radial frequency stimuli from circles as a function of the depth and frequency of sinusoidal modulation. We implemented a new four-choice oddity task and compared the resulting data with that from a traditional two-alternative forced choice task. We found that radial frequency pattern perception was measurable at the youngest age tested (2 months). Behavioral performance at all radial frequencies improved with age. Performance was better for higher radial frequencies, suggesting the developing visual system prioritizes processing of fine visual details that are ecologically relevant. By using two complementary methods, we were able to capture a comprehensive developmental trajectory for shape perception. |
Arryn Robbins; Anatolii Evdokimov Distractor similarity and category variability effects in search Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 86, no. 7, pp. 2231–2250, 2024. @article{Robbins2024,Categorical search involves looking for objects based on category information from long-term memory. Previous research has shown that search efficiency in categorical search is influenced by target/distractor similarity and category variability (i.e., heterogeneity). However, the interaction between these factors and their impact on different subprocesses of search remains unclear. This study examined the effects of target/distractor similarity and category variability on processes of categorical search. Using multidimensional scaling, we manipulated target/distractor similarity and measured category variability for target categories that participants searched for. Eye-tracking data were collected to examine attentional guidance and target verification. The results demonstrated that the effect of category variability on response times (RTs) was dependent on the level of target/distractor similarity. Specifically, when distractors were highly similar to target categories, there was a negative relation between RTs and variability, with low variability categories producing longer RTs than higher variability categories. Surprisingly, this trend was only present in the eye-tracking measures of target verification but not attentional guidance. Our results suggest that searchers more effectively guide attention to low-variability categories compared to high-variability categories, regardless of the degree of similarity between targets and distractors. However, low category variability interferes with target match decisions when distractors are highly similar to the category, thus the advantage that low category variability provides to searchers is not equal across processes of search. |
Daniel Ritish; Preethi V. Reddy; Vanteemar S. Sreeraj; Harleen Chhabra; Vijay Kumar; Ganesan Venkatasubramanian; Kesavan Muralidharan Oculomotor abnormalities and aberrant neuro-developmental markers: Composite endophenotype for bipolar I disorder Journal Article In: The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 69, no. 8, pp. 590–597, 2024. @article{Ritish2024,Background: Neurological soft signs (NSSs), minor physical anomalies (MPAs), and oculomotor abnormalities were plausible biomarkers in bipolar disorder (BD). However, specific impairments in these markers in patients after the first episode mania (FEM), in comparison with first-degree relatives (high risk [HR]) of BD and healthy subjects (health control [HC]) are sparse. Aim of the study: This study aimed at examining NSSs, MPAs, and oculomotor abnormalities in remitted adult subjects following FEM and HR subjects in comparison with matched healthy controls. Investigated when taken together, could serve as composite endophenotype for BD. Methods: NSSs, MPAs, and oculomotor abnormalities were evaluated in FEM (n = 31), HR (n = 31), and HC (n = 30) subjects, matched for age (years) (p = 0.44) and sex (p = 0.70) using neurological evaluation scale, Waldrop's physical anomaly scale and eye tracking (SPEM) and antisaccades (AS) paradigms, respectively. Results: Significant differences were found between groups on NSSs, MPAs, and oculomotor parameters. Abnormalities are higher in FEM subjects compared to HR and HC subjects. Using linear discriminant analysis, all 3 markers combined accurately classified 72% of the original 82 subjects (79·2% BD, 56·70% HR, and 82·1% HC subjects). Conclusions: AS and SPEM could enhance the utility of NSSs, and MPAs as markers for BD. The presence of these abnormalities in FEM suggests their role in understanding the etiopathogenesis of BD in patients who are in the early course of illness. These have the potential to be composite endophenotypes and have further utility in early identification in BD. |
Elizabeth Riley; Hamid Turker; Dongliang Wang; Khena M. Swallow; Adam K. Anderson; Eve De Rosa Nonlinear changes in pupillary attentional orienting responses across the lifespan Journal Article In: GeroScience, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 1017–1033, 2024. @article{Riley2024,The cognitive aging process is not necessarily linear. Central task-evoked pupillary responses, representing a brainstem-pupil relationship, may vary across the lifespan. Thus we examined, in 75 adults ranging in age from 19 to 86, whether task-evoked pupillary responses to an attention task may serve in as an index of cognitive aging. This is because the locus coeruleus (LC), located in the brainstem, is not only among the earliest sites of degeneration in pathological aging, but also supports both attentional and pupillary behaviors. We assessed brief, task-evoked phasic attentional orienting to behaviorally relevant and irrelevant auditory tones, stimuli known specifically to recruit the LC in the brainstem and evoke pupillary responses. Due to potential nonlinear changes across the lifespan, we used a novel data-driven analysis on 6 dynamic pupillary behaviors on 10% of the data to reveal cut off points that best characterized the three age bands: young (19–41 years old), middle aged (42–68 years old), and older adults (69 + years old). Follow-up analyses on independent data, the remaining 90%, revealed age-related changes such as monotonic decreases in tonic pupillary diameter and dynamic range, along with curvilinear phasic pupillary responses to the behaviorally relevant target events, increasing in the middle-aged group and then decreasing in the older group. Additionally, the older group showed decreased differentiation of pupillary responses between target and distractor events. This pattern is consistent with potential compensatory LC activity in midlife that is diminished in old age, resulting in decreased adaptive gain. Beyond regulating responses to light, pupillary dynamics reveal a nonlinear capacity for neurally mediated gain across the lifespan, thus providing evidence in support of the LC adaptive gain hypothesis. |
Heidi C. Riek; Naomi P. Visanji; Isabell C. Pitigoi; Daniel G. Di Luca; Laura Armengou-Garcia; Nazish Ahmed; Julia E. Perkins; Donald C. Brien; Jeff Huang; Brian C. Coe; Jana Huang; Taneera Ghate; Anthony E. Lang; Connie Marras; Douglas P. Munoz Multimodal oculomotor assessment reveals prodromal markers of Parkinson's disease in non-manifesting LRRK2 G2019S mutation carriers Journal Article In: npj Parkinson's Disease, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 234, 2024. @article{Riek2024,Oculomotor behaviour changes in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) are a promising source of prodromal disease markers. Capitalizing on this phenomenon to facilitate early diagnosis requires oculomotor assessment in prodromal cohorts. We examined oculomotor behaviour in non-manifesting LRRK2 G2019S mutation carriers (LRRK2-NM), who have heightened PD risk.Seventeen LRRK2-NM participants, 47 patients with idiopathic PD, and 63 healthy age-matched control participants completed an interleaved pro- and antisaccade task while undergoing video-based eye-tracking. We analyzed between-group differences in saccade, pupil, blink, and fixation acquisition behaviour. Patients with PD showed previously demonstrated abnormalities (saccade hypometria, antisaccade errors). Relative to controls, LRRK2-NM participants and patients with PD both displayed increased short-latency prosaccades and reduced pupil velocity, plus altered fixation acquisition-less preemptive returning of gaze to the future fixation point location. Interestingly, the effect on blink probability was opposite-higher than controls in LRRK2-NM participants but lower in patients with PD. Future longitudinal studies must confirm the viability of these features as prodromal PD markers. |
Laura Rettie; John E. Marsh; Simon P. Liversedge; Mengsi Wang; Federica Degno Auditory distraction during reading: Investigating the effects of background sounds on parafoveal processing Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, pp. 1–24, 2024. @article{Rettie2024,Previous research suggests that unexpected (deviant) sounds negatively affect reading performance by inhibiting saccadic planning, which models of reading agree takes place simultaneous to parafoveal processing. This study examined the effect of deviant sounds on foveal and parafoveal processing. Participants read single sentences in quiet, standard (repeated sounds), or deviant sound conditions (a new sound within a repeated sound sequence). Sounds were presented with a variable delay coincident with the onset of fixations on target words during a period when saccadic programming and parafoveal processing occurred. We used the moving window paradigm to manipulate the amount of information readers could extract from the parafovea (the entire sentence or a 13-character window of text). Global, sentence-level analyses showed typical disruption to reading by the window, and under quiet conditions similar effects were observed at the target and post-target word in the local analyses. Standard and deviant sounds also produced clear distraction effects of differing magnitudes at the target and post-target words, though at both regions, these effects were qualified by interactions. Effects at the target word suggested that with sounds, readers engaged in less effective parafoveal processing than under quiet. Similar patterns of effects due to standard and deviant sounds, each with a different time course, occurred at the post-target word. We conclude that distraction via auditory deviation causes disruption to parafoveal processing during reading, with such effects being modulated by the degree to which a sound's characteristics are more or less unique. |
Anna Render; Hedwig Eisenbarth; Matt Oxner; Petra Jansen Arousal, interindividual differences and temporal binding a psychophysiological study Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 88, no. 5, pp. 1653–1677, 2024. @article{Render2024,The sense of agency varies as a function of arousal in negative emotional contexts. As yet, it is unknown whether the same is true for positive affect, and how inter-individual characteristics might predict these effects. Temporal binding, an implicit measure of the sense of agency, was measured in 59 participants before and after watching either an emotionally neutral film clip or a positive film clip with high or low arousal. Analyses included participants' individual differences in subjective affective ratings, physiological arousal (pupillometry, skin conductance, heart rate), striatal dopamine levels via eye blink rates, and psychopathy. Linear mixed models showed that sexual arousal decreased temporal binding whereas calm pleasure had no facilitation effect on binding. Striatal dopamine levels were positively linked whereas subjective and physiological arousal may be negatively associated with binding towards actions. Psychopathic traits reduced the effect of high arousal on binding towards actions. These results provide evidence that individual differences influence the extent to which the temporal binding is affected by high arousing states with positive valence. |
Zach V. Redding; Ian C. Fiebelkorn Separate cue- and alpha-related mechanisms for distractor suppression Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 25, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Redding2024,Research on selective attention has largely focused on the enhancement of behaviorally important information, with less focus on the suppression of distracting information. Enhancement and suppression can operate through a push−pull relationship attributable to competitive interactions among neural populations. There has been considerable debate, however, regarding (1) whether suppression can be voluntarily deployed, independent of enhancement, and (2) whether voluntary deployment of suppression is associated with neural processes occurring prior to the distractor onset. Here, we investigated the interplay between pre- and post-distractor neural processes, while male and female human subjects performed a visual search task with a cue that indicated the location of an upcoming distractor. We utilized two established EEG markers of suppression: the distractor positivity (PD) and alpha power (∼8–15 Hz). The PD—a component of event-related potentials—has been linked with successful distractor suppression, and increased alpha power has been linked with attenuated sensory processing. Cueing the location of an upcoming distractor speeded responses and led to an earlier PD, consistent with earlier suppression due to strategic use of a spatial cue. In comparison, higher predistractor alpha power contralateral to distractors led to a later PD, consistent with later suppression. Lower alpha power contralateral to distractors instead led to distractor-related attentional capture. Lateralization of alpha power was not linked to the spatial cue. This observation, combined with differences in the timing of suppression—as indexed by earlier and later PD components—demonstrates that cue-related, voluntary suppression can occur separate from alpha-related gating of sensory processing. |
Jesus Garcia Ramirez; Michael Vanhoyland; N. A. Ratan Murty; Thomas Decramer; Wim Van Paesschen; Stefania Bracci; Hans Op Beeck; Nancy Kanwisherd; Peter Janssen; Tom They Intracortical recordings reveal the neuronal selectivity for bodies and body parts in the human visual cortex Journal Article In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 121, no. 51, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Ramirez2024,Body perception plays a fundamental role in social cognition. Yet, the neural mechanisms underlying this process in humans remain elusive given the spatiotemporal constraints of functional imaging. Here, we present intracortical recordings of single- and multiunit spiking activity in two epilepsy surgery patients in or near the extrastriate body area, a critical region for body perception. Our recordings revealed a strong preference for human bodies over a large range of control stimuli. Notably, body selectivity was driven by a distinct selectivity for body parts. The observed body selectivity generalized to non-photographic depictions of bodies including silhouettes and stick figures. Overall, our study provides unique neural data that bridge the gap between human neuroimaging and macaque electrophysiology studies, laying a solid foundation for computational models of human body processing. |
Reza Rajimehr; Haoran Xu; Asa Farahani; Simon Kornblith; John Duncan; Robert Desimone Functional architecture of cerebral cortex during naturalistic movie watching Journal Article In: Neuron, vol. 112, no. 24, pp. 4130–4146, 2024. @article{Rajimehr2024,Characterizing the functional organization of cerebral cortex is a fundamental step in understanding how different kinds of information are processed in the brain. However, it is still unclear how these areas are organized during naturalistic visual and auditory stimulation. Here, we used high-resolution functional MRI data from 176 human subjects to map the macro-architecture of the entire cerebral cortex based on responses to a 60-min audiovisual movie stimulus. A data-driven clustering approach revealed a map of 24 functional areas/networks, each explicitly linked to a specific aspect of sensory or cognitive processing. Novel features of this map included an extended scene-selective network in the lateral prefrontal cortex, separate clusters responsive to human-object and human-human interaction, and a push-pull interaction between three executive control (domain-general) networks and domain-specific regions of the visual, auditory, and language cortex. Our cortical parcellation provides a comprehensive and unified map of functionally defined areas in the human cerebral cortex. |
Adam W. Qureshi; Rebecca L. Monk; Shelby Quinn; Bethan Gannon; Kayleigh Mcnally; Derek Heim Catching a smile from individuals and crowds: Evidence for distinct emotional contagion processes Journal Article In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 127, no. 1, pp. 132–152, 2024. @article{Qureshi2024,Research examining how crowd emotions impact observers usually requires participants to engage in an atypical mental process whereby (static) arrays of individuals are cognitively integrated to represent a crowd. The present work sought to extend our understanding of how crowd emotions may spread to individuals by assessing self-reported emotions, attention and muscle movement in response to emotions of dynamic, virtually modeled crowd stimuli. Self-reported emotions and attention from thirty-six participants were assessed when foreground and background crowd characters exhibited homogeneous (Study 1) or heterogeneous (Study 2) positive, neutral, or negative emotions. Results suggested that affective responses in observers are shaped by crowd emotions even in the absence of direct attention. Thirty-four participants supplied self-report and facial electromyography responses to the same homogeneous (Study 3) or heterogeneous (Study 4) crowd stimuli. Results indicated that positive crowd emotions appeared to exert greater attentional pull and objective responses, while negative crowd emotions also elicited affective responses. Study 5 (n = 67) introduced a control condition (stimuli containing an individual person) to examine if responses are unique to crowds and found that emotional contagion from crowds was more intense than from individuals. These studies present methodological advances in the study of crowd emotional contagion and have implications for our broader understanding ofhow people process, attend, and affectively respond to crowds. Advancing theory by suggesting that emotional contagion from crowds is distinct from that elicited by individuals, findings may have applications for refining crowd management approaches. |
Leanne Quigley; Kristin Russell; Christine Yung; Keith S. Dobson; Christopher R. Sears Associations between attentional biases for emotional images and rumination in depression Journal Article In: Cognition and Emotion, pp. 1–18, 2024. @article{Quigley2024,Rumination is a key feature of depression and contributes to its onset, maintenance, and recurrence. Researchers have proposed that biases in the attentional processing of emotional information may underlie rumination, and particularly, the brooding component. This investigation evaluated associations between attentional biases for emotional images and rumination, including both brooding and reflection, in currently and never depressed participants. In two separate studies, participants viewed sets of four emotional images (happy, sad, threatening, and neutral) for 8 s in a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm. In both studies, currently depressed individuals attended to happy face images and happy naturalistic images significantly less than never depressed individuals. In Study 2, currently depressed individuals attended to sad naturalistic images significantly more than never depressed individuals. There were no statistically significant associations between attentional biases and any of the forms of rumination, independent of their shared relationship with depression symptoms. These findings call into question the robustness of the link between attentional biases and rumination. |
Ibrahim M. Quagraine; Jordan Murray; Gokce Busra Cakir; Sinem Balta Beylergil; Alexa Kaudy; Aasef G. Shaikh; Fatema F. Ghasia Evaluating eye tracking during dichoptic video viewing with varied fellow eye contrasts in amblyopia Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 65, no. 14, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Quagraine2024,Purpose: This study uses eye tracking to investigate how varying fellow eye (FE) contrast during dichoptic video viewing influences eye movement patterns, and their associations with interocular suppression, visual acuity, and stereoacuity deficit in amblyopia. Methods: Eye movements of 27 amblyopic and 8 healthy control participants were recorded during dichoptic viewing of stationary dots and videos with FE contrasts (100%, 50%, 25%, and 10%). Analysis included durations the amblyopic and FE spent in different stimulus regions, fixation switches, and eye deviation, and correlating these with suppression, visual acuity, and stereoacuity. Results: Participants with pronounced suppression, visual acuity, and stereoacuity deficits demonstrated reduced amblyopic eye fixation in the amblyopic eye (AE) region at 100% FE contrast. Lowering FE contrast increased amblyopic eye duration in stimuli presented within the AE region, notably in anisometropic and treated strabismic participants, and strabismic participants exhibiting fixation switches during viewing of dichoptic stationary dots. Even at lower FE contrasts, participants with greater stereoacuity and visual acuity deficits continued to exhibit diminished AE fixation in the AE region. Increased eye deviation was seen in strabismic participants with lowering of FE contrasts. Conclusions: Dichoptic contrast modulation holds promise for reducing suppression with responses varying by amblyopia type and visual function deficits. Larger strabismic angles may hinder binocular benefits of dichoptic treatments. Fixation switches may serve as an indicator of favorable outcomes. Eye tracking is crucial for understanding these dynamics, providing essential insights into visual attention dynamics of the FE and AE, and may serve as a valuable tool in optimization of amblyopia treatments. |
Minglang Qiao; Yufan Liu; Mai Xu; Xin Deng; Bing Li; Weiming Hu; Ali Borji Joint learning of audio–visual saliency prediction and sound source localization on multi-face videos Journal Article In: International Journal of Computer Vision, vol. 132, no. 6, pp. 2003–2025, 2024. @article{Qiao2024,Visual and audio events simultaneously occur and both attract attention. However, most existing saliency prediction works ignore the influence of audio and only consider vision modality. In this paper, we propose a multi-task leawrning method for audio–visual saliency prediction and sound source localization on multi-face video by leveraging visual, audio and face information. Specifically, we first introduce a large-scale database of multi-face video in visual-audio condition, containing eye-tracking data and sound source annotations. Using this database, we find that sound influences human attention, and conversely attention offers a cue to determine sound source on multi-face video. Guided by these findings, an audio–visual multi-task network (AVM-Net) is introduced to predict saliency and locate sound source. AVM-Net consists of three branches corresponding to visual, audio and face modalities. The visual branch has a two-stream architecture to capture spatial and temporal information. Face and audio branches encode audio signals and faces, respectively. Finally, a spatio-temporal multi-modal graph is constructed to model the interaction among multiple faces. With joint optimization of these branches, the intrinsic correlation of the tasks of saliency prediction and sound source localization is utilized and their performance is boosted by each other. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms 12 state-of-the-art saliency prediction methods, and achieves competitive results in sound source localization. |
Wei Qi; Xiang Liao; Dan Wang; Xinyu Liu; Chen Xu; Xiangqian Li On the relationship between childhood socioeconomic status and eating preference: Influence from attentional bias and decision-making style Journal Article In: Current Psychology, vol. 43, no. 24, pp. 21257–21272, 2024. @article{Qi2024a,Recent studies suggested that childhood socioeconomic status (SES) can influence peoples' eating preferences and obesity in adulthood even when the current SES was controlled. The present study investigated the cognitive mechanism by which childhood SES influences eating preference. In Experiment 1, we examined participants' food-related attentional bias using a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm. The results showed that participants in the low childhood SES group had greater gaze direction bias and gaze duration bias to high-calorie food images than participants in the high childhood SES group, suggesting a stronger attentional bias to food-related information. In Experiment 2, we examined participants' food-related decision-making style using a food delay discounting task. The results showed that compared to participants in the high childhood SES group, participants in the low childhood SES were more likely to choose smaller but sooner high-calorie food rewards than larger but later rewards (more food vouchers or an equivalent amount of money), suggesting a more impulsive decision-making style. In both experiments, participants in high and low childhood SES had similar current SES and BMI. Our results suggested that experiencing a childhood of resource scarcity might alter peoples' cognitive preference when processing food-related information, which explains why childhood SES had a long-lasting effect on eating preference and obesity. |
Ruoxi Qi; Yueyuan Zheng; Yi Yang; Caleb Chen Cao; Janet H. Hsiao Explanation strategies in humans versus current explainable artificial intelligence: Insights from image classification Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, pp. 1–24, 2024. @article{Qi2024,Explainable AI (XAI) methods provide explanations of AI models, but our understanding of how they compare with human explanations remains limited. Here, we examined human participants' attention strategies when classifying images and when explaining how they classified the images through eye-tracking and compared their attention strategies with saliency-based explanations from current XAI methods. We found that humans adopted more explorative attention strategies for the explanation task than the classification task itself. Two representative explanation strategies were identified through clustering: One involved focused visual scanning on foreground objects with more conceptual explanations, which contained more specific information for inferring class labels, whereas the other involved explorative scanning with more visual explanations, which were rated higher in effectiveness for early category learning. Interestingly, XAI saliency map explanations had the highest similarity to the explorative attention strategy in humans, and explanations highlighting discriminative features from invoking observable causality through perturbation had higher similarity to human strategies than those highlighting internal features associated with higher class score. Thus, humans use both visual and conceptual information during explanation, which serve different purposes, and XAI methods that highlight features informing observable causality match better with human explanations, potentially more accessible to users. |
Simran Purokayastha; Mariel Roberts; Marisa Carrasco Do microsaccades vary with discriminability around the visual field? Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 1–19, 2024. @article{Purokayastha2024,Microsaccades-tiny fixational eye movements-improve discriminability in high-acuity tasks in the foveola. To investigate whether they help compensate for low discriminability at the perifovea, we examined microsaccade characteristics relative to the adult visual performance field, which is characterized by two perceptual asymmetries: horizontal-vertical anisotropy (better discrimination along the horizontal than vertical meridian) and vertical meridian asymmetry (better discrimination along the lower than upper vertical meridian). We investigated whether and to what extent microsaccade directionality varies when stimuli are at isoeccentric locations along the cardinals under conditions of heterogeneous discriminability (Experiment 1) and homogeneous discriminability, equated by adjusting stimulus contrast (Experiment 2). Participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice orientation discrimination task. In both experiments, performance was better on trials without microsaccades between ready signal onset and stimulus offset than on trials with microsaccades. Across the trial sequence, the microsaccade rate and directional pattern were similar across locations. Our results indicate that microsaccades were similar regardless of stimulus discriminability and target location, except during the response period-once the stimuli were no longer present and target location no longer uncertain-when microsaccades were biased toward the target location. Thus, this study reveals that microsaccades do not flexibly adapt as a function of varying discriminability in a basic visual task around the visual field. |
Kristina I. Pultsina; Tatiana A. Stroganova; Galina L. Kozunova; Andrey O. Prokofyev; Aleksandra S. Miasnikova; Anna M. Rytikova; Boris V. Chernyshev Atypical pupil-linked arousal induced by low-risk probabilistic choices, and intolerance of uncertainty in adults with ASD Journal Article In: Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, no. 2023, pp. 1–19, 2024. @article{Pultsina2024,Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience stress when operating in a probabilistic environment, even if it is familiar, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Their decision-making may be affected by the uncertainty aversion implicated in ASD and associated with increased autonomic arousal. Previous studies have shown that in neurotypical (NT) people, decisions with predictably better outcomes are less stressful and elicit smaller pupil-linked arousal than those involving exploration. Here, in a sample of 46 high-functioning ASD and NT participants, using mixed-effects model analysis, we explored pupil-linked arousal and behavioral performance in a probabilistic reward learning task with a stable advantage of one choice option over the other. We found that subjects with ASD learned and preferred advantageous probabilistic choices at the same rate and to the same extent as NT participants, both in terms of choice ratio and response time. Although both groups exhibited similar predictive behaviors, learning to favor advantageous choices led to increased pupillary arousal for these choices in the ASD group, while it caused a decrease in pupillary arousal in the NT group. Moreover, greater pupil-linked arousal during decisions with higher expected value correlated with greater degree of self-reported intolerance of uncertainty in everyday life. Our results suggest that in a nonvolatile probabilistic environment, objectively good predictive abilities in people with ASD are coupled with elevated physiological stress and subjective uncertainty regarding the decisions with the best possible but still uncertain outcome that contributes to their intolerance of uncertainty. |
Erdem Pulcu; Calum Guinea; Hannah Clemens; Catherine J. Harmer; Susannah E. Murphy Value-based decision-making between affective and non-affective memories Journal Article In: iScience, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Pulcu2024,Affective biases can change how past events are recalled from memory. To capture mechanisms underlying affective memory formation, recall, and bias, we studied value-based decision-making (VBDM) between reward memories encoded in different mood states. Our findings suggest that following discrete affective events, created by large magnitude wins and losses on a Wheel of Fortune (WoF), healthy volunteers display an overall positive memory bias [favoring higher probability shapes learned after a WoF win compared with those learnt after a WoF loss outcome]. During this VBDM process, participants' pupils constrict before decision-onset for higher-value choices, and remained dilated for a sustained period after choice. Sustained pupil dilation was particularly sensitive to the reward values of abstract memories encoded in a positive mood. Taken together, we demonstrate that experimentally induced affective memories are recalled with a positive bias, and pupil-linked central arousal systems are actively engaged during VBDM between affective and non-affective memories. |
Eva Puimege; Maribel Montero Perez; Elke Peters; Maribel Montero Perez; Elke Peters The effects of typographic enhancement on L2 collocation processing and learning from reading: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Applied Linguistics, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 88–110, 2024. @article{Puimege2024,Collocations play a crucial part in the development of fluent, native-like second language knowledge. Several studies have shown that typographic enhancement can promote learners' engagement with, and learning of collocations in meaning-focused activities such as reading. However, it is unclear whether the attention-raising effect of TE extends to later encounters in unenhanced contexts, and how the combination of TE and unenhanced repetition affects collocation knowledge. The present study used eye-tracking and offline tests to examine the effects of typographic enhancement and repeated exposure on L2 learning of collocations from reading. The results show that the attention-raising effect of typographic enhancement does not necessarily extend to later exposures, and that repeated exposure following enhanced attention has minimal effects on learners' collocation knowledge. These findings have implications for the use of typographic enhancement in second language reading materials, and may be interpreted in relation to the role of salience in collocation learning from meaning-focused activities. |
Michal Pšurný; Stanislav Mokrý; Jana Stavkova Exploring consumers' perceptions of online purchase decision factors: Electroencephalography and eye-tracking evidence Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 18, no. November, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Psurny2024,Introduction: Consumer behavior on the Internet is influenced by factors that can affect consumers' perceptions and attention to products. Understanding these processes at the neurobiological level can help to understand consumers' implicit responses to marketing stimuli. The objective of this study is to use electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the differential effects of selected online purchase decision factors that are becoming increasingly important in online shopping. Methods: Using event-related potentials (ERPs) and simultaneous eye-tracking measurements, we identified differences in the perception of utilitarian and hedonic products when the products are exposed together with visual elements of the factors review, discount, and quantity discount. The ERP analysis focused on the P200 and late positive potential components (LPP). Results: By allowing free-viewing of stimuli during measurement, early automatic and later more complex attentional affective responses could be observed. The results suggest that the review and discount factors are processed faster than the product itself. However, the eye-tracking data indicate that the brain processes the factor without looking at it directly, i.e., from a peripheral view. Discussion: The study also demonstrates the possibilities of using new objective methods based on neurobiology and how they can be applied, especially in areas where the use of neuroscience is still rare, yet so much needed to objectify consumers' knowledge of their need satisfaction behavior. |
Joseph Pruitt; J. D. Knotts; Brian Odegaard Consistent metacognitive efficiency and variable response biases in peripheral vision Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 24, no. 8, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Pruitt2024,Across the visual periphery, perceptual and metacognitive abilities differ depending on the locus of visual attention, the location of peripheral stimulus presentation, the task design, and many other factors. In this investigation, we aimed to illuminate the relationship between attention and eccentricity in the visual periphery by estimating perceptual sensitivity, metacognitive sensitivity, and response biases across the visual field. In a 2AFC detection task, participants were asked to determine whether a signal was present or absent at one of eight peripheral locations (±10°, 20°, 30°, and 40°), using either a valid or invalid attentional cue. As expected, results revealed that perceptual sensitivity declined with eccentricity and was modulated by attention, with higher sensitivity on validly cued trials. Furthermore, a significant main effect of eccentricity on response bias emerged, with variable (but relatively unbiased) c'a values from 10° to 30°, and conservative c'a values at 40°. Regarding metacognitive sensitivity, significant main effects of attention and eccentricity were found, with metacognitive sensitivity decreasing with eccentricity, and decreasing in the invalid cue condition. Interestingly, metacognitive efficiency, as measured by the ratio of meta-d'a/d'a, was not modulated by attention or eccentricity. Overall, these findings demonstrate (1) that in some circumstances, observers have surprisingly robust metacognitive insights into how performance changes across the visual field and (2) that the periphery may be subject to variable detection biases that are contingent on the exact location in peripheral space. |
Claudio M. Privitera; Sean Noah; Thom Carney; Stanley A. Klein; Agatha Lenartowicz; Stephen P. Hinshaw; James T. McCracken; Joel T. Nigg; Sarah L. Karalunas; Rory C. Reid; Mercedes T. Oliva; Samantha S. Betts; Gregory V. Simpson Pupillary dilations in a Target/Distractor visual task paradigm and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) Journal Article In: Neuroscience Letters, vol. 818, pp. 1–6, 2024. @article{Privitera2024,ADHD is a neurocognitive disorder characterized by attention difficulties, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, often persisting into adulthood with substantial personal and societal consequences. Despite the importance of neurophysiological assessment and treatment monitoring tests, their availability outside of research settings remains limited. Cognitive neuroscience investigations have identified distinct components associated with ADHD, including deficits in sustained attention, inefficient enhancement of attended Targets, and altered suppression of ignored Distractors. In this study, we examined pupil activity in control and ADHD subjects during a sustained visual attention task specifically designed to evaluate the mechanisms underlying Target enhancement and Distractor suppression. Our findings revealed some distinguishing factors between the two groups which we discuss in light of their neurobiological implications. |
Claire Prendergast Losing the thread: How three- and five-year-olds predict the outcome of a story when non-literal language is used to update events Journal Article In: Cogent Psychology, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Prendergast2024,How do children learn to interpret nonliteral utterances nonliterally? A multidisciplinary report highlighting the role of reasoning about abstract meanings in nonliteral language comprehension is presented to shed light on why young children struggle to infer some, but not all, nonliteral meanings. An experimental paradigm using picture selection is then used to test differences in three- and five-year-old's predictions when idioms are used to update stories. Norwegian-speaking children (N = 162; N = 86 females) are asked to predict story outcomes that are based on cognitive heuristics. The results show that five-year-olds are more likely than three-year-olds to choose literal interpretations of idioms as outcomes (δ = 0.12). Five-year-olds choose the correct outcome more when there is no literal outcome available (δ = 0.15). The increase in literalism observed with age is explained through development in metalinguistic reflexivity. This suggests that children may increasingly hold speakers at their word, enabling access to abstract meanings over time. |
Aikaterini Premeti; Frédéric Isel; Maria Pia Bucci In: Neurology International, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 312–326, 2024. @article{Premeti2024,Whether dyslexia is caused by phonological or attentional dysfunction remains a widely debated issue. To enrich this debate, we compared the eye movements of 32 French university students with (14 students) and without (18 students) dyslexia while performing a delayed phonological lexical decision task on 300 visually presented stimuli. The processing stimuli involved either a lexical (i.e., words) or a non-lexical route relying on a grapheme-phoneme correspondence (pseudohomophones and pseudowords), while other stimuli involved only a visual search (consonant and symbol sequences). We recorded the number of fixations, the duration of the first fixation and the amplitude of saccades made on the stimuli. Compared to the controls, the participants with dyslexia made more fixations while reading regardless of the type of stimulus (lexical and non-lexical). Crucially, the participants with dyslexia exhibited longer first fixations in particular while reading phonologically challenging stimuli such as pseudohomophones and pseudowords compared to stimuli involving a simple visual search (consonants, symbols). Taken together, these results suggest that both visual and phonological impairments may be implicated in dyslexia, supporting the hypothesis that dyslexia is a multifactorial deficit. |
Paul Prasse; David R. Reich; Silvia Makowski; Tobias Scheffer; Lena A. Jäger Improving cognitive-state analysis from eye gaze with synthetic eye-movement data Journal Article In: Computers & Graphics, vol. 119, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Prasse2024,Eye movements can be used to analyze a viewer's cognitive capacities or mental state. Neural networks that process the raw eye-tracking signal can outperform methods that operate on scan paths preprocessed into fixations and saccades. However, the scarcity of such data poses a major challenge. We therefore develop SP-EyeGAN, a neural network that generates synthetic raw eye-tracking data. SP-EyeGAN consists of Generative Adversarial Networks; it produces a sequence of gaze angles indistinguishable from human ocular micro- and macro-movements. We explore the use of these synthetic eye movements for pre-training neural networks using contrastive learning. We find that pre-training on synthetic data does not help for biometric identification, while results are inconclusive for the detection of ADHD and gender classification. However, for the eye movement-based assessment of higher-level cognitive skills such general reading comprehension, text comprehension, and the distinction of native from non-native readers, pre-training on synthetic eye-gaze data improves the models' performance and even advances the state-of-the-art for reading comprehension. The SP-EyeGAN model, pre-trained on GazeBase, along with the code for developing your own raw eye-tracking machine learning model with contrastive learning, is available at https://github.com/aeye-lab/sp-eyegan. |
Jourdan J. Pouliot; Richard T. Ward; Caitlin M. Traiser; Payton Chiasson; Faith E. Gilbert; Andreas Keil Neurophysiological and autonomic dynamics of threat processing during sustained social fear generalization Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 482–497, 2024. @article{Pouliot2024,Survival in rapidly changing environments requires that organisms learn to predict noxious outcomes based on situational cues. One key facet of successful threat prediction is generalization from a specific predictive cue to similar cues, ensuring that a cue-outcome contingency is applied beyond the original learning environment. Generalization has also been observed in laboratory studies of human aversive conditioning: Most behavioral and physiological processes generalize responses from a stimulus paired with threat, (the CS+), to unpaired stimuli, with response magnitudes varying as a function of stimulus similarity. In contrast, work focusing on sensory responses in visual cortex has found a sharpening pattern, in which responses to stimuli closely resembling the CS+ are maximally suppressed, potentially reflecting lateral inhibitory interactions with the CS+ representation. Originally demonstrated with simple visual cues, changes in visuocortical tuning have also been observed in threat generalization learning across facial identity cues. It is however unclear to what extent these visuocortical changes represent transient or sustained effects and if generalization learning requires prior conditioning to the CS+. The present study addressed these questions using EEG and pupillometry in a paradigm involving several hundreds of trials of aversive generalization learning along a gradient of facial identities. Visuocortical ssVEP sharpening occurred after dozens of trials of generalization learning without prior differential conditioning, but diminished as learning progressed further. By contrast, generalization of EEG alpha power suppression, pupil dilation, and self-reported valence and arousal ratings was seen throughout the experimental session. Findings are consistent with models of threat processing emphasizing the role of changing visucocortical and attention dynamics in the formation, curation, and shaping of fear memories as observers continue learning about stimulus-outcome contingencies. |
Galina Portnova; Guzal Khayrullina; Olga Martynova Temporal dynamics of autonomic nervous system responses under cognitive-emotional workload in obsessive-compulsive disorder Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 61, no. 6, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Portnova2024a,Dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) is commonly observed in various mental disorders, particularly when individuals engage in prolonged cognitive-emotional tasks that require ANS adjustment to workload. Although the understanding of the temporal dynamics of sympathetic and parasympathetic tones in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is limited, analyzing ANS reactions to cognitive-emotional workload could provide valuable insights into one of the underlying causes of OCD. This study investigated the temporal dynamics of heart rate (HR) and pupil area (PA) while participants with OCD and healthy volunteers solved antisaccade tasks, with affective pictures serving as central fixation stimuli. The data of 31 individuals with OCD and 30 healthy volunteers were included in the study, comprising three separate blocks, each lasting approximately 8 min. The results revealed an increase in sympathetic tone in the OCD group, with the most noticeable rise occurring during the middle part of each block, particularly during the presentation of negative stimuli. Healthy volunteers demonstrated adaptive temporal dynamics of HR and PA from the first block to the last block of tasks, whereas individuals with OCD exhibited fewer changes over time, suggesting a reduced adaptation of the ANS sympathetic tone to cognitive-emotional workload in OCD. |
Galina Portnova; Guzal M. Khayrullina; Ivan V. Mikheev; Sofiya M. Byvsheva; Elena V. Proskurnina; Olga Martynova The dynamics of resting-state EEG and salivary trace elements in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder Journal Article In: ACS Chemical Neuroscience, vol. 15, no. 7, pp. 1415–1423, 2024. @article{Portnova2024,The study of salivary microelements and their neurophysiological and behavioral correlates in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a pressing issue in modern psychiatry, which, however, lacks adequate research at this time. In this study, we tested the dynamics of behavioral parameters, resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG), and salivary iron, copper, manganese, magnesium, and zinc in 30 healthy volunteers and 30 individuals with OCD before and after an emotional antisaccade task. The eye-movement data served as a measure of behavioral performance. Our research revealed consistently higher manganese concentrations in the OCD group compared to healthy volunteers associated with a higher EEG ratio of amplitude transformation and symptom severity. The dynamics of salivary microelements and resting-state EEG, possibly influenced by cognitive and emotional load during the anticsaccade task, differed between groups. In healthy volunteers, there was a decrease in salivary iron level with an increase in high-frequency power spectral density of EEG. The OCD group showed a decrease in salivary copper with an increased Hjorth mobility of EEG. |
Giorgia Ponsi; Michael Schepisi; Donato Ferri; Francesco Bianchi; Chiara Consiglio; Laura Borgogni; Salvatore Maria Aglioti Leading through gaze: Enhanced social attention in high-rank members of a large-scale organization Journal Article In: iScience, vol. 27, no. 11, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Ponsi2024,Human attention is naturally directed where others are looking. Primate research indicates that this phenomenon is influenced by the social rank of the gazer. Whether this applies to human societies remains underexplored. Diverging from the typical approach based on transient social rank manipulations in convenience samples, we tested low- and high-rank individuals permanently working in a large-scale organization. Participants executed saccades toward positions matching or not the gaze direction of distractor faces varying in dominance level (low, neutral, and high). The analysis of saccadic reaction time revealed that high-rank participants were more interfered by face distractors, regardless of dominance. Our results suggest that an important feature of leadership is related to the fine-tuning of social attention. These findings not only contribute to understanding how hierarchical rank shapes social cognition but also have implications for organizational behavior and leadership training strategies. |
Antonella Pomè; Nadine Schlichting; Clara Fritz; Eckart Zimmermann Prediction of sensorimotor contingencies generates saccadic omission Journal Article In: Current Biology, vol. 34, no. 14, pp. 3215–3225, 2024. @article{Pome2024,With every movement of our eyes, the visual receptors in the retina are swiped across the visual scene. Saccades are the fastest and most frequent movements we perform, yet we remain unaware of the self-produced visual motion. Previous research has tried to identify a dedicated suppression mechanism that either actively or passively cancels vision at the time of saccades.1 Here, we investigated a novel theory, which states that saccadic omission results from habituation to the predicted sensory consequences of our own actions. We experimentally induced novel, i.e., artificial visual consequences of saccade performance by presenting gratings that were drifting faster than the flicker fusion frequency and that became visible only when participants performed saccades. We asked participants to perform more than 100 saccades in each session across these gratings to make the novel contingencies predictable for the sensorimotor system. We found that contrast sensitivity for intra-saccadic motion declined drastically after repeated exposure of such motion. The reduction in sensitivity was even specific to the saccade vector performed in habituation trials. Moreover, when subjects performed the same task in fixation, no reduction in sensitivity was observed. In a motion speed comparison task, we found that the reduction in contrast sensitivity is the consequence of silencing-predicted intra-saccadic visual motion. Our data demonstrate that the sensorimotor system selectively habituates to recurring intra-saccadic visual motion, suggesting an efficient prediction mechanism of visual stability. |
Rista C. Plate; Tralucia Powell; Rachael Bedford; Tim J. Smith; Ankur Bamezai; Quentin Wedderburn; Alexis Broussard; Natasha Soesanto; Caroline Swetlitz; Rebecca Waller; Nicholas J. Wagner Social threat processing in adults and children: Faster orienting to, but shorter dwell time on, angry faces during visual search Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Plate2024,Attention to emotional signals conveyed by others is critical for gleaning information about potential social partners and the larger social context. Children appear to detect social threats (e.g., angry faces) faster than non-threatening social signals (e.g., neutral faces). However, methods that rely on behavioral responses alone are limited in identifying different attentional processes involved in threat detection or responding. To address this question, we used a visual search paradigm to assess behavioral (i.e., reaction time to select a target image) and attentional (i.e., eye-tracking fixations, saccadic shifts, and dwell time) responses in children (ages 7–10 years old |
Isabell C. Pitigoi; Brian C. Coe; Olivia G. Calancie; Donald C. Brien; Rachel Yep; Heidi C. Riek; Ryan H. Kirkpatrick; Blake K. Noyes; Brian J. White; Gunnar Blohm; Douglas P. Munoz Attentional modulation of eye blinking is altered by sex, age, and task structure Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 1–17, 2024. @article{Pitigoi2024,Spontaneous eye blinking is gaining popularity as a proxy for higher cognitive functions, as it is readily modulated by both environmental demands and internal processes. Prior studies were impoverished in sample size, sex representation, and age distribution, making it difficult to establish a complete picture of the behavior. Here we present eye-tracking data from a large cohort of normative participants (n = 604; 393 F; aged 5–93 years) performing two tasks: one with structured, discrete trials (interleaved pro-/anti-saccade task, IPAST) and one with a less structured, continuous organization in which participants watch movies (free-viewing; FV). Sex-and age-based analyses revealed that females had higher blink rates between the ages of 22 and 58 years in the IPAST and 22 and 34 years in FV. We derived a continuous measure of blink probability to reveal behavioral changes driven by stimulus appearance in both paradigms. In the IPAST, blinks were suppressed near stimulus appearance, particularly on correct anti-saccade trials, which we attribute to the stronger inhibitory control required for anti-saccades compared with pro-saccades. In FV, blink suppression occurred immediately after scene changes, and the effect was sustained on scenes where gaze clustered among participants (indicating engagement of attention). Females were more likely than males to blink during appearance of novel stimuli in both tasks, but only within the age bin of 18–44 years. The consistency of blink patterns in each paradigm endorses blinking as a sensitive index for changes in visual processing and attention, while sex and age differences drive interindividual variability. |
Alessandro Piras; Francesco Del Santo; Andrea Meoni; Milena Raffi Saccades and microsaccades coupling during free-throw shots in basketball players Journal Article In: Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 229–237, 2024. @article{Piras2024a,We investigated the role of saccades and microsaccades when different levels of basketball players were engaged in an ecological free-throw condition. All participants made more correct than incorrect shoots, with a movement time initiation shorter in amateurs than in near-expert groups. Near-experts had more stable gaze fixation than amateurs, with higher microsaccade rate and duration and lower peak velocity. Amateurs showed higher saccade rate, peak velocity, and amplitude than near-experts. The temporal sequence of near-experts' microsaccade rate increased after the saccade peak; on the contrary, in amateurs, the saccade peak is shown after the decrement in microsaccade rates. The spatiotemporal characteristics of microsaccades and saccades may reflect an optimal sampling method by which the brain discretely acquires visual information and can differentiate between participants who use a fixation before the critical movement time and participants who move their eyes to catch more visual cues to make decisions. |
Alessandro Piras; Matteo Bertucco; Francesco Del Santo; Andrea Meoni; Milena Raffi Postural stability assessment in expert versus amateur basketball players during optic flow stimulation Journal Article In: Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology, vol. 74, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Piras2024b,We evaluated the role of visual stimulation on postural muscles and the changes in the center of pressure (CoP) during standing posture in expert and amateur basketball players. Participants were instructed to look at a fixation point presented on a screen during foveal, peripheral, and full field optic flow stimuli. Postural mechanisms and motor strategies were assessed by simultaneous recordings of stabilometric, oculomotor, and electromyographic data during visual stimulation. We found significant differences between experts and amateurs in the orientation of visual attention. Experts oriented attention to the right of their visual field, while amateurs to the bottom-right. The displacement in the CoP mediolateral direction showed that experts had a greater postural sway of the right leg, while amateurs on the left leg. The entropy-based data analysis of the CoP mediolateral direction exhibited a greater value in amateurs than in experts. The root-mean-square and the coactivation index analysis showed that experts activated mainly the right leg while amateurs the left leg. In conclusion, playing sports for years seems to have induced some strong differences in the standing posture between the right and left sides. Even during non-ecological visual stimulation, athletes maintain postural adaptations to counteract the body oscillation. |
Alessandro Piras The timing of vision in basketball three-point shots Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Piras2024,The aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between gaze behaviour, motor responses and the direction of visual attention when different levels of basketball players were engaged in a basketball three-point shot. Twelve near-experts and 12 amateur basketball players, wearing an eye tracker and an inertial sensor, performed 20 shots on a basketball field, receiving the ball from a teammate, who then acted as the opponent. The trial sequence was subdivided into catching, aiming and ball flight phases. The analysis demonstrated that near-experts exhibited longer fixation durations and saccades of lower amplitude and peak velocity than amateurs. The gaze behaviour showed that all players utilized fixations during the last part of the catching phase, during most of the aiming phase, and during the final part of the ball flight phase. The greatest number of saccades was exhibited between the aiming and the ball flight phases, when the ball was released by the players. Saccades were oriented toward the teammate during the catching phase. Instead, during the aiming and ball flight phases, saccade orientations were not polarized toward a specific visual cue. In conclusion, vision plays a critical role in every aspect of the three-point shot in basketball, from catching the ball, to aiming preparation, and shot execution. It is a key factor in decision-making, spatial awareness, and overall performance in team sports. |
Leonardo Piot; Hui Chen; Anthony Picaud; Maxine Dos Santos; Lionel Granjon; Zili Luo; Ann Wai Huen To; Regine Y. Lai; Hintat Cheung; Thierry Nazzi Tonal interference in word learning? A comparison of Cantonese and French Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 242, pp. 1–26, 2024. @article{Piot2024,Most languages of the world use lexical tones to contrast words. Thus, understanding how individuals process tones when learning new words is fundamental for a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying word learning. The current study asked how tonal information is integrated during word learning. We investigated whether variability in tonal information during learning can interfere with the learning of new words and whether this is language and age dependent. Cantonese- and French-learning 30-month-olds (N = 97) and Cantonese- and French-speaking adults (N = 50) were tested with an eye-tracking task on their ability to learn phonetically different pairs of novel words in two learning conditions: a 1-tone condition in which each object was named with a single label and a 3-tone condition in which each object was named with three different labels varying in tone. We predicted learning in all groups in the 1-tone condition. For the 3-tone condition, because tones are part of the phonological system of Cantonese but not of French, we expected the Cantonese groups to either fail (toddlers) or show lower performance than in the 1-tone condition (adults), whereas the French groups might show less sensitivity to this manipulation. The results show that all participants learned in the 1-tone condition and were sensitive to tone variation to some extent. Learning in the 3-tone condition was impeded in both groups of toddlers. We argue that tonal interference in word learning likely comes from the phonological level in the Cantonese groups and from the acoustic level in the French groups. |
Juan D. Guevara Pinto; Megan H. Papesh High target prevalence may reduce the spread of attention during search tasks Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 86, no. 1, pp. 62–83, 2024. @article{Pinto2024,Target prevalence influences many cognitive processes during visual search, including target detection, search efficiency, and item processing. The present research investigated whether target prevalence may also impact the spread of attention during search. Relative to low-prevalence searches, high-prevalence searches typically yield higher fixation counts, particularly during target-absent trials. This may emerge because the attention spread around each fixation may be smaller for high than low prevalence searches. To test this, observers searched for targets within object arrays in Experiments 1 (free-viewing) and 2 (gaze-contingent viewing). In Experiment 3, observers searched for targets in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) stream at the center of the display while simultaneously processing occasional peripheral objects. Experiment 1 used fixation patterns to estimate attentional spread, and revealed that attention was narrowed during high, relative to low, prevalence searches. This effect was weakened during gaze-contingent search (Experiment 2) but emerged again when eye movements were unnecessary in RSVP search (Experiment 3). These results suggest that, although task demands impact how attention is allocated across displays, attention may also narrow when searching for frequent targets. |
Ana Luísa Pinho; Hugo Richard; Ana Fernanda Ponce; Michael Eickenberg; Alexis Amadon; Elvis Dohmatob; Isabelle Denghien; Juan Jesús Torre; Swetha Shankar; Himanshu Aggarwal; Alexis Thual; Thomas Chapalain; Chantal Ginisty; Séverine Becuwe-Desmidt; Séverine Roger; Yann Lecomte; Valérie Berland; Laurence Laurier; Véronique Joly-Testault; Gaëlle Médiouni-Cloarec; Christine Doublé; Bernadette Martins; Gaël Varoquaux; Stanislas Dehaene; Lucie Hertz-Pannier; Bertrand Thirion Individual Brain Charting dataset extension, third release for movie watching and retinotopy data Journal Article In: Scientific Data, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Pinho2024,The Individual Brain Charting (IBC) is a multi-task functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging dataset acquired at high spatial-resolution and dedicated to the cognitive mapping of the human brain. It consists in the deep phenotyping of twelve individuals, covering a broad range of psychological domains suitable for functional-atlasing applications. Here, we present the inclusion of task data from both naturalistic stimuli and trial-based designs, to uncover structures of brain activation. We rely on the Fast Shared Response Model (FastSRM) to provide a data-driven solution for modelling naturalistic stimuli, typically containing many features. We show that data from left-out runs can be reconstructed using FastSRM, enabling the extraction of networks from the visual, auditory and language systems. We also present the topographic organization of the visual system through retinotopy. In total, six new tasks were added to IBC, wherein four trial-based retinotopic tasks contributed with a mapping of the visual field to the cortex. IBC is open access: source plus derivatives imaging data and meta-data are available in public repositories. |
Hannah Pickard; Petrina Chu; Claire Essex; Emily J. Goddard; Katie Baulcombe; Ben Carter; Rachael Bedford; Tim J. Smith Toddler screen use before bed and its effect on sleep and attention: A randomized clinical trial Journal Article In: JAMA Pediatrics, vol. 178, no. 12, pp. 1270–1279, 2024. @article{Pickard2024,IMPORTANCE Toddler screen time has been associated with poorer sleep and differences in attention. Understanding the causal impact of screen time on early development is of the highest importance. OBJECTIVE To test (1) the feasibility of the 7-week parent-administered screen time intervention (PASTI) in toddlers (aged 16-30 months) who have screen time in the hour before bed and (2) the impact of PASTI on toddlers' sleep and attention. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This assessor-blinded, UK-based randomized clinical trial was conducted between July 2022 and July 2023. This was a single-site study that enrolled families with a toddler aged between 16 and 30 months, living within 75 miles of the Babylab, and with 10 minutes or more of screen time in the hour before bed on 3 or more days a week. Exclusion criteria were (1) a genetic or neurological condition, (2) premature birth (<37 weeks), and (3) current participation in another study. INTERVENTIONS Families were randomized (1:1:1) to (1) PASTI: caregivers removed toddler screen time in the hour before bed and used activities from a bedtime box instead (eg, reading, puzzles); (2) bedtime box (BB only): used matched before-bed activities, with no mention of screen time; or (3) no intervention (NI): continued as usual. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Feasibility outcomes: participation rate, intervention adherence, retention, family experiences, and assessment acceptability. Efficacy outcomes: screen use, actigraphy-measured sleep, and eye-tracking attention measures. RESULTS A total of 427 families were screened, 164 were eligible (38.4%), and 105 families were randomized (mean [SD] age, 23.7 [4.6] months; 60 male [57%]). The trial was feasible, with 99% participant (104 of 105) retention and 94% of families (33 of 35) adhering to PASTI. PASTI showed reductions in parent-reported screen time (vs NI: Cohen d = -0.96; 95% CI, -1.32 to -0.60; vs BB only: Cohen d = -0.65; 95% CI, -1.03 to -0.27). PASTI showed small to medium improvements in objectively measured sleep efficiency (vs NI: Cohen d = 0.27; 95% CI, -0.11 to 0.66; vs BB only: Cohen d = 0.56; 95% CI, 0.17-0.96), night awakenings (vs NI: Cohen d = -0.28; 95% CI, -0.67 to 0.12; vs BB only: Cohen d = -0.31; 95% CI, -0.71 to 0.10), and reduced daytime sleep (vs NI: Cohen d = -0.30; 95% CI, -0.74 to 0.13) but no difference compared with BB only. There was no observable effect of PASTI on objective measures of attention. Compared with BB only, PASTI showed a difference on parent-reported effortful control (Cohen d = -0.40; 95% CI, -0.75 to -0.05) and inhibitory control (Cohen d = -0.48; 95% CI, -0.77 to -0.19), due to an increase in BB-only scores. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Results of this randomized clinical trial show that, supporting pediatric recommendations, removing screen time before toddler bedtime was feasible and showed modest preliminary beneficial effects on sleep. A future full confirmatory trial is needed before PASTI's adoption by parents and pediatricians. |
Zhongling Pi; Qiuchen Yu; Yi Zhang; Yan Li; Hui Chen; Jiumin Yang Presenting points or rank: The impacts of leaderboard elements on English vocabulary learning through video lectures Journal Article In: Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 104–117, 2024. @article{Pi2024d,Background: Leaderboards are a highly popular gamification component used in student learning to enhance motivation, attentional engagement, and learning performance. However, few studies have examined the effects of individual leaderboard elements on English vocabulary learning through video lectures. Objectives: The present study aimed to examine how different leaderboard elements (i.e., points and rank) may affect students' English vocabulary learning through video lectures. Methods: A total of 34 students were assigned to groups using different leaderboard elements in a counterbalanced order. Participants' motivation, eye movements, and learning performance were measured and analysed. Results and Conclusions: Students' leaderboard rank was shown to increase their motivation regardless of whether other elements were present. Eye movement tracking revealed that the presence of the leaderboard increased students' saccades between the questions and the options, and lengthened their dwell time on the learning materials while reducing their dwell time on the non-learning-related screen areas. Presenting students' rank alone also improved their learning performance. Implications: Our findings strongly support the use of video lectures for English vocabulary learning, with the following recommendations: (1) Instructors should present students' rank on the leaderboard to enhance students' motivation and engagement; (2) Instructors should present only the students' rank on the leaderboard to also enhance students' learning performance. |
Zhongling Pi; Renjia Liu; Hongjuan Ling; Xingyu Zhang; Shuo Wang; Xiying Li The emotional design of an instructor: Body gestures do not boost the effects of facial expressions in video lectures Journal Article In: Interactive Learning Environments, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 952–971, 2024. @article{Pi2024c,A video lecture instructor exhibiting positive emotion has been shown to induce similar emotions in students, improving the students' motivation and increasing their attention, thus improving their learning performance. However, little systematic research exists on which specific design features with regards to the instructor can induce such emotions. The current study aimed to test whether congruent body gestures boost the effects of an instructor's facial expressions (happy vs. bored) on learning from video lectures in terms of students' emotions, motivation, attention, cognitive load, and learning performance. There were four conditions: (1) a happy face without body gestures, (2) a happy face accompanied with happy body gestures, (3) a bored face without body gestures, and (4) a bored face accompanied with bored body gestures. One-way repeated ANOVAs showed that congruent body gestures strengthened the emotional effects, and strengthened the attentional split effects of the happy face; when the instructor did not produce body gestures, her happy face facilitated students' learning performance compared to the bored face. Our findings suggest that instructors should be encouraged to exhibit a happy face without body gestures when giving video lectures to increase students' learning. |
Zhongling Pi; Hongjuan Ling; Xiying Li; Qin Wang Instructors' pointing gestures and positive facial expressions hinder learning in video lectures: Insights from teachers and students in China Journal Article In: Education and Information Technologies, vol. 29, pp. 21115–21131, 2024. @article{Pi2024b,In video lectures, instructors naturally produce nonverbal behaviors, such as gestures, facial expressions, and gaze guidance. Instructors' pointing gestures can act as attentional cues, directing students' attention, while their positive facial expressions can act as social cues, eliciting students' positive social response. The current study examined whether an instructor's positive facial expressions weakened the benefits of the pointing gestures in video lectures. We designed an eye-tracking experiment, recruiting a total of 32 students. We found that when the instructor combined pointing gestures with positive facial expressions, students dwelled shorter on the slides and longer on the instructor, and showed lower learning performance. The results partially supported our hypotheses, suggesting that the effect of an instructor's pointing gestures on student learning could be influenced by the instructor's facial expressions in video lectures with slides. The findings offer valuable practical implications for enhancing the design of video lectures that feature an instructor alongside slides. Instructors should refrain from using attentional cues and positive-emotional social cues simultaneously to promote students' learning in video lectures. |