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2025 |
Yawen Guo; Jon D. Elhai; Christian Montag; Dongyu Liu; Xinyu Zhang; Haibo Yang Temporal dynamics in attentional bias toward shopping cues among problematic online shoppers Journal Article In: Journal of Behavioral Addictions, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 1079–1094, 2025. @article{Guo2025,Background and aims: Online shopping has become a primary form of consumption in daily life, inevitably accompanied by the emergence of problematic online shopping. Attentional bias towards online shopping cues influences individuals' online shopping behavior. This study examined attentional bias mechanisms in problematic online shoppers using two experiments. Methods: This study combines the dot-probe task and eye-tracking technology to explore attentional bias and temporal dynamics toward shopping-related cues among problematic online shoppers. Experiment 1 recruited 84 participants to investigate attentional bias toward proximal cues, while Experiment 2 recruited 76 participants to examine attentional bias toward distal cues. Results: The results of Experiment 1 showed that both problematic online shoppers and control individuals exhibited shorter first fixation latency, longer gaze duration, and total fixation duration toward proximal cues. And only problematic online shoppers exhibited slower first exit saccade velocity and average exit saccade velocity. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that problematic online shoppers exhibited longer gaze duration and total fixation duration, as well as faster first entry saccade velocity toward distal cues. Discussion and conclusions: In summary, problematic online shoppers exhibit similar attentional bias toward both shopping proximal and distal cues, which are presented as the vigilance-maintenance pattern. For problematic online shoppers, distal cues have gradually acquired incentive value comparable to that of proximal cues. However, it should be noted that control individuals also exhibited attentional bias toward proximal cues. |
Jessica N. Goetz; Mark B. Neider Top-down categorical information can be utilized in distractor suppression Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 87, no. 5, pp. 1397–1415, 2025. @article{Goetz2025c,Studies of attention have found behavioral benefits when observers are provided with top-down information related to distractor items. This effect is known as distractor suppression and is thought to be an independent process from target guidance. Most studies have focused on salient or singleton cues to elucidate upon the top-down versus bottom-up debate. Here, we examined if distractor suppression applies to categorical cues through three experiments. In Experiment 1, we modeled previously reported paradigms and replicated suppression effects to salient stimuli but with categorical objects. In Experiment 2, stimulus salience was kept constant, and participants were informed that a category of objects was always a distractor. We found distractor suppression effects where response times (RTs) were faster on trials that included the cued distractor category. In Experiment 3, distractor suppression effects were preserved when we utilized a slightly modified target set embedded in categorical objects. The present set of studies indicate that categorical information can be suppressed. The results suggest that attentional guidance may not be reliant on only the weighting of target features when categorical information is known, but also the use of relevant distractor information. |
Elena Gessa; Chiara Valzolgher; Elena Giovanelli; Massimo Vescovi; Chiara Visentin; Nicola Prodi; Eloise Di Blasi; Viola Sadler; Francesco Pavani Speech-reading on the lips as a cognitive resource to understand speech in noise Journal Article In: Experimental Brain Research, vol. 243, no. 7, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Gessa2025,In challenging acoustic scenarios, speech processing is often linked to listening effort, which can be described as the balance between cognitive demands and motivation to understand speech. In such conditions, people usually rely on several behavioral strategies to support speech understanding and reduce listening effort (e.g., speech-reading behavior). Still, it is not clear what cognitive mechanisms underlie the use of behavioral strategies for listening. We hypothesized that the cognitive and motivational dimensions of listening effort may also drive speech-reading strategies spontaneously adopted in challenging conditions. Normal-hearing adults (N = 64) performed audiovisual speech-recognition in noise, in combination with a concurrent mnemonic task with low vs. high working memory engagement to set cognitive demands. Motivation was manipulated between-subjects through fixed or performance-related monetary rewards. Speech-reading was tracked with eye-movement, and pupil dilation served as a physiological measure of listening effort, confirming manipulation effectiveness. We found that exerted listening effort intensifies speech-reading behavior, with motivation playing a key role in this behavioral adaptation to enhanced cognitive demands. These findings document the association between internal mental processes and behavioral adaptation in the speech domain. |
Elisa Gavard; Valérie Chanoine; Franziska Geringswald; Jean-Luc Anton; Eddy Cavalli; Johannes C. Ziegler Neural networks for semantic and syntactic prediction and visual-motor statistical learning in adult readers with and without dyslexia Journal Article In: Neurobiology of Language, vol. 6, pp. 1–34, 2025. @article{Gavard2025,Prediction has become a key concept for understanding language comprehension, language production, and more recently reading. Recent studies suggest that predictive mechanisms in reading may be related to domain-general statistical learning (SL) abilities that support the extraction of regularities from sequential input. Both mechanisms have been discussed in relation to developmental dyslexia. Some suggest that SL is impaired in dyslexia with negative effects on the ability to make linguistic predictions. Others suggest that dyslexic readers rely to a greater extent on semantic and syntactic predictions to compensate for lower-level deficits. Here, we followed these two research questions in a single study. We therefore assessed the effects of semantic and syntactic prediction in reading and SL abilities in a population of university students with dyslexia and a group of typical readers using fMRI. The SL task was a serial reaction time (SRT) task that was performed inside and outside the scanner. The predictive reading task was performed in the scanner and used predictive versus nonpredictive semantic and syntactic contexts. Our results revealed distinct neural networks underlying semantic and syntactic predictions in reading, group differences in predictive processing in the left precentral gyrus and right anterior insula, and an association between predictive reading and SL, particularly in dyslexic readers. These findings contribute to our understanding of the interplay between SL, predictive processing, and compensation in dyslexia, providing new insights into the neural mechanisms that support reading. |
Marion Gardier; Marie Geurten Is uncertainty in the eyes or in parents' talk? Linking an eye-tracking measure of toddlers' core metacognition to parental metacognitive talk Journal Article In: Child Development, vol. 96, no. 4, pp. 1385–1394, 2025. @article{Gardier2025,Recent studies have established that even preverbal infants can monitor and regulate their mental states, raising the question of the variables involved in this early metacognitive development. Here, the metacognition of fifty-five 18-month-old (27 females; mostly White; data collection: 2023) was assessed using an eye-tracking paradigm designed to capture children's ability to seek information (i.e., a cue) under uncertainty. Moreover, the relations between toddlers' metacognition and parental (52 mothers) metacognitive talk during a 10-min play session were also examined. Beyond replicating previous data showing metacognitive accuracy in toddlerhood, our results indicated that the frequency of parental utterances referring to metacognitive monitoring—but not metacognitive regulation—was related to toddlers' metacognition (OR = 1.3). Implications for sociocultural models of metacognitive development are discussed. |
Xiaoxue Fu; Emma Platt; Frederick Shic; Jessica Bradshaw Infant social attention associated with elevated likelihood for autism spectrum disorder: A multi-method comparison Journal Article In: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 55, no. 7, pp. 2337–2349, 2025. @article{Fu2025,Purpose: The study aimed to compare eye tracking (ET) and manual coding (MC) measures of attention to social and nonsocial information in infants with elevated familial likelihood (EL) of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and low likelihood of ASD (LL). ET provides a temporally and spatially sensitive tool for measuring gaze allocation. Existing evidence suggests that ET is a promising tool for detecting distinct social attention patterns that may serve as a biomarker for ASD. However, ET is prone to data loss, especially in young EL infants. Methods: To increase evidence for ET as a viable tool for capturing atypical social attention in EL infants, the current prospective, longitudinal study obtained ET and MC measures of social and nonsocial attention in 25 EL and 47 LL infants at several time points between 3 and 24 months of age. Results: ET data was obtained with a satisfactory success rate of 95.83%, albeit with a higher degree of data loss compared to MC. Infant age and ASD likelihood status did not impact the extent of ET or MC data loss. There was a significant positive association between the ET and MC measures of attention, and separate analyses of attention using ET and AC measures yielded comparable findings. These analyses indicated group differences (EL vs. LL) in age-related change in attention to social vs. nonsocial information. Conclusion: Together, the findings support infant ET as a promising approach for identifying very early markers associated with ASD likelihood. |
Rika Etteldorf; Annabell Coors; Santiago Estrada; Monique M. B. Breteler; Ulrich Ettinger Regional brain volume and cortical thickness mediate age-related differences in eye movement control Journal Article In: The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, vol. 80, no. 7, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Etteldorf2025,Objectives: Eye movements (EMs) are considered biomarkers for age-related neurological or psychological deficits, and oculomotor control has been shown to strongly decline with age. This study aimed to understand the neural pathways of these age-related changes. Methods The analysis was based on 5,400 participants (aged 30-95 years) from the population-based Rhineland Study. EMs were recorded using video-based infrared oculography at 1,000 Hz. Brain structure measures were obtained from T1-weighted MR images using FreeSurfer. Relations of brain structure with EM outcomes were quantified using multivariable linear regression models while adjusting for age, sex, educational level, and best-corrected visual acuity. Brain structure measures were further analyzed as potential mediators in the relation between age and EM outcomes. Results: Larger volumes of the globus pallidus and thalamus were associated with shorter saccadic latencies. Thicker cortex in frontal and parietal brain regions was associated with fewer direction errors in the antisaccade task in female but not in male participants. Thicker cortex in the calcarine sulcus was associated with better smooth pursuit performance. Cerebellar gray and white matter volumes were associated with better performance on the antisaccade and smooth pursuit tasks. Mediation analyses suggested that age-related differences in brain structures explain up to 18% of age-related differences in oculomotor performance. Discussion: Our findings extend previous studies by identifying novel brain structural correlates of EM performance and quantifying the extent to which they explain age-related differences in EM performance. Our results show that differences in brain structure partly account for age-related differences in EM performance. |
Menghuan Chen; Mario Reutter; Paul Pauli; Matthias Gamer; Andre Pittig Overcoming automatic behavioral tendencies in approach-avoidance conflict decisions Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 62, no. 7, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Chen2025g,Adequate control over automatic responses to affective stimuli is crucial for adaptive goal-oriented behavior. However, it remains unclear how individuals overcome automatic approach-avoidance tendencies to appetitive and aversive stimuli. Here we examined free versus forced approach-avoidance decisions to four conditioned stimuli (CSs), which were previously paired with either a single aversive (avCS+) or appetitive outcome (appCS+), both (i.e., conflicting) outcomes (confCS+), or no outcome (neuCS−). These CSs were presented in an anticipation phase before participants could use a joystick to either approach and obtain CS-specific outcomes or avoid without getting anything. Response times, subjective ratings, heart rate, and eye-tracking data were recorded in N = 75 participants. Results revealed that for single outcomes, concordant responses (e.g., avoidance to the avCS+) were faster than forced discordant responses (e.g., approach to the avCS+). During anticipation, gaze fixations shifted towards the spatial location associated with the concordant response for single-outcome stimuli (e.g., upward for avoidance of avCS+). Conflicting stimuli elicited intermediate behavioral and gaze patterns at the group level, while exploratory analyses revealed substantial individual differences: High avoiders (i.e., participants showing an overall high proportion of avoidance) exhibited slower approach responses and greater threat-focused visual attention compared to low avoiders. Decreased heart rate in response to all CSs suggests a general preparation of behavioral responses, while increased pupil dilation during the anticipation of aversive stimuli indicates threat-related processing. These findings suggest that competing outcomes can amplify individual differences in motivational salience and therefore might inspire clinical interventions focused on inhibiting disorder-specific behavioral tendencies. |
Shan-Mei Chang; Dai-Yi Wang; Zheng-Hong Guan Craving and attentional bias in gaming: Comparing esports, casual, and high-risk gamers using eye-tracking Journal Article In: Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 168, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Chang2025d,Attentional biases, as measured through eye movements, have been observed in both gaming disorders and substance addictions. However, few studies compare these biases among esports gamers (ESG), high-risk gamers (HRG), and other frequent gamers, despite ESG and HRG both groups dedicating significant time to gaming. This study included 47 male participants aged 15 to 19. Participants were categorized as ESG, casual gamers (CG), or HRG based on their MOBA experience, esports training, and Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) scores. Each participant completed a dot-probe task with 56 stimulus conditions based on gaming cues, while eye-tracking technology recorded eye movements. The results indicated that HRG spent more total viewing time on stimulus images than ESG and CG. Additionally, HRG had longer first fixation durations and fewer saccade counts than the other two groups. Furthermore, HRG reported higher impulsivity and lower attentional focusing, suggesting a distinct psychological profile. Although ESG did not exhibit the same attentional biases as HRG, their self-reported gaming time was similar. This may be due to gaming being a career commitment for ESG, while for HRG, it serves as an escape from life pressures. Notably, eye-movement measures can identify high-risk tendencies early and uncover differences missed by self-report scales, including saccade count and attentional shifting. Caution is needed when diagnosing gaming disorder solely based on gaming time and self-reports. Future research could use attentional bias tasks as complementary diagnostic tools and further explore higher depression levels in HRG and ESG compared to CG. |
Dario Cazzoli; Brigitte C. Kaufmann; Henrik Rühe; Nora Geiser; Thomas Nyffeler Incidence of visuospatial neglect in acute stroke: Assessment and stroke characteristics in an unselected 1-year cohort Journal Article In: Stroke, vol. 56, no. 7, pp. 1693–1703, 2025. @article{Cazzoli2025,BACKGROUND: The true incidence of visuospatial neglect, impaired attention toward contralesional space, remains unclear. Common variability sources are sensitivity differences of conventional assessments and the exclusion of patients with language, motor, and other cognitive impairments. We aimed to determine the incidence of visuospatial neglect in an unselected cohort of patients with acute stroke using video oculography during free visual exploration, a newly established assessment overcoming the aforementioned biases. METHODS: Single-center, prospective, observational cohort study. We screened every patient admitted to a representative Swiss stroke center over 1 year (N=626). Two hundred eighty-five patients were eligible (first-ever stroke within 72 hours), and 221 were included. The incidence of visuospatial neglect was determined with conventional paper-pencil assessments and video oculography during free visual exploration. Demographic, risk, and stroke-related factors, as well as stroke localization, were also considered. Feasibility and ability to detect visuospatial neglect of the assessments were evaluated. RESULTS: The overall incidence of visuospatial neglect was ≈38%: widely varying location-specifically: ≈61% and ≈22% for stroke in the right and left cerebral hemispheres, respectively, and ≈14% to ≈37% for some less commonly affected infratentorial areas or multifocal stroke. In hemispheric stroke, visuospatial neglect was most common when the middle (≈64% right and ≈21% left) and posterior (≈53% right and ≈25% left) cerebral artery territories were affected. Neglect patients had higher National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale scores, more commonly atrial fibrillation and thrombectomy, and less commonly an undetermined stroke cause. They were older, with ≈4% yearly increase in the odds of having visuospatial neglect. Video oculography during free visual exploration was administrable and detected visuospatial neglect more often than conventional paper-pencil assessments. CONCLUSIONS: The incidence of visuospatial neglect in an unselected cohort, using a highly sensitive assessment, is considerably higher than previously assumed and can also occur after less typically localized strokes. These results can enhance the awareness of visuospatial neglect in the acute setting, potentially facilitating earlier identification and therapy of this disabling disorder. |
Alejandro Cambronero-Delgadillo; Christof Körner; Iain Gilchrist; Margit Höfler Influence of time pressure on successive visual searches Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 1–17, 2025. @article{CambroneroDelgadillo2025,In the current eye-tracking experiment, we explored the effects of time pressure on visual search performance and oculomotor behavior. Participants performed two consecutive time-pressured searches for a T-shaped target among L-shaped distractors in two separate displays of fifteen items, with the option to self-interrupt the first search (Search 1) to proceed to the second (Search 2). Our results showed that participants maintained high search accuracy during Search 1 across all conditions, but performance noticeably declined during Search 2 with increasing time pressure. Time pressure also led to decreased numbers of fixations and faster response times overall. When both targets where acquired, fixation durations were longer in Search 2 than in Search 1, while saccade amplitudes were shorter in Search 2. Our findings suggest that time pressure leads to the first target being prioritized when targets possess equal value, emphasizing the challenges of optimizing performance in time-sensitive tasks. |
Mellisa Boyle; Barry Dauphin; Harold H. Greene; Mindee Juve; Ellen Day-Suba Eye movements during pareidolia: Exploring biomarkers for thinking and perception problems on the Rorschach Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Boyle2025,Eye movements (EMs) offer valuable insights into cognitive and perceptual processes, serving as potential biomarkers for disordered thinking. This study explores the relationship between EM indices and perception and thinking problems in the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS). Sixty non-clinical participants underwent eye-tracking while completing the Rorschach test, focusing on variables from the Perception and Thinking Problems Domain (e.g., WSumCog, SevCog, FQo%). The results reveal that increased cognitive disturbances were associated with greater exploratory activity but reduced processing efficiency. Regression analyses highlighted the strong predictive role of cognitive variables (e.g., WSumCog) over perceptual ones (e.g., FQo%). Minimal overlap was observed between performance-based (R-PAS) and self-report measures (BSI), underscoring the need for multi-method approaches. The findings suggest that EM patterns could serve as biomarkers for early detection and intervention, offering a foundation for future research on psychotic-spectrum processes in clinical and non-clinical populations. |
Michele Bevilacqua; Fabienne Windel; Elena Beanato; Pauline Menoud; Sarah Zandvliet; Nicola Ramdass; Lisa Fleury; Julie Hervé; Krystel R. Huxlin; Friedhelm C. Hummel; Estelle Raffin Pathway-dependent brain stimulation responses indicate motion processing integrity after stroke Journal Article In: Brain, vol. 148, no. 7, pp. 2361–2372, 2025. @article{Bevilacqua2025,Homonymous hemianopia (HH), a common visual impairment resulting from occipital lobe lesions, affects a significant number of stroke survivors. Intensive perceptual training can foster recovery, possibly by enhancing surviving visual pathways. This study employed cortico-cortical paired associative stimulation (ccPAS) to induce associative plasticity within the residual and bidirectional primary visual cortex (V1)-middle temporal area (MT) pathways in stroke patients. We used ccPAS, which is thought to tap into Hebbian-like spike-timing dependent plasticity, over a motion processing pathway in stroke patients to transiently improve visual motion discrimination in their blind field. Sixteen stroke patients participated in this double-blind, crossover study comparing the effects of bidirectional ccPAS (V1-to-MT or MT-to-V1) on motion discrimination and EEG-Granger Causality. Additionally, we explored potential multimodal sources of inter-individual variability. Results showed that MT-to-V1 ccPAS enhanced motion direction discrimination, but the expected electrophysiological increase in top-down MT-to-V1 inputs was observed only in patients who showed improvement in motion discrimination. Good responders to MT-V1 ccPAS also demonstrated improved functional coupling between the cortical motion pathway and other relevant areas in the visual network, as well as more preserved ipsilesional V1-MT structural integrity. These findings indicate that targeted ccPAS can effectively engage functionally relevant residual visual pathways in stroke-affected brains, potentially offering new avenues for patient stratification and visual recovery strategies. |
Lola Beerendonk; Jorge F. Mejías; Stijn A. Nuiten; Jan Willem Gee; Jasper B. Zantvoord; Johannes J. Fahrenfort; Simon Gaal Adaptive arousal regulation: Pharmacologically shifting the peak of the Yerkes–Dodson curve by catecholaminergic enhancement of arousal Journal Article In: PNAS, vol. 122, no. 28, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Beerendonk2025,Performance typically peaks at moderate arousal levels, consistent with the Yerkes–Dodson law, as confirmed by recent human and mouse pupillometry studies. Arousal states are influenced by neuromodulators like catecholamines (noradrenaline and dopamine) and acetylcholine. To investigate their contributions to this law, we pharmacologically enhanced arousal while measuring human decision-making and spontaneous arousal fluctuations via pupil size. The catecholaminergic agent atomoxetine increased overall arousal and shifted the entire arousal–performance curve, suggesting a relative arousal mechanism where performance adapts to arousal fluctuations within arousal states. In contrast, the cholinergic agent donepezil did not measurably affect arousal or the curve. We modeled these findings in a neurobiologically plausible computational framework, showing how catecholaminergic modulation alters a disinhibitory neural circuit that encodes sensory evidence for decision-making. This work suggests that performance adapts flexibly to arousal fluctuations, ensuring optimal performance in each and every global arousal state. |
Stefanie I. Becker; Zachary Hamblin-Frohman; Koralalage Don Raveen Amarasekera Visual search is relational without prior context learning Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 260, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Becker2025,The most prominent models of visual attention assume that we tune attention to the specific feature value of a sought-after object (e.g., a specific colour or orientation) to aid search. However, subsequent research has shown that attention is often tuned to the relative feature of the target, that the target has in relation to other items in the surround (e.g., redder/greener, darker/lighter, larger/smaller), in line with a Relational Account of Attention. Previous research is still limited though, as it used repeated-target designs and relatively sparse displays. With this, it is still unknown whether we can indeed tune attention to relative features prior to the first eye movement, or whether this requires context knowledge gained from experience. Moreover, it is unclear how search progresses from one item to the next. The present study tested these questions in a 36-item search display with multiple distractors and variable target and non-target colours. The first fixations on a trial showed that these displays still reliably evoked relational search, even when observers had no knowledge of the context. Moreover, the first five fixations within a trial showed that we tend to select the most extreme items first, followed by the next-extreme, until the target is found, in line with the relational account. These findings show that information about the relative target feature can be rapidly extracted and is used to guide attention in the first fixation(s) of search, whereby attention only hones in on the target colour after multiple fixations on relatively more extreme distractors. |
Srishty Aggarwal; Supratim Ray Changes in Higuchi fractal dimension across age in healthy human EEG are anticorrelated with changes in oscillatory power and 1/f slope Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 1–17, 2025. @article{Aggarwal2025,Nonlinear dynamical methods such as Higuchi fractal dimension (HFD) are often used to study the complexities of brain activity. In human electroencephalogram (EEG), although power in the gamma band (30–70 Hz) and the slope of the power spectral density (PSD) have been shown to reduce with healthy ageing, there are conflicting findings regarding how HFD and other measures of complexity vary with ageing. Further, the dependence of HFD on features obtained from PSD (such as gamma power and slope) has not been thoroughly probed. To address these issues, we computed time- and frequency-resolved HFD for EEG data collected from an elderly population (N = 217), aged between 50 and 88 years, for baseline (BL) eyes open state and during a fixation task in which visual grating stimuli that induce strong gamma oscillations were presented. During BL, HFD increased with age for frequencies up to 150 Hz but surprisingly showed an opposite trend at higher frequencies. Interestingly, this change in HFD was opposite to the age-related change in PSD 1/f slope. Further, stimulus-related changes in HFD were anticorrelated with the changes in oscillatory power. However, stimulus- and age-related changes in HFD persisted even after normalization with surrogates, showing the effect of nonlinear dynamics on HFD. Further, age classification using HFD was slightly better than classification using spectral features (power and slope). Therefore, HFD could be jointly sensitive to various spectral features as well as some nonlinearities not captured using spectral analysis, which could enhance our understanding of brain dynamics underlying healthy ageing. |
Miao Zhong; Yiwen Yu; Shiqi Tan; Xiangyong Yuan; Yi Jiang Pupil dynamics and causality perception: Insights from pupillometry Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 62, no. 6, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Zhong2025,Causality perception is fundamental to interpreting interactions between objects in the physical world. However, little is known about whether physiological responses, particularly pupil size, can implicitly track causality perception. This study employed pupillometry across three experiments to investigate the relationship between pupil dynamics and causality perception. The results revealed that spatiotemporally contiguous launching events (i.e., direct launching), perceived as a causal collision between two objects, induced greater pupil dilation after the collision than simple single-object motion (i.e., passing and pass-by events) or motion with a temporally inverted cause-effect order (i.e., temporal-inverted events), both of which lacked a causal structure. However, launching with a spatial gap (i.e., gap launching) also elicited pupil dilation comparable to direct launching, although gap launching was rated lower in perceived causality. Temporal-inverted events provoked early pupil dilation, corresponding to the sudden and spontaneous motion of the first object. Furthermore, for invariant visual stimuli that could be perceived as either causal launching or noncausal passing (i.e., ambiguous events), pupil size changes did not differentiate between subjective causal and noncausal judgments. These findings indicate that although pupil dilation was evident during causality perception, it was not uniquely or directly tied to causality perception but was influenced by multiple factors, particularly responses to spontaneous motion. This study deepens the understanding of the physiological mechanisms underlying causality perception while also emphasizing the limitation of using pupillometry to examine it. |
Yiyang Yang; Hulin Ren Attention and outcomes across learning conditions in lL2 vocabulary acquisition: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 1–21, 2025. @article{Yang2025c,The role of attention has been shown to be essential in second language (L2) learning. However, the impact of different learning conditions on attention and learning outcomes remains underdeveloped, particularly through the application of eye-tracking technology. This study aims to evaluate the effect of intentional learning conditions (i.e., data-driven learning) on vocabulary learning and attentional allocations. Twenty-six intermediate English L2 learners participated in the study to learn the usage of four artificial attributive adjectives in noun phrases (NPs). Learning outcomes were analysed to assess the types of knowledge developed, shedding light on the role of attention and the conscious processing of word usage. Eye-tracking data, collected using Eyelink 1000 plus, investigated gaze patterns and the allocation of attentional sources when applying the learned usage of adjectives. The results indicate that fixation stability and regression movements significantly differ under the impact of intentional learning conditions. Post-test results also indicate a shift in attention from the target adjectives to the associated nouns. These findings underscore the critical role of attention and highlight the influence of learning conditions on L2 vocabulary learning, providing practical implications and empirical validation for L2 educators and researchers aiming to enhance vocabulary instruction through intentional learning strategies. |
Jingjing Xu; Zhongling Pi; Meng Liu; Chaoqun Ye; Weiping Hu Effective learning through task motivation and learning scaffolding: Analyzing online collaborative interaction with eye tracking technology Journal Article In: Instructional Science, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 479–506, 2025. @article{Xu2025b,Discussion has become a crucial method of interactive learning in online collaborative environments. This study aims to identify the impact of different task motivation compositions and learning scaffolding on attention, learning performance, and behavioral patterns. The 90 Chinese undergraduate and graduate students (Mage=20.38 |
Zhimou Wang; Peida Zhan Eye-tracking-based hidden Markov modeling for revealing within-item cognitive strategy switching Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 57, no. 6, pp. 1–38, 2025. @article{Wang2025r,Identifying cognitive strategies in problem-solving helps researchers understand advanced cognitive processes and their applicable contexts. Current methods typically identify strategies for each item of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, capturing only between-item cognitive strategy switching (CSS). Although within-item CSS is recognized, methods to dynamically identify and reveal it are lacking. This study introduces the concept of an eye movement snippet, a basic unit for studying within-item CSS, along with a new eye-tracking process measure that quantifies the sequence length of alternatives viewed in a snippet. Combined with hidden Markov modeling, we propose a new method for dynamically identifying within-item cognitive strategies and revealing their switching. Using eye-tracking data from a matrix reasoning test, we demonstrate the value of the proposed method through a series of analyses. The results indicate that during problem-solving: (1) participants predominantly used two strategies—constructive matching and response elimination; (2) there is a high probability of switching from constructive matching to response elimination, but not vice versa; (3) more difficult items lead to more frequent strategy switching; (4) frequent strategy switching decreases time spent in the matrix area and on problem-solving planning; (5) frequent strategy switching correlates with incorrect answers for some items; and (6) frequent strategy switching increases total response time. Additionally, within-item CSS showed three distinct patterns as the test progressed, with significant differences in participants' intelligence levels and total test time among the patterns. Overall, the proposed method effectively identifies within-item cognitive strategies and their switching in matrix reasoning tasks. |
Wanning Wang; Xueying Li; Ning Jia Interpersonal distance moderate perceptions of fairness in social comparisons under gain-loss contexts: An eye tracking study Journal Article In: Current Psychology, vol. 44, no. 12, pp. 12172–12186, 2025. @article{Wang2025m,During social comparison, individuals' perceptions of fairness may change, but whether interpersonal distance can moderate perceptions of fairness during social comparison and whether this moderation differs between gain and loss contexts remains unclear. Here, eye-tracking technology was employed to compare fairness perceptions during social comparisons with companions of different interpersonal distances (i.e., mother, friend, or stranger) in gain and loss contexts. Behavioral results indicated an asymmetry in fairness perception during social comparison in the gain and loss contexts when the companion was the mother. In the gain context, downward comparisons elicited higher fairness perceptions than upward comparisons, whereas in the loss context, there was no significant difference in fairness perception between upward and downward comparisons. When the companion was a friend or a stranger, downward social comparisons consistently elicited higher fairness perceptions than upward comparisons, regardless of the gain or loss context. Eye-tracking results demonstrated that the influence of interpersonal distance on fairness perception during social comparison was reflected in the AOI dwell time%. Specifically, regardless of the gain or loss context, participants paid equal attention to themselves and their mothers when the companion was the mother. However, when the companion was a friend or a stranger, participants paid more attention to themselves than to the companion. Overall, the results suggest that interpersonal distance selectively moderates fairness perceptions during social comparison in gain and loss contexts, with an asymmetrical moderation pattern between these contexts. |
Gabriel Wainstein; Christopher J. Whyte; Kaylena A. Ehgoetz Martens; Eli J. Müller; Vicente Medel; Britt Anderson; Elisabeth Stöttinger; James Danckert; Brandon R. Munn; James M. Shine Evidence from pupillometry, fMRI, and RNN modelling shows that gain neuromodulation mediates task-relevant perceptual switches Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 13, pp. 1–26, 2025. @article{Wainstein2025,Perceptual updating has been hypothesised to rely on a network reset modulated by bursts of ascending neuromodulatory neurotransmitters, such as noradrenaline, abruptly altering the brain's susceptibility to changing sensory activity. To test this hypothesis at a large-scale, we analysed an ambiguous figures task using pupillometry and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Behaviourally, qualitative shifts in the perceptual interpretation of an ambiguous image were associated with peaks in pupil diameter, an indirect readout of phasic bursts in neuromodulatory tone. We further hypothesised that stimulus ambiguity drives neuromodulatory tone, leading to heightened neural gain, hastening perceptual switches. To explore this hypothesis computationally, we trained a recurrent neural network (RNN) on an analogous perceptual categorisation task, allowing gain to change dynamically with classification uncertainty. As predicted, higher gain accelerated perceptual switching by transiently destabilising the network's dynamical regime in periods of maximal uncertainty. We leveraged a low-dimensional readout of the RNN dynamics to develop two novel macroscale predictions: perceptual switches should occur with peaks in low-dimensional brain state velocity and with a flattened egocentric energy landscape. Using fMRI, we confirmed these predictions, highlighting the role of the neuromodulatory system in the large-scale network reconfigurations mediating adaptive perceptual updates. |
Yuta Suzuki; Shigeki Nakauchi; Hsin I. Liao Selective activation of ipRGC modulates working memory performance Journal Article In: PLoS One, vol. 20, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Suzuki2025,Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) are known to be sensitive to short-wavelength light (460–480nm; blue or cyan light) and to play a role in regulating physiological responses such as circadian rhythms. Previous studies have shown that exposure to blue light improves performance on working memory tasks compared with exposure to amber light. However, it remains unclear whether these cognitive benefits via light are attributable to integrated signals across ipRGCs and rod/cone or ipRGC alone. To address this, the present study investigates the specific contribution of ipRGCs to working memory performance using a silent substitution method that selectively manipulates ipRGC activity while minimizing the influence of LMS cone responses. Participants engaged in 1- and 2-back tasks under low- or high-ipRGC activation light, a metameric color perceived as magenta. Results showed that hit rate in the 2-back task was significantly higher under exposure to high-ipRGC light than to low-ipRGC light. Our overall findings provide direct evidence that isolated ipRGC activation, independent of perceptual blue or cone involvement, can modulate cognitive task processing. |
Nancy Sotero Silva; Christoph Kayser; Felix Bröhl In: Hearing Research, vol. 461, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{SoteroSilva2025,Eye movement-related eardrum oscillations (EMREOs) reflect movements of the tympanic membrane that scale with the magnitude and direction of saccades. EMREOs have been consistently described in humans and non-human primates, yet many questions regarding this phenomenon remain unresolved. Based on bilateral in-ear recordings in human participants we here explore several properties of these EMREOs in order to improve our understanding of this signal's origin and functional significance. Our data support that the EMREO time course is comparable between the left and right ears, and between paradigms guiding saccades by visual and auditory target stimuli. However, the precise amplitude time course differs significantly between ipsi- and contralateral saccades in addition to the previously known phase-inversion described for saccades in opposing directions. Finally, our data suggest that the EMREO amplitude is negatively related to the compliance of the tympanic membrane as established by tympanometry. Collectively, these results support the notion that EMREOs reflect motor-related top-down signals relayed to the ear from yet-to-be-resolved sources, and fuel the speculation that EMREOs may be generated by the middle ear muscles in a differential operation similar to the execution of ipsi- and contralateral saccades. |
Tanja C. Roembke; Bob McMurray Unlearning incorrect associations in word learning: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 1–35, 2025. @article{Roembke2025,Computational and animal models suggest that the unlearning or pruning of incorrect meanings matters for word learning. However, it is currently unclear how such pruning occurs during word learning and to what extent it depends on supervised and unsupervised learning. In two experiments (N1 = 40; N2 = 42), adult participants first completed a pretraining, in which each word was paired with two objects across trials: its target and another object (termed secondary target [T2]). Subsequently, participants learned the correct word-object-mappings in a supervised training paradigm and were then tested on the word meanings. During training, trials were structured such that some T2s never occurred with the targets, while others did, allowing us to disentangle the contributions of supervised and unsupervised pruning accounts. Eye movements were tracked during training and testing to measure the activation strength of alternative meanings. The experiments were identical but differed in how often the word was paired with the T2 during pretraining. We found that while weak incorrect associations were pruned quickly (Experiment 1), stronger ones remained present even after ceiling performance (Experiment 2), suggesting that the extent to which incorrect associations are unlearned depends on the strength of the initial mappings. Additionally, pruning was observed even for T2s that did not co-occur with their corresponding word during training in line with unsupervised pruning. Overall, these findings imply that subtle incorrect associations may remain in the lexicon and contribute to other language processes (e.g., word recognition) even after word learning is completed. |
Mario Reutter; Janna Teigeler; Matthias Gamer The influence of (social) anxiety and visual exploration on threat responding and generalization Journal Article In: Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol. 189, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Reutter2025,Fear generalization has been identified as an important mechanism that might contribute to the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders. It is, however, yet unclear to what degree attentional processes contribute to overgeneralization of fear in clinical samples. To address this issue, we utilized a set of facial photographs that was meticulously created such that pairs of faces could either be distinguished by looking into the eyes or the region around mouth and nose, respectively. These pairs were then employed as CS+ and CS− in a differential fear conditioning paradigm followed by a generalization test with morphs in steps of 20 %, creating a continuum between CS+ and CS−. In a sample with diverse levels of social and general anxiety (N = 87), we demonstrated that the amount of fear generalization depends on attentional orienting towards diagnostic facial features. While social anxiety did not affect the shape of generalization gradients, we observed altered visual exploration patterns and a distinct multi-phasic heart rate modulation in participants with higher social anxiety. General anxiety symptomatology was also related to these characteristics of visual exploration and additionally predicted a broad elevation of threat ratings. In summary, fear generalization depends on attentional deployment. Future work should build on these findings to further explore these processes in clinical populations. |
Luis D. Ramirez; Feiyi Wang; Sam Ling Attention alters population spatial frequency tuning Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 25, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Ramirez2025,Spatial frequency (SF) selectivity serves as a fundamental building block within the visual system, determining what we can and cannot see. Attention is theorized to augment the visibility of items in our environment by changing how we process SFs. However, the specific neural mechanisms underlying this effect remain unclear, particularly in humans. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure voxel-wise population SF tuning (pSFT), which allowed us to examine how attention alters the SF response profiles of neural populations in the early visual cortex (V1–V3). In the scanner, participants (five female, three male) were cued to covertly attend to one of two spatially competing letter streams, each defined by low or high SF content. This task promoted feature-based attention directed to a particular SF, as well as the suppression of the irrelevant stream's SF. Concurrently, we measured pSFT in a task-irrelevant hemifield to examine how the known spatial spread of feature-based attention influenced the SF tuning properties of neurons sampled within a voxel. We discovered that attention elicited attractive shifts in SF preference, toward the attended SF. This suggests that attention can profoundly influence populations of SF preference across the visual field, depending on task goals and native neural preferences. |
Daniel J. Pearce; Gerard M. Loughnane; Trevor T. J. Chong; Nele Demeyere; Jason B. Mattingley; Margaret J. Moore; Peter W. New; Redmond G. O'Connell; Megan H. O'Neill; Dragan Rangelov; Renerus J. Stolwyk; Sam S. Webb; Shou Han Zhou; Méadhbh B. Brosnan; Mark A. Bellgrove Target selection signals causally influence human perceptual decision-making Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 24, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Pearce2025,The ability to form decisions is a foundational cognitive function which is impaired across many psychiatric and neurological conditions. Understanding the neural processes underpinning clinical deficits may provide insights into the fundamental mechanisms of decision-making. The N2c has been identified as an EEG signal indexing the efficiency of early target selection, which subsequently influences the timing of perceptual reports through modulating neural evidence accumulation rates. Evidence for the contribution of the N2c to human decision-making however has thus far come from correlational research in neurologically healthy individuals. Here, we capitalized on the superior temporal resolution of EEG to show that unilateral brain lesions in male and female humans were associated with specific deficits in both the timing and strength of the N2c in the damaged hemisphere, with corresponding deficits in the timing of perceptual reports contralaterally. The extent to which the N2c influenced clinical deficits in perceptual reporting speed depended on neural rates of evidence accumulation. This work provides causal evidence that the N2c indexes an early, hemisphere-specific process supporting human decision-making. This noninvasive EEG marker could be used to monitor novel approaches for remediating clinical deficits in perceptual decision-making across a range of brain disorders. |
Jasmine Pan; Louis N. Vinke; Joseph T. McGuire; Sam Ling Heterogeneous effects of cognitive arousal on the contrast response in human visual cortex Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 25, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{Pan2025a,While animal studies have found that arousal states modulate visual responses, direct evidence for effects of arousal on human vision remains limited. Here, we used fMRI to examine effects of cognitive arousal on the gain of contrast response functions (CRFs) in human visual cortex. To measure CRFs, we measured BOLD responses in early visual cortex (V1–V3) while participants (n = 20, 14 females and 6 males) viewed stimuli that parametrically varied in contrast. To induce different cognitive arousal states, participants solved auditory arithmetic problems categorized as either Easy (low arousal) or Hard (high arousal). We found diversity in the modulatory effects across individuals: some individuals exhibited enhanced neural response with increased arousal, whereas others exhibited the opposite effect—a decrease in response with increased arousal. The pattern of overall BOLD modulation showed within-individual stability and was correlated with the degree of arousal-driven change in pupil size. Individuals who exhibited larger increases in pupil size with the arousal manipulation tended to show greater arousal-related decreases in visuocortical responses. We speculate that the polarity of the modulatory effect by cognitive arousal may relate to individual differences in cognitive effort expended in the high-difficulty condition, with individuals reaching different points on an underlying non-monotonic function. |
Emily E. Oor; Emilio Salinas; Terrence R. Stanford Location- and feature-based selection histories make independent, qualitatively distinct contributions to urgent visuomotor performance Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 13, pp. 1–25, 2025. @article{Oor2025,Attention mechanisms guide visuomotor behavior by weighing physical salience and internal goals to prioritize stimuli as choices for action. Although less well studied, selection history, which reflects multiple facets of experience with recent events, is increasingly recognized as a distinct source of attentional bias. To examine how selection history impacts saccadic choices, we trained two macaque monkeys to perform an urgent version of an oddball search task in which a red target appeared among three green distracters or vice versa. By imposing urgency, performance could be tracked continuously as it transitioned from uninformed guesses to informed choices as a function of processing time. This, in turn, permitted assessment of attentional control as manifest in motor biases, processing speed, and asymptotic accuracy. Here, we found that the probability of making a correct choice was strongly modulated by the histories of preceding target locations and target colors. Crucially, although both effects were gated by success (or reward), their dynamics were clearly distinct: whereas location history promoted a motor bias, color history modulated perceptual sensitivity, and these influences acted independently. Thus, combined selection histories can give rise to enormous swings in visuomotor performance even in simple tasks with highly discriminable stimuli. |
Haneieh Molaei; Reza Abbas Farishta; Reza Farivar Multi-feature mapping of distortions in amblyopia with localized sampling Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, vol. 66, no. 6, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Molaei2025a,PURPOSE. The purpose of this study was to investigate position, orientation, and spatial frequency (SF) distortions in amblyopia, their distribution across the visual field (VF), and their relationship with visual acuity (VA) loss. METHODS. Twenty-one participants with amblyopia were tested using three tasks measuring distortions in position, orientation, and SF. Stimuli were presented on a 6 × 6 grid covering the central 5 degrees of the VF, with participants adjusting the fellow eye's perception to match the amblyopic eye. Distortion maps were created for each type, and correlations were analyzed within subjects (across their 3 distortion maps) and between subjects (comparing the same type of distortion maps across participants). Correlations with VA loss were also assessed. RESULTS. The prevalence of distortion maps varied, with SF distortions being the most dominant (88.9%), followed by position distortions (66.7%), and orientation distortions being the least common (22.2%). Distortions extended beyond the fovea. Within subjects, spatial patterns of distortion showed no significant correlations across distortion types (P > 0.05), indicating their independence. Between subjects, no significant correlations were found for the same type of distortion map, suggesting individual variability. Additionally, VA differences were not significantly correlated with any distortion type, reinforcing the independence of VA from perceptual distortions. CONCLUSIONS. This study highlights the importance of assessing multiple distortion types to fully characterize perceptual deficits in amblyopia. The findings suggest that no single distortion type fully represents amblyopic spatial distortion, as each operates independently. Distortion mapping is essential for understanding, monitoring improvements, and accurately diagnosing amblyopia, as VA measurements alone fail to address these deficits comprehensively. |
Eugene McSorley; Rachel McCloy; Louis Williams Viewing of abstract art follows a gist to survey gaze pattern over time regardless of broad categorical titles Journal Article In: PLoS One, vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{McSorley2025,Artworks are often shown alongside informative contextual text. This can be as simple as its title and date, or it can be a more descriptive or elaborative explanation of the piece, such as describing its content or explaining the symbolism of the work. Contextual information has been shown to have no impact on early viewing behaviour. A consistent impact on observer eye movement scan paths and fixations is only found in the later periods of looking. One explanation for this is that early eye movement responses to artworks support automatic low-level visual processing that quickly extracts a broad, holistic gist or sense of the works, allowing rapid categorization. The influence of contextual information may only be felt in later periods as it concentrates fixations on descriptive or elaborative elements more quickly and for longer periods. To examine this explanation, we recorded eye movement responses to abstract paintings that were preceded by basic-level categorical labels. In Experiment 1, abstract works were preceded by the labels Landscape, Portrait or Abstract, while in Experiment 2 the labels Action, Still Life or Abstract were given. We found that saccadic eye movements were more common in the first 2 seconds of viewing and were spread over a large portion of the artworks. They became less frequent and were spatially clustered over time. This changing pattern of saccades and their fixation periods was not affected by the contextual information provided by the category labels suggesting a minimal role for top-down control of eye movements when viewers are faced with abstract artworks. |
Nicolas Masson; Christine Schiltz; Laurie Geers; Michael Andres Spatial coding of arithmetic operations in early learning: An eye tracking study in first-grade elementary school children Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 89, no. 3, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Masson2025,A growing body of evidence indicates that mental calculation in adults is accompanied by horizontal attention shifts along a mental continuum representing the range of plausible answers. The fast deployment of spatial attention suggests a predictive role in guiding the search for the answer. The link between arithmetic and spatial functions is theoretically justified by the need to alleviate the cognitive load of mental calculation, but the question of how this link establishes during development gives rise to opposing views emphasizing either biological or cultural factors. The role of education, in particular, remains debated in the absence of data covering the period when children learn arithmetic. In this study, we measured gaze movements, as a proxy for attentional shifts, while first-grade elementary school children solved single-digit additions and subtractions. The investigation was scheduled only a few weeks after the formal teaching of symbolic subtraction to assess the role of spatial attention in early learning. Gaze patterns revealed horizontal– but not vertical– attentional shifts, with addition shifting the gaze more rightward than subtraction. The shift was observed as soon as the first operand and the operator were presented, corroborating the view that attention is used to predictively identify the portion of the numerical continuum where the answer is likely to be located, as adult studies suggested. The finding of a similar gaze pattern in adults and six-year-old children who have just learned how to subtract single digits challenges the idea that arithmetic problem solving requires intensive practice to be linked to spatial attention. |
Xiaobo Liu; Yuxi Li; Yuan Chen; Chen Xue; Jin Fan; Jiaming Zhang; Dongling Zhong; Qinjian Dong; Zhong Zheng; Juan Li; Rongjiang Jin Attentional bias toward threatening stimuli in major depressive disorder: A free-viewing eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Affective Disorders, vol. 378, pp. 352–359, 2025. @article{Liu2025q,Object: Limited evidence exists regarding negative attentional bias toward threatening stimuli in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). This cross-sectional study aimed to explore attentional bias toward threatening stimuli in patients with MDD. Method: Hamilton Depression Scale-24 items (HAMD-24) and Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAMA) were used to assess all participants. The MDD and healthy participants freely viewed images with positive, threatening, and neutral valence for 1000 ms, during which eye movements were recorded with the Eyelink system. Eye-tracking metrics including the mean fixation duration, mean fixation counts, mean saccade counts, mean saccade velocity, mean saccade amplitude, and mean pupil diameter were compared between MDD and healthy groups. Correlations between eye-tracking variables and both HAMD-24 total scores and factor scores were analyzed. Results: The study included 100 MDD participants and 100 matched healthy controls. The MDD patients had longer mean fixation duration and reduced saccade counts on threatening and neutral images compared to the healthy controls. Additionally, the MDD patients showed prolonged mean fixation duration and reduced mean fixation counts and saccade counts when viewing threatening images compared to positive images. In contrast, no bias was observed in the healthy controls. Regarding mean pupil diameter, MDD participants showed greater mean pupil diameter for threatening images compared to neutral and positive images. No significant differences were observed in mean saccade velocity and saccade amplitude between the groups. There were positive correlations between mean fixation duration on threatening stimuli and retardation factor scores of HAMD-24. Conclusion: Patients with MDD exhibit abnormal attentional bias toward threatening stimuli, which is associated with the severity of retardation symptoms in MDD. |
Dongyu Liu; Xinyu Zhang; Jon D. Elhai; Christian Montag; Haibo Yang The attention allocation of individuals with problematic smartphone use during different cognitive reappraisal phases Journal Article In: Cognitive Therapy and Research, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 563–575, 2025. @article{Liu2025g,Background: To understand the potential mechanisms by which cognitive reappraisal (CR) improves problematic smartphone use (PSU), this study aims to explore the attention allocation of individuals with PSU during different CR phases when exposed to smartphone-related stimuli. Methods: Fifty participants were recruited for the formal experiment, with 25 participants in the PSU group and 25 in the control group. Eye tracking was used to assess attention allocation by calculating fixation proportions on the smartphone area of interest (S-AOI; smartphone salient area) in smartphone-related stimuli during the cue reactivity, CR, and post-CR phases. Network analysis was employed to examine the connections among phases for both groups to explore the relationships in attention allocation across these phases. Results: (1) Both groups presented higher fixation proportions toward the S-AOI in the latter part of the cue reactivity phase. (2) During the CR phase, both groups presented lower early fixation proportions on the S-AOI than did the cue reactivity phase and the rest of the CR phase. (3) In the post-CR phase, the significant difference in fixation proportions toward the S-AOI between the PSU and the control groups disappeared. (4) Network analysis revealed greater global strength in the PSU group than in the control group. Conclusions: There are specific attentional patterns toward smartphone-related stimuli during the CR process, and the attentional allocation patterns of the PSU group improved after using CR. Additionally, the PSU group's attentional allocation patterns appeared more interconnected across different phases. |
Katharina Lingelbach; Jochem W. Rieger Neurophysiological basis of emotional face perception and working memory load in a dual-task MEG study Journal Article In: Human Brain Mapping, vol. 46, no. 8, pp. 1–25, 2025. @article{Lingelbach2025,Research on the neurophysiological effects of emotional face processing, working memory (WM) load, and their interaction in dual-tasks remains scarce. Therefore, we conducted a combined magnetoencephalography eye-tracking study with 47 participants. The dual-task temporally interleaved a facial emotion discrimination task with a visuo-spatial n-back task. Source-space cluster analyzes of event-related magnetic fields (ERFs) and oscillations revealed significant main effects of emotional expression and WM load. During emotion discrimination, enhanced ERFs for negative facial expressions located across the insula, ACC, and face-specific occipital regions suggest amplified emotion processing but also the recruitment of attentional control mechanisms. During the n-back phase, emotional faces did not affect evoked responses when they were task-irrelevant. Interaction trends in pupil dilation indicated that emotion-specific processing is diminished under high WM load. During the n-back phase, increased WM load reduced alpha and low beta oscillations in temporo- and parieto-occipital areas. In addition, reduced target fixations in the presence of negative facial distractors indicated a tendency toward emotion-specific interference. Furthermore, sustained increased WM load affected perceived valence, pupil size, and reaction time in both subtasks. A convergence of neurophysiological, physiological, and behavioural findings points to specific processing modes with greater resource depletion for negative expressions and high WM load in the dual-task. In conclusion, the study advanced our understanding of (a) circumstances under which emotional faces modulate ERFs in a dual-task, (b) mechanisms underlying emotion discrimination, (c) interaction effects of emotional expression and WM load in gaze behavior, as well as (d) how WM-related oscillatory alpha and beta power is affected by increasing load. |
Pedro Lencastre; Rujeena Mathema; Pedro G. Lind From eyes' microtremors to critical flicker fusion Journal Article In: PLOS ONE, vol. 20, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Lencastre2025a,The critical flicker fusion threshold (CFFT) is the frequency at which a flickering light source becomes indistinguishable from continuous light. The CFFT is an important biomarker of health conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease and epilepsy, and is affected by factors as diverse as fatigue, drug consumption, and oxygen pressure, which make CFFT individual- and context-specific. Other causal factors beyond such biophysical processes are still to be uncovered. We investigate the connection between CFFT and specific eye-movements, called microtremors, which are small oscillatory gaze movements during fixation periods. We present evidence that individual differences in CFFT can be accounted by microtremors, and design an experiment, using a high-frequency monitor and recording the participant's eye-movements with an eye-tracker device, which enables to measure the range of frequencies of a specific individual's CFFT. Additionally, we introduce a classifier that can predict if the CFFT of specific participant lies in the range of high or low frequencies, based on the corresponding range of frequencies of eyes' microtremors. Our results show an accuracy of 85% for a frequency threshold of 60 Hz and 88% for a threshold of 120 Hz. |
Laura Lazartigues; Fabien Mathy; Carlos Aguilar; Frédéric Lavigne The order of stimuli matters when learning second-order transitional probabilities Journal Article In: Learning and Behavior, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 183–193, 2025. @article{Lazartigues2025,The order of stimuli within sequences and the transitional probabilities (TPs) it generates are central information in sequence processing. However, less is known about what type of information and how it is extracted by general learning mechanisms. The present study focused on statistical learning of second-order TPs. Second-order TPs are involved when only the combination of two stimuli predicts the third. In a first experiment, TPs depended crucially on the order of presentation of a pair A-B, which led to different predictions depending on the order of the stimuli (i.e., ABC vs. BAF). Eight visuomotor sequences governed by second-order TPs were used and response times (RTs) were recorded for each transition. The task included a learning phase followed by a switch phase during which the second-order TP were reversed (e.g., the sequences ABC and BAF became respectively ABF and BAC). A decrease of RTs between the second and the third stimulus during the learning phase and an increase of RTs during the switch phase suggested that variations of orders within second-order TPs could be learned. Further analyses, however, indicated that such learning was difficult for most participants. A second experiment showed that the difficulty of learning was not solely due to the difficulty to pick up the effect of order of presentation, but that learning second-order transitional probabilities in addition to order would be the main obstacle. These experiments suggest that statistical learning is capable of learning complex associations, even if this remains a challenge for human cognition. |
Arianna N. LaCroix; Ileana Ratiu Saccades and blinks index cognitive demand during auditory noncanonical sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 1147–1172, 2025. @article{LaCroix2025,Noncanonical sentence structures pose comprehension challenges because they require increased cognitive demand. Prosody may partially alleviate this cognitive load. These findings largely stem from behavioral studies, yet physiological measures may reveal additional insights into how cognition is deployed to parse sentences. Pupillometry has been at the forefront of investigations into physiological measures of cognitive demand during auditory sentence comprehension. This study offers an alternative approach by examining whether eye-tracking measures, including blinks and saccades, index cognitive demand during auditory noncanonical sentence comprehension and whether these metrics are sensitive to reductions in cognitive load associated with typical prosodic cues. We further investigated how eye-tracking patterns differ across correct and incorrect responses, as a function of time, and how each related to behavioral measures of cognition. Canonical and noncanonical sentence comprehension was measured in 30 younger adults using an auditory sentence-picture matching task. We also assessed participants' attention and working memory. Blinking and saccades both differentiate noncanonical sentences from canonical sentences. Saccades further distinguish noncanonical structures from each other. Participants made more saccades on incorrect than correct trials. The number of saccades also related to working memory, regardless of syntax. However, neither eye-tracking metric was sensitive to the changes in cognitive demand that was behaviorally observed in response to typical prosodic cues. Overall, these findings suggest that eye-tracking indices, particularly saccades, reflect cognitive demand during auditory noncanonical sentence comprehension when visual information is present, offering greater insights into the strategies and neural resources participants use to parse auditory sentences. |
Ke Jin; Yuyuan Zhang; Junming Chen Optimizing urban visual identity: Eye-tracking insights for outdoor advertising management Journal Article In: Buildings, vol. 15, no. 12, pp. 1–26, 2025. @article{Jin2025,In addition to architecture and infrastructure, urban outdoor advertising also shapes urban visual identity, serving as a prominent carrier of public information and visual stimuli. However, excessive or poorly designed advertisements disrupt the cityscape and contribute to visual pollution and cognitive overload. Leveraging computer-based eye tracking, this study examines the visual and cognitive effects of outdoor advertising designs within urban contexts. Key eye-tracking metrics, including total fixation duration, fixation count, time to first fixation, and first fixation duration, are measured to analyze the influence of various variables on visual attention and user experience, such as color contrast, text complexity, information hierarchy, and spatial layout. The findings reveal that high-contrast, text-heavy designs hinder visual flow and increase mental effort, while visually balanced layouts improve legibility and reduce cognitive burden. These results offer actionable insights for optimizing urban visual identity and enhancing the clarity, comfort, and coherence of outdoor advertising. By integrating perceptual data into urban design strategies, this research provides a data-driven approach to smarter, more human-centered advertising management and urban aesthetic governance. |
Timothy L. Hodgson; Phoebe Cartwright; Joseph Dodd; Annabelle Hippisley Oculomotor deficits in children with sensory processing difficulties Journal Article In: British Journal of Occupational Therapy, vol. 88, no. 6, pp. 352–361, 2025. @article{Hodgson2025,Background: Atypically developing children often present with a variety of sensory processing difficulties which have been proposed to reflect abnormal development of pathways integrating sensation and action. A brain system in which the process of sensorimotor integration is particularly well understood is the oculomotor system, but no studies to date have used computerised eye tracking to assess eye movements in children with sensory processing difficulties. Method: Ten children with sensory processing difficulties completed a battery of oculomotor tasks comprising pro-saccades, anti-saccades, smooth pursuit tracking and sustained fixation. Eye movements were recorded using a high-resolution eye tracker. Results: Compared to age-matched controls, children with sensory processing difficulties were found to make more directional errors in the anti-saccade task and less-accurate smooth pursuit and sustained fixation. Conclusion: Consistent differences were found in oculomotor ability in children with sensory processing difficulties which are likely to impact children's ability to process and respond to visual information within home and school contexts. Further research is needed to understand the relationship between oculomotor deficits in children with sensory processing difficulties and the presence/absence of neurodevelopmental diagnoses. Eye tracking may be of value in the future for assessment and objective evaluation of interventions for sensory processing difficulties such as sensory integration therapy. |
Swagata Halder; Deepak Velgapuni Raya; Devarajan Sridharan Distinct neural bases of subcomponents of the attentional blink Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 13, pp. 1–30, 2025. @article{Halder2025,The attentional blink reflects a ubiquitous bottleneck with selecting and processing the second of two targets that occur in close temporal proximity. An extensive literature has examined the attention blink as a unitary phenomenon. As a result, which specific component of attention – perceptual sensitivity, choice bias, or both – is compromised during the attentional blink, and their respective neural bases, remains unknown. Here, we address this question with a multialternative task and novel signal detection model, which decouples sensitivity from bias effects. We find that the attentional blink impairs specifically one component of attention – sensitivity – while leaving the other component – bias – unaffected. Distinct neural markers of the attentional blink were mapped onto distinct subcomponents of the sensitivity deficits. Parieto-occipital N2p and P3 potential amplitudes characterized target detection deficits, whereas long-range high-beta band (20–30 Hz) coherence between frontoparietal electrodes signaled target discrimination deficits. We synthesized these results with representational geometry analysis. The analysis revealed that detection and discrimination deficits were encoded along separable neural dimensions, whose configural distances robustly correlated with the neural markers of each. Overall, these findings provide detailed insights into the subcomponents of the attentional blink and reveal dissociable neural bases underlying its detection and discrimination bottlenecks. |
Annika Garlichs; Mark Lustig; Matthias Gamer; Helen Blank Protocol to study how expectations guide predictive eye movements and information sampling in humans Journal Article In: STAR Protocols, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Garlichs2025,Investigating eye movements provides a unique tool to explore how expectations influence information sampling in the visual domain. Here, we present a protocol for measuring predictive eye movements during face anticipation as well as fixations and dwell time during face recognition in humans. We describe steps for setting up two eye-tracking experiments. We then detail procedures for the measurement and analysis of eye-tracking data. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Garlichs et al.1 |
Cora Fischer; Jochen Kaiser; Christoph Bledowski A direct neural signature of serial dependence in working memory Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 13, pp. 1–25, 2025. @article{Fischer2025a,Serial dependence describes the phenomenon that current object representations are attracted to previously encoded and reported representations. While attractive biases have been observed reliably in behavior, a direct neural correlate has not been established. Previous studies have either shown a reactivation of past information without observing a neural signal related to the bias of the current information, or a repulsive distortion of current neural representations contrasting the behavioral bias. The present study recorded neural signals with magnetoencephalography (MEG) during a working memory task to identify neural correlates of serial dependence. Participants encoded and memorized two sequentially presented motion directions per trial, one of which was later retro-cued for report. Multivariate analyses provided reliable reconstructions of both motion directions. Importantly, the reconstructed directions in the current trial were attractively shifted toward the target direction of the previous trial. This neural bias mirrored the behavioral attractive bias, thus reflecting a direct neural signature of serial dependence. The use of a retro-cue task in combination with MEG allowed us to determine that this neural bias emerged at later, post-encoding time points. This timing suggests that serial dependence in working memory affects memorized information during read-out and reactivation processes that happen after the initial encoding. |
M. G. Filippova; D. Yu Chopchik; D. S. Gnedykh; D. I. Kostina; E. I. Perikova Variability of the boundaries of semantic priming: The role of the informativeness of primes Journal Article In: Neuroscience and Behavioral Physiology, vol. 55, no. 5, pp. 900–904, 2025. @article{Filippova2025,The objective of this study was to determine which of the theories, inhibition or episode retrieval, is more relevant for recently learned semantic pairs. At the memorization stage, 34 study participants were presented with pseudowords with semantic binding in the form of images of unknown fruits. At the test stage, a semantic priming procedure was used with a color solution task, where in 50% of cases targets were images of fruits and primes were their names (pseudowords); in the other 50%, conversely, the targets were names and the primes were images. The congruence of the primes (congruence and incongruence of the image and its learned name) was also varied. Eye movement activity was recorded in parallel. Positive priming was found for image primes in congruent conditions and negative priming was found for word primes regardless of their congruence. These results did not favor either of the theories, although, having demonstrated an expansion of the boundaries of the negative priming effect, they showed the ability of the cognitive system to switch flexibly between more general and more specific levels of processing depending on the characteristics of the stimuli. |
Stefan Duschek; Antonio J. Sutil; Paulina Piwkowski; Thomas Rainer; Ulrich Ettinger Affective modulation of preparatory cognitive activity Journal Article In: PsyCh Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 463–465, 2025. @article{Duschek2025a,This EEG and eye-tracking study investigated affective influences on cognitive preparation using a precued pro−/antisaccade task with emotional faces as cues. Negative information interfered with preparatory processes with high but not low executive function load. |
Eelke Vries; Freek Ede Microsaccades reveal preserved spatial organisation in visual working memory despite decay in location-based rehearsal Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 259, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Vries2025,Space provides a foundational scaffold for retaining and selecting visual information in working memory. It remains unclear, however, whether and how spatial organisation in visual working memory persists over temporally extended memory delays, particularly when the locations of memoranda are incidental and never probed for report. Studies using continuous spatial markers of working-memory retention often report a gradual decay over time, which may or may not reflect a genuine decay in spatial organisation within working memory. To examine this, we capitalised on two recently established spatial eye-movement (microsaccade) markers of ‘location-based mnemonic rehearsal' and ‘location-based mnemonic selection' that we here studied during and following short (1 s), medium (3 s), and long (5 s) working-memory delays. Our findings, replicated across two experiments, demonstrate that while markers of location-based rehearsal may diminish throughout the working-memory delay, mnemonic selection remains anchored to incidentally encoded object locations. This implies that spatial organisation in working memory is preserved even when markers of active spatial rehearsal have meanwhile decayed, suggesting the notion of a “silent spatial scaffold” for working memory. |
Adrien Coudiere; Frederic R. Danion In: Experimental Brain Research, vol. 243, no. 6, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Coudiere2025,When making reciprocal hand movements between two fixed/known targets, Fitts' law states that movement time (MT) is a linear function of the index of difficulty (ID) set by the ratio between movement amplitude (A) and target width (W). Crucially ID also impacts eye-hand coordination. However, because known/fixed targets limit the usefulness of eye movements, and because hand dynamics changes drastically with ID (either continuous or discrete), we reexamined this issue using a variant of the Fitts task in which the next target position was assigned randomly and unveiled only when the ongoing target was reached. Practically, hand and eye movements were recorded in participants (N = 25) who had to successively reach 12 circular targets of width W (0.3, 0.6, or 1.2 cm) separated by an amplitude A (5, 10, or 20 cm), allowing to examine IDs ranging from 2.36 to 6.08 bits. Introducing target uncertainty did not alleviate the linear relationship between MT and ID (R2 = 0.99), neither the impact of ID on hand kinematics. Importantly, the influence of ID on eye-hand coordination persisted. Notably, by cross-correlating eye and hand signals, we show a trade-off between its temporal and spatial aspects. Finally, we found that eye-hand coordination was influenced to a larger extent by A than W, making it prone to task scaling effects (differences in AW combinations resulting in similar ID). Altogether these results reinforce the critical role of task difficulty on eye-hand coordination and the need to simultaneously consider its temporal and spatial aspects. |
Yuqing Cai; Christoph Strauch; Stefan Van der Stigchel; Antonia F. Ten Brink; Frans W. Cornelissen; Marnix Naber Mapping simulated visual field defects with movie-viewing pupil perimetry Journal Article In: Graefe's Archive for Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology, vol. 263, no. 6, pp. 1641–1650, 2025. @article{Cai2025a,Purpose: Assessing the quality of the visual field is important for the diagnosis of ophthalmic and neurological diseases and, consequently, for rehabilitation. Visual field defects (VFDs) are typically assessed using standard automated perimetry (SAP). However, SAP requires participants to understand instructions, maintain fixation and sustained attention, and provide overt responses. These aspects make SAP less suitable for very young or cognitively impaired populations. Here we investigate the feasibility of a new and less demanding form of perimetry. This method assesses visual sensitivity based on pupil responses while performing the perhaps simplest task imaginable: watching movies. Method: We analyzed an existing dataset, with healthy participants (n = 70) freely watching movies with or without gaze-contingent simulated VFDs, either hemianopia (left- or right-sided) or glaucoma (large nasal arc, small nasal arc, and tunnel vision). Meanwhile, their gaze and pupil size were recorded. Using a recently published toolbox (Open-DPSM), we modeled the relative contribution of visual events to the pupil responses to indicate relative visual sensitivity across the visual field and to dissociate between conditions with and without simulated VFDs. Result: Conditions with and without simulated VFDs could be dissociated, with an AUC ranging from 0.85 to 0.97, depending on the specific simulated VFD condition. In addition, the dissociation was better when including more movies in the modeling but the model with as few movies as 10 movies was sufficient for a good classification (AUC ranging from 0.84 to 0.96). Conclusion: Movie-viewing pupil perimetry is promising in providing complementary information for the diagnosis of VFDs, especially for those who are unable to perform conventional perimetry. |
Anna Bognár; Ghazaleh Ghamkhari Nejad; Guy Rens; Rajani Raman; Rufin Vogels Expanding the stimulus domain: Co-occurrence of motion and body-category selectivity in the macaque ventral STS Journal Article In: Progress in Neurobiology, vol. 249, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Bognar2025a,The primate Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS) plays a pivotal role in the recognition of bodies and their actions, which is essential for survival and social interaction with conspecifics. Here, we show that, surprisingly, a sizable proportion of macaque middle ventral STS units are selective for static bodies and random dot motion. They show a faithful representation of random dot motion direction, with motion directions differing by 180 degrees being represented distinctly, although responding more strongly to complex optic flow patterns. This aligns with an fMRI experiment in which we show that the mid-STS body patch, defined by a greater activation to static bodies compared to faces and objects, is also more strongly activated by moving random dot patterns compared to static ones, especially when including complex optic flow patterns. More anterior ventral STS body-selective units demonstrate a less pronounced random dot motion selectivity and this is mainly for complex optic flow patterns. Moreover, middle STS units, but rarely those of the anterior STS, respond selectively to dynamic dot patterns in which body parts are visible solely through motion, and their preference correlates with those for videos of acting monkeys. Overall, these findings highlight an association between body and motion processing in the macaque ventral STS, which might result from the co-occurrence of body features and motion during the observation of bodily actions. |
Tess Barich; Louise Kyriaki; Alexandre Forndran; Paul Williamson; Joanne Arciuli Children's processing of irony during reading in English: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 254, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Barich2025,We know a great deal about the mechanisms underpinning literacy, yet gaps exist in understanding some complex literacy skills. The processing of irony during reading is one such skill. We used eye-tracking and behavioral measures to examine the processing of irony during reading in English in 30 children aged 10 to 12 years (33% female and 67% male; Mage = 11.34 years) by comparison with 32 adults (75% female and 25% male; Mage = 24.34 years). To accommodate individual differences, we included standardized measures of reading ability in our linear mixed models. Although children were slower in their reading times and had more difficulty in comprehending accurately the meanings of ironic texts versus literal texts by comparison with adults, children showed an adult-like processing cost for ironic information versus literal information across most measures. There were main effects but no substantial interactions involving reading ability. Future studies could include a broader range of ages to better understand the developmental trajectory of irony processing during reading. |
Ralph Andrews; Michael C. Melnychuk; Catherine N. Moran; David P. McGovern; Alexa Holfelder; Sarah Moran; Paul M. Dockree Arousal and sustained attention fluctuate differently with respiration in younger and older adults Journal Article In: Imaging Neuroscience, vol. 3, pp. 1–21, 2025. @article{Andrews2025,Respiration is being increasingly recognised as both synchronising its dynamics with external events and modulating internal psychophysiological states. However, the extent to which these effects stem from a respiratory modulation of attention remains underexplored. Here, we leverage differing attentional strategies of younger (YA) and older adults (OA)—OA exhibited greater focus during a simple contrast change detection task—to examine their relationship with respiratory phase-locking behaviour. OA exhibited stronger phase-locking of their respiratory cycle to task-relevant events compared with YA. Notably, participants appeared to actively adjust their breathing so that late exhalation phases coincided with target presentation, despite variable inter-target intervals. To characterise this target-locked respiratory phase window, we analysed pupil diameter and EEG frequency-power as indices of arousal and attention. Pupil diameter, frontal delta and theta, posterior alpha, and steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP) amplitude all varied significantly over the respiratory cycle, suggesting that arousal was enhanced for respiratory phases aligned with target expectancy and attenuated outside these phases. OA showed stronger respiratory modulation of delta, theta, and alpha, whereas YA showed stronger modulation of pupil diameter and SSVEP. We interpret these findings as evidence that respiration shapes attentional fluctuations, expanding and contracting the vigilant state across the respiratory cycle through interactions with arousal and attentional systems. Further, the age-dependent quality of attention which is applied to a task has implications for the degree of respiratory phase-locking and how physiological signatures of arousal and attention are modulated. |
Xiao Yi Zhang; Zi-Yang Liu; Pei-Yan Li; Jing-Hua Wang; Yu-Feng Zang; Hang Zhang Eye movements in visual fixation predict behavioral response performance in sustained attention Journal Article In: International Journal of Psychophysiology, vol. 211, pp. 1–7, 2025. @article{Zhang2025o,Individuals naturally make eye movements over time during visual fixation and voluntarily perform changes in eye position. However, the functional implication of spontaneous changes of eye movements remains unclear. Given that visual fixation is commonly used as a baseline condition in cognitive experiments, we conducted an experiment using eye-tracking to test whether spontaneous fluctuations in eye position are linked to sustained attention. Eye-position data were collected while subjects performed visual fixation and a sustained attention task. We found that slow fluctuations (<0.2 Hz) in eye position correlated with slow fluctuations in response behavior [reaction time (RT)] during the sustained attention task. Further analysis revealed that off-task but not on-task slow fluctuations in eye position contributed to slow fluctuations in sustained attention behavior. The spontaneous fluctuations in eye position could predict the behavioral performance in sustained attention. These results provide new insights into the functional significance of eye movements during visual fixation, which should be considered in interpreting the findings of cognitive experiments using visual fixation as the baseline condition. |
Jialu You; Xi Liu; Jing Yang; Liyuan Zhang; Le Zhang; Quan Wang Quantifying the impact of mild and moderate myopia on attention in school-age children through eye tracking Journal Article In: European Journal of Pediatrics, vol. 184, no. 5, 2025. @article{You2025,Objectives: By utilizing eye-tracking data, this study aims to evaluate the impact of both mild and moderate myopia and different refractive correction methods on certain types of attention of school-age children. Methods: In this prospective case–control study, data was collected from 90 children aged 8 to 10 years old. Participants were classified into three groups based on their spherical lens: mild myopia group (SE: ≤ − 0.50D and > − 3.00D), moderate myopia group (SE: ≤ − 3.00D and > − 6.00D), and control group (SE: ≤ + 0.50D and > − 0.50D). Additionally, children with myopia were subdivided into three subgroups based on refractive correction methods: the uncorrected group, the spectacles corrected group, and the orthokeratology lenses group. The eye-tracking system was used to record and compare attention assessment metrics, including saccade latency, total search time, and saccade accuracy. To enhance result reproducibility, MoCA scale scores were used as a control method to measure attention. Results: When categorized by refraction, MoCA scale scores were lower in the moderate myopia group compared to the control group (p = 0.011). Saccade latency and total search time were slower in both the mild and moderate myopia groups compared to the control group (p < 0.001). A weak positive correlation was observed between spherical lens and total search time (r = 0.260 |
Ken W. S. Tan; Amritha Stalin; Adela S. Y. Park; Kristine Dalton; Benjamin Thompson Interleaved periods of exercise do not enhance visual perceptual learning Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Tan2025,Animal models indicate that exercise promotes visual cortex neuroplasticity; however, results from studies that have explored this effect in humans are mixed. A potential explanation for these discrepant results is the relative timing of exercise and the task used to index neuroplasticity. We hypothesized that a close temporal pairing of exercise and training on a vision task would enhance perceptual learning (a measure of neuroplasticity) compared to a non exercise control. Thirty-two participants (mean age = 31 years; range, 20-65; SD = 11.1; 50:50 sex ratio) were randomly assigned to Exercise or Non Exercise groups. The Exercise group alternated between moderate cycling along a virtual course and training on a peripheral crowding task (5 minutes each, 1 hour total intervention), and the Non Exercise group alternated between passive viewing of the virtual cycling course and the vision task. The protocol was repeated across 5 consecutive days. Both groups exhibited reduced visual crowding after 5 days of training. However, there was no difference in perceptual learning magnitude or rate between groups. Translation of the animal exercise and visual cortex neuroplasticity results to humans may depend on a range of factors, such as baseline fitness levels and the measures used to quantify neuroplasticity. |
Shiyong Su; Thomas Vanvoorden; Pierre Le Denmat; Alexandre Zénon; Clara Braconnier; Julie Duque Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation boosts accuracy during perceptual decision-making Journal Article In: Brain Stimulation, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 975–986, 2025. @article{Su2025a,Background: The locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system is a well-established regulator of behavior, yet its precise role remains unclear. Animal studies predominantly support a “gain” hypothesis, suggesting that the LC-NE system enhances sensory processing. In contrast, human studies have proposed an alternative “urgency” hypothesis, postulating that LC-NE primarily accelerates responses. Method: To address this discrepancy, we administered transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) in two experiments. In the first experiment (n = 22), we showed that 4-s tVNS trains reliably induced greater pupil dilation compared to SHAM condition, indicating increased LC-NE activity. In the second experiment (n = 21), we applied tVNS during a random dot motion task to assess its impact on perceptual decision-making. Result: tVNS improved accuracy without affecting reaction times, which appears inconsistent with the “urgency” hypothesis. Exploratory drift-diffusion model analyses further support the “gain” hypothesis, revealing that tVNS increased the drift rate, indicative of enhanced evidence accumulation. Both accuracy and drift-rate improvements were most prominent following errors and especially pronounced in participants who exhibited post-error declines in these measures under SHAM. Conclusion: Our findings align with the “gain” hypothesis, with tentative evidence suggesting that the impact of LC-NE activity adapts to task demands. Accordingly, tVNS showed the strongest effects in contexts prone to accuracy declines, possibly reflecting attentional disengagement, which points to a role of LC in mitigating lapses of attention. |
Julia Elina Stocker; Antonia Schulz; Ina Thome; Jens Sommer; Jonas Rabeneck; Kristin Marie Rusch; Olaf Steinsträter; Andreas Jansen Interhemispheric integration in the neural face perception network: Does stimulus location matter? Journal Article In: Imaging Neuroscience, vol. 3, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Stocker2025,The neural mechanisms underlying hemispheric lateralization can be investigated using neuroimaging methods and modelling techniques. In some experiments, sensory information is initially presented exclusively to one hemisphere, for example, by displaying a visual stimulus in the periphery of the contralateral hemifield. This experimental design enables, among other things, a comparison of competing theories of interhemispheric integration (e.g., interhemispheric inhibition vs. interhemispheric recruitment). However, the underlying neural models for peripheral stimulation may differ from those for central stimulation and, therefore, may not adequately describe the mechanisms associated with typical, foveal stimulus processing. To address this question, the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study analysed the influence of stimulus location (peripheral vs. central) on neural network connectivity, particularly interhemispheric transfer, as determined by dynamic causal modelling (DCM), for a face perception task. Face and object images were presented either peripherally or centrally to a group of healthy volunteers (N = 17). By contrasting brain activations for faces against objects, we identified bilateral face-sensitive regions, such as the left and right fusiform face area (FFA) and the occipital face area (OFA). Additionally, we extracted the bilateral primary visual cortex (V1) as the input region for our neural models. We constructed five increasingly complex models that differed only in their modulatory connectivity. Bayesian model averaging (BMA) was employed to average the parameters across all models, enabling the calculation of interhemispheric transfer difference (i.e., left-to-right minus right-to-left modulatory connectivity parameter) and the strength of interhemispheric transfer between bilateral OFA and FFA regions. Our findings demonstrate that interhemispheric integration depends on stimulus location. Peripheral presentations of faces induce different connectivity patterns compared with centrally depicted faces. Specifically, we observed larger interhemispheric transfer differences for peripheral face stimuli compared with central stimuli. In conclusion, peripheral and central presentations of faces modulate the face processing network differently, with left and right visual field presentations yielding asymmetrical connectivity patterns. Since faces are preferentially processed via the fovea, the typical face processing network likely aligns more closely with activation patterns elicited by central stimuli. In contrast, connectivity patterns triggered by peripheral stimulation may represent an atypical processing style and cannot be directly compared with those activated by central stimuli. |
Abigail I. Spear; Rebecca L. Johnson; Hayley Yun; Jane Ashby; Abigail L. Kleinsmith To boldly go where no text has gone before: The effects of boldface letters on eye movements in reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 87, no. 4, pp. 1270–1286, 2025. @article{Spear2025,Over the years, numerous speed-reading technologies have proposed ways for people to improve their reading speed and efficiency. The current study empirically tested Bionic Reading's claims that bolding the first half of words provides an optimal location for the eyes to land and is enough to process the entire word. Participants read paragraphs in five bolding conditions to see how reading patterns and eye movements were impacted. Bionic Reading's claims were not supported by this study, as bolding the first half of every word did not facilitate reading relative to bolding the middle half or last half of every word and, in fact, led to costs relative to regular unbolded reading. Additionally, visual access to only the first few letters was not enough to recognize whole words. The differential effects of bolding were also explored across different individual difference measures, but Bionic Reading was not found to be beneficial for any specific population on reading speed or in eye movement measures. |
Dixit Sharma; Shira M. Lupkin; Vincent B. McGinty Orbitofrontal high-gamma reflects spike-dissociable value and decision mechanisms Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 20, pp. 1–17, 2025. @article{Sharma2025a,The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays a crucial role in value-based decisions. While much is known about how OFC neurons represent values, far less is known about information encoded in OFC local field potentials (LFPs). LFPs are important because they can reflect subthreshold activity not directly coupled to spiking and because they are potential targets for less invasive forms of brain–machine interface (BMI). We recorded neural activity in the OFC of male macaques performing a two-option value-based decision task. We compared the value- and decision-coding properties of high-gamma LFPs (HG, 50–150 Hz) to the coding properties of spiking multiunit activity (MUA) recorded concurrently on the same electrodes. HG and MUA both represented the values of decision targets, but HG signals had value-coding features that were distinct from concurrently measured MUA. On average HG amplitude increased monotonically with value, whereas in MUA the value encoding was net neutral on average. HG encoded a signal consistent with a comparison between target values, a signal which was negligible in MUA. In individual channels, HG could predict choice outcomes more accurately than MUA; however, when channels were combined in a population-based decoder, MUA was more accurate than HG. In summary, HG signals reveal value-coding features in OFC that could not be observed from spiking activity, including representation of value comparisons and more accurate behavioral predictions. These results have implications for the role of OFC in value-based decisions and suggest that high-frequency LFPs may be a viable—or even preferable—target for BMIs to assist cognitive function. |
Bikash Sahoo; Adam C. Snyder Neural dynamics in extrastriate cortex underlying false alarms Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 20, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Sahoo2025,The unfolding of neural population activity can be described as a dynamical system. Stability in the latent dynamics that characterize neural population activity has been linked with consistency in animal behavior, such as motor control or value-based decision-making. However, whether such characteristics of neural dynamics can explain visual perceptual behavior is not well understood. To study this, we recorded V4 populations in two male monkeys engaged in a non-match-to-sample visual change-detection task that required sustained engagement. We measured how the stability in the latent dynamics in V4 might affect monkeys' perceptual behavior. Specifically, we reasoned that unstable sensory neural activity around dynamic attractor boundaries may make animals susceptible to taking incorrect actions when withholding action would have been correct (“false alarms”). We made three key discoveries: (1) greater stability was associated with longer trial sequences; (2) false alarm rate decreased (and response times slowed) when neural dynamics were more stable; and (3) low stability predicted false alarms on a single-trial level, and this relationship depended on the position of the neural activity within the state space, consistent with the latent neural state approaching an attractor boundary. Our results suggest the same outward false alarm behavior can be attributed to two different potential strategies that can be disambiguated by examining neural stability: (1) premeditated false alarms that might lead to greater stability in population dynamics and faster response time and (2) false alarms due to unstable sensory activity consistent with misperception. |
John Palmer; Cathleen M. Moore; Alex L. White; Geoffrey M. Boynton Spatial selectivity in visual detection suffers when attention is divided Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 87, no. 4, pp. 1107–1131, 2025. @article{Palmer2025,Humans are not perfect at selectively responding to one stimulus while ignoring others visible at the same time. In spatial filtering tasks, this imperfect selectivity is often measured by how the judgment of the relevant stimulus depends on whether an irrelevant stimulus is associated with the same response. Such congruency effects decline with increasing spatial separation between stimuli and are minimal for widely separated stimuli. However, there is evidence that divided attention can increase congruency effects even for widely separated stimuli. We investigated this possibility for a pair of widely separated stimuli and a simple yes/no detection task. Performance was measured for a single task (only one of the stimuli was task-relevant) and for a dual task (both of the stimuli were task-relevant). In the single task there were small congruency effects, whereas in the dual task larger congruency effects occurred despite the widely separated stimuli. Results from a second experiment with sequential and simultaneous presentations were consistent with the congruency effect being due to later processes such as memory or decision rather than immediate processes such as perception. Additional results comparing high and low performance levels were consistent with congruency effects being due to a graded process such as attenuation or crosstalk rather than an all-or-none process such as blocking or substitution. These results rule out many possible theories of spatial selectivity. Our working hypothesis is that spatial selection can protect against interactive processing of multiple stimuli for a single task but not for dual tasks. |
Hilary H. T. Ngai; Jingwen Jin Emotion-guided attention impacts deliberate multi-evidence emotion-related perceptual decision-making Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 62, no. 5, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Ngai2025a,Emotion-guided endogenous attention (e.g., attending to fear) may play a crucial role in determining how humans integrate emotional evidence from various sources when assessing the general emotional tenor of the environment. For instance, what emotion a presenter focuses on can shape their perception of the overall emotion of the room. While there is an increasing interest in understanding how endogenous attention affects emotion perception, existing studies have largely focused on single-stimulus perception. There is limited understanding of how endogenous attention influences emotion evidence integration across multiple sources. To investigate this question, human participants (N = 40) were invited to judge the average emotion across an array of faces ranging from fearful to happy. Endogenous attention was manipulated by instructing participants to decide whether the face array was “fearful or not” (fear attention), “happy or not” (happy attention). Eye movement results revealed an endogenous attention-induced sampling bias such that participants paid more attention to extreme emotional evidence congruent with the target emotion. Computational modeling revealed that endogenous attention shifted the decision criterion to be more conservative, leading to reduced target-category decisions. These findings unraveled the cognitive and computational mechanisms of how endogenous attention impacts the way we gather emotional evidence and make integrative decisions, shedding light on emotion-related decision-making. |
Francesco Mantegna; Emanuele Olivetti; Philipp Schwedhelm; Daniel Baldauf Covariance-based decoding reveals a category-specific functional connectivity network for imagined visual objects Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 311, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Mantegna2025,The coordination of different brain regions is required for the visual imagery of complex objects (e.g., faces and places). Short-range connectivity within sensory areas is necessary to construct the mental image. Long-range connectivity between control and sensory areas is necessary to re-instantiate and maintain the mental image. While dynamic changes in functional connectivity are expected during visual imagery, it is unclear whether a category-specific network exists in which the strength and the spatial destination of the connections vary depending on the imagery target. In this magnetoencephalography study, we used a minimally constrained experimental paradigm wherein imagery categories were prompted using visual word cues only, and we decoded face versus place imagery based on their underlying functional connectivity patterns as estimated from the spatial covariance across brain regions. A subnetwork analysis further disentangled the contribution of different connections. The results show that face and place imagery can be decoded from both short-range and long-range connections. Overall, the results show that imagined object categories can be distinguished based on functional connectivity patterns observed in a category-specific network. Notably, functional connectivity estimates rely on purely endogenous brain signals suggesting that an external reference is not necessary to elicit such category-specific network dynamics. |
Marvin R. Maechler; Eunhye Choe; Patrick Cavanagh; Peter J. Kohler; Peter U. Tse Hemifield specificity of attention response functions during multiple-object tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 19, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Maechler2025,The difficulty of tracking multiple moving objects among identical distractors increases with the number of tracked targets. Previous research has shown that the number of targets tracked (i.e., load) modulates activity in brain areas related to visuospatial attention, giving rise to so-called attention response functions (ARFs). While the hemifield/hemispheric effects of spatial attention (e.g., hemispatial neglect, hemifield capacity limits) are well described, it had not previously been tested whether a hemispheric or hemifield imbalance exists among ARFs. By recording blood oxygenation level-dependent activity from human brains (n = 19, female and male) in a multiple-object tracking paradigm, we show that the number of tracked objects modulates activity in a large network of areas bilaterally. A significant effect of contralateral load was found in earlier areas throughout the dorsal and ventral visual streams, while the effects of ipsilateral load emerged in later areas. Both contra- and ipsilateral load significantly influenced activity in the parietal and frontal lobes, specifically the dorsal attention network. In addition, some brain regions in the occipital lobe were significantly more sensitive to contralateral than ipsilateral load. Our results are consistent with findings showing that a diverse set of brain areas contributes to tracking multiple targets. In particular, we extend the canonical view of load-based ARFs to include hemifield bias. Given the hemifield-specific nature of speed and capacity limits to multiple-object tracking, we conjecture that areas that show a strong hemifield preference may impose a bottleneck on processing that results in limits on the capacity and speed of tracking. |
Qunyue Liu; Xiabin Lin; Qin Wang; Yuxiang Lan; Zhipeng Zhu; Xiong Yao; Yaling Gao; Yuanping Shen; Meng Huang; Hongxin Wang How do nature type and expertise impact restorative perceptions and eye movements? A between-subjects eye-tracking study Journal Article In: People and Nature, vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 1198–1210, 2025. @article{Liu2025l,Previous research has shown that natural environments and landscape-related expertise affect psychological restoration and visual behaviour. However, little is known about how subtle differences in naturalness across similar settings, and the role of expertise, influence restorative benefits and eye movements. This study addresses these gaps by investigating how different nature settings—wild nature, tended nature (includes plaza, lawn, path, pool and waterfall settings), and urban environments—influence human preferences, restorative perceptions and eye movements. A between-subjects experimental design was used, with 280 participants randomly assigned to one of seven landscape settings (40 participants per setting). Eye movements were tracked during the experiment to assess visual engagement. The study found that the type of setting significantly influenced preferences, restorative potential and outcomes. Wild nature, along with two tended nature settings (pool and waterfall), was rated higher in restorative potential compared with urban and plaza settings by both expert and non-expert groups. No significant differences were observed between pool, waterfall and wild nature settings in these ratings. While expertise influenced preferences in lawn, path and waterfall settings, it did not significantly impact perceptions of restorative potential or outcomes in most settings. Furthermore, settings had a stronger effect on eye movements in non-experts, with notable differences in eye movement behaviour between the two groups. This study emphasizes the importance of designing landscapes that cater to the diverse needs and preferences of different user groups. The findings contribute to the interdisciplinary field of people–nature relationships, providing insights for landscape architecture, urban planning and public health. |
Anika Krause; Christian H. Poth Urgency enforces stimulus-driven action across spatial and numerical cognitive control tasks Journal Article In: PLoS One, vol. 20, pp. 1–18, 2025. @article{Krause2025a,It has been shown that urgency in cognitive control tasks elicits a time-window in which responses are dominated by stimuli rather than goals. If stimulus information conflicts with goal-relevant information, urgency impairs goal-directed responses. This was shown for an antisaccade task as well as tasks using manual responses. Critically, however, all previous studies on manual responses used arrows as stimuli, leaving it unclear whether urgency affects cognitive control also in tasks using different stimuli. Here, we show that the urgency effect can also be elicited in three cognitive control tasks that do not use arrow stimuli. Participants completed either a Spatial Stroop task with word stimuli, in which they reacted to the word meaning while ignoring the spatial position, or a Numerical Stroop Task, in which they had to respond to the numerically larger of two presented numbers. The physical size of the numbers varied but was irrelevant to the task. The third task was a Simon task, where participants were instructed to react to the color of a stimulus while ignoring its spatial position. In all tasks, urgency evoked a time window, in which the position or the physical size dominated the response, which was evident from a drop of performance below chance level in conflict situations. These results reveal that the effect of urgency on cognitive control does not depend on arrow stimuli and emerges in a number of other spatially related tasks, specifically in spatial and numerical cognitive control tasks. As such, they suggest that urgency affects cognitive control more generally. |
Geoffrey Kaye; Edan Johnston; Jaiden Burke; Natalie Gasson; Welber Marinovic Differential effects of visual and auditory cognitive tasks on smooth pursuit eye movements Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 62, no. 5, pp. 1–10, 2025. @article{Kaye2025,Smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEM) are important to gather visual information that guides our interactions with moving objects (e.g., tracking a tennis ball, or following a car when driving). In many neurological conditions, from Parkinson's disease to stroke, the voluntary control of SPEM can be compromised. Therefore, SPEMs can serve as sensitive proxies for assessing cognitive and sensorimotor function. Prior research has shown that SPEMs are influenced by attention and working memory load, yet it remains unclear how the sensory modality of concurrent tasks interacts with these effects. Here, we conducted a 3 (working memory load: no load, easy [low load], and hard [high load]) × 2 (sensory modality: visual vs. auditory) experiment to examine how working memory load and secondary task modality interact to affect SPEM in healthy young adults. Participants tracked a moving circle while simultaneously performing an arithmetic task, where they added either constant (1) or variable (1–5) numbers which were presented visually or auditorily. Our results showed that a secondary auditory task increased tracking variability during high cognitive load. In contrast, we found that the visual task improved tracking, reducing variability irrespective of cognitive load. We interpret our results as evidence that auditory processing requires additional top-down control that is critical for the control of smooth pursuit, diverting resources required for smooth pursuit and, consequently, increasing SPEM variability. These findings emphasize the importance of sensory modality in understanding the interactions between working memory and oculomotor control. We suggest that auditory secondary cognitive tasks may provide a more sensitive test of sensorimotor control deficits in future research with clinical populations. |
Yu Cin Jian; Pin Hsien Kuo; Ting Ai Chen College students' mindsets and second-language academic text reading: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Current Psychology, vol. 44, no. 10, pp. 8905–8920, 2025. @article{Jian2025b,Recent research has confirmed that growth mindsets (GMs) have a positive effect on reading performance and attitudes towards engagement. However, due to the scarce use of second language (L2) texts as reading materials, if mindsets are relevant to L2 reading processes remain unclear. This study used an eye tracker, questionnaires, and a reading comprehension test to explore the relationship between readers' language mindsets and levels of concentration and willingness to read L2 academic texts, reading processes, and comprehension performance. Data were collected from 107 college students with English as a second language. Participants filled out the Language Mindsets Inventory, read an academic English text with their eye movements recorded, and completed comprehension post-tests. Pearson's correlation analysis revealed that students who considered language intelligence malleable also thought their English learning ability was changeable, had higher levels of concentration and willingness to read academic articles, and had better general English reading ability than those whose language intelligence level was fixed. Moreover, multiple regression analysis revealed that students approaching the growth mindset end had a shorter single-mean fixation duration (i.e., faster decoding) when reading the academic text, and this eye-movement measure could further predict their academic English reading comprehension outcomes, with general English ability providing mediating effects. Overall, the findings suggest that students' language mindsets are directly relevant to L2 academic text reading processes, concentration, and willingness levels and indirectly relevant to reading comprehension performance. |
Caitlin M. Hudac; Kelsey Dommer; Monique Mahony; Trent D. DesChamps; Brianna Cairney; Rachel Earl; Evangeline C. Kurtz-Nelson; Jessica Bradshaw; Raphael A. Bernier; Evan E. Eichler; Emily Neuhaus; Sara Jane Webb; Frederick Shic Visual and auditory attention in individuals with DYRK1A and SCN2A disruptive variants Journal Article In: Autism Research, vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 909–921, 2025. @article{Hudac2025,This preliminary study sought to assess biomarkers of attention using electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking in two ultra-rare monogenic populations associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Relative to idiopathic ASD (n = 12) and neurotypical comparison (n = 49) groups, divergent attention profiles were observed for the monogenic groups, such that individuals with DYRK1A (n = 9) exhibited diminished auditory attention condition differences during an oddball EEG paradigm whereas individuals with SCN2A (n = 5) exhibited diminished visual attention condition differences noted by eye gaze tracking when viewing social interactions. Findings provide initial support for alignment of auditory and visual attention markers in idiopathic ASD and neurotypical development but not monogenic groups. These results support ongoing efforts to develop translational ASD biomarkers within the attention domain. |
Yi Hsuan Hsu; Chien-Chung Chen Eye-movement patterns for perceiving bistable figures Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 1–18, 2025. @article{Hsu2025,Bistable figures can generate two different percepts alternating with each other. It is suggested that eye fixation plays an important role in bistable figure perception because it helps us selectively focus on certain image features. We tested how the shift of percept is related to the eye-fixation pattern and whether inhibition of return (IOR) plays a role in this process. IOR refers to the phenomenon where, after attention remains at the same image location for a period, the inhibition to the mechanisms supporting that location increases. Consequently, visual attention shifts to a new location, and reallocation to the original location is suppressed. We used an eye tracker to record the observers' eye movements during observation of the duck/rabbit figure and the Necker cube while recording their percept reversals. In Experiment 1, we showed there were indeed different eye fixation patterns for different percepts. Also, the fixation shifted across different regions that occurred before the percept reversal. In Experiment 2, we examined the influence of inward bias on the duck/rabbit figure and found that it had a significant effect on the first percept but that this effect diminished over time. In Experiment 3, a mask was added to the attended region to remove the local saliency. This manipulation increased the number of percept reversals and fixation shifts across different regions. That is, the change in local saliency can cause a fixation shift and thus reverse our perception. Our result shows that what we perceive depends on where we look. |
Nabil Hasshim; Molly Carruthers; Ludovic Ferrand; Maria Augustinova; Benjamin A. Parris No pupillometric evidence for effortful proactive control in the proportion-congruent Stroop paradigm Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 78, no. 5, pp. 884–896, 2025. @article{Hasshim2025,Cognitive control is the ability to allocate attention away from stimuli that are irrelevant to achieving a goal, towards stimuli that are. When conflict is anticipated, attention is biased in a global, top-down manner called proactive control and this effortful type of cognitive control is engaged before stimulus onset. The list-wise congruency proportion (LWPC) effect, where the Stroop congruency effect is reduced when there are more incongruent than congruent trials compared to vice versa, has been viewed as one of the prime signatures of this type of cognitive control. However, there has been recent debate about the extent to which this effect should be attributed to proactive control instead of alternative explanations such as simpler associative learning or reactive control. Thus, by using pupillometry (i.e., an indicator of cognitive effort), the present study investigated the extent to which LWPC effects result from effortful proactive control. Experiment 1 employed a classic proportion congruency manipulation, while Experiment 2 replaced congruent trials with neutral trials to control for potential effects of associative learning. While in line with past findings, proportion congruency effects were obtained in response times of both experiments and pupillometry showed both proportion congruency and Stroop effects after stimulus onset, no differences in pupil sizes were found during the preparatory phase. Therefore, these results do not support the idea that the observed LWPC effects are due to participants engaging in effortful proactive control. |
Courtney Guida; Minwoo J. B. Kim; Olivia A. Stibolt; Alyssa Lompado; James E. Hoffman The N400 component reflecting semantic and repetition priming of visual scenes is suppressed during the attentional blink Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 87, no. 4, pp. 1199–1218, 2025. @article{Guida2025,In the attentional blink paradigm, participants attempt to identify two targets appearing in a rapidly presented stream of distractors. Report accuracy is typically high for the first target (T1) while identification of the second target (T2) is impaired when it follows within about 200–400 ms of T1. An important question is whether T2 is processed to a semantic level even when participants are unaware of its identity. We examined this issue in three studies that used natural scenes as stimuli and the N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP) as a measure of semantic priming. In the first experiment, the prime (e.g., a doghouse in a yard) was presented at the beginning of the trial and a test picture that was related (e.g., a dog standing in the kitchen) or unrelated (e.g., a coffee mug on a table) appeared as T2. In the second experiment, the prime was presented as T2 and the test picture appeared at the end of the picture sequence. In both experiments, we found robust semantic priming when participants were aware of the identity of the blinked picture and an absence of priming when they were unaware. In Experiment 3, we used identity priming to assess whether earlier representations preceding semantics were preserved, and again found that priming critically depended on awareness of the prime's identity. These results suggest that semantic priming in scenes, as measured with the N400, is a higher-level process that critically depends on attention and awareness. |
Jessica N. Goetz; Mark B. Neider How robust is categorial distractor suppression? Assessing the impact of additional categories and increased set size Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 87, no. 4, pp. 1162–1178, 2025. @article{Goetz2025a,Distractor suppression is the process of utilizing top-down information about distractors to improve search performance. Most studies have utilized simple stimuli and concluded that basic visual features are suppressed. However, recent studies have shown that categorical information can be suppressed, albeit with limited categories and display set sizes. In three experiments, we examined whether suppression for categorical distractors remained robust in more realistic search conditions by increasing the number of categories and display set sizes. Across our experiments, we modified previous experiments' paradigms where participants searched for specific t orientations that were embedded in categorical objects. In Experiment 1, we increased the number of categories. In Experiment 2, we only increased the display set size. In Experiment 3, we increased both the number of categories and the display set size. Response times were faster on trials where the cued distractor category appeared, indicating distractor suppression effects in Experiments 1 and 2 but not Experiment 3. Combined, the results suggest that categorical distractor suppression effects likely occur in more realistic contexts, but other more beneficial search strategies may also be employed with increased task complexity. |
Johannes B. Finke; Tim Klucken In: Biological Psychology, vol. 198, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{Finke2025,Beyond their incentive value, visual sexual stimuli are thought to have intrinsically rewarding properties that may contribute to the rising prevalence of problematic pornography use. However, whether excessive consumption of visual sexual stimuli fits classic models of addiction and involves reinforcement-based learning remains controversial. To address this question, the present study focused on the interplay of individual differences in trait sexual desire (specifically, the drive to engage in solitary sexuality) with stimulus modality in appetitive Pavlovian conditioning. 62 heterosexual participants (final sample, 36 women) underwent two sessions of differential conditioning, spaced one week apart. During one learning session, neutral cues were reinforced (50 %) by presentation of visual sexual stimuli, while auditory sexual stimuli served as unconditioned stimuli during the other session. Indexing both sexual arousal and appetitive learning, pupil dilation (as well as startle modulation) was used to track the acquisition of conditioned responses. Results revealed that solitary sexuality was associated with blunted differential pupillary responses to cues predicting visual (yet not auditory) sexual stimuli and less sensitization across trials, presumably reflecting reduced anticipatory arousal (consistent with self-report findings) and/or altered processing of uncertainty. At the same time, both enhanced startle habituation and valence ratings suggest that the preference for erotica was unaffected in individuals high in solitary sexuality. Fitted computational models provide additional evidence for a link to divergent learning trajectories. Taken together, our findings underscore the special nature of visual sexual stimuli (compared to auditory sexual stimuli) and support the view that excessive consumption may reflect a dispositional reward deficiency that drives individuals to seek out more intense stimulation. |
Dock H. Duncan; Norman Forschack; Dirk Moorselaar; Matthias M. Müller; Jan Theeuwes Learning modulates early encephalographic responses to distracting stimuli: A combined SSVEP and ERP study Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 21, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Duncan2025,Through experience, humans can learn to suppress locations that frequently contain distracting stimuli. However, the neural mechanism underlying learned suppression remains largely unknown. In this study, we combined steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs) with event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the mechanism behind statistically learned spatial suppression. Twenty-four male and female human participants performed a version of the additional singleton search task in which one location contained a distractor stimulus frequently. The search stimuli constantly flickered on-and-off the screen, resulting in steady-state entrainment. Prior to search onset, no differences in the SSVEP response were found, though a post hoc analysis did reveal proactive alpha lateralization. Following search onset, clear evoked differences in both the SSVEP and ERP signals emerged at the suppressed location relative to all other locations. Crucially, the early timing of these evoked modulations suggests that learned distractor suppression occurs at the initial stages of visual processing. |
Andrea I. Costantino; Benjamin O. Pelzer; Mark A. Williams; Matthew J. Crossley Partial information transfer from peripheral visual streams to foveal visual streams may be mediated through local primary visual circuits Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 311, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{Costantino2025,Visual object recognition is driven through the what pathway, a hierarchy of visual areas processing features of increasing complexity and abstractness. The primary visual cortex (V1), this pathway's origin, exhibits retinotopic organization: neurons respond to stimuli in specific visual field regions. A neuron responding to a central stimulus will not respond to a peripheral one, and vice versa. However, despite this organization, task-relevant feedback about peripheral stimuli can be decoded in unstimulated foveal cortex, and disrupting this feedback impairs discrimination behavior. The information encoded by this feedback remains unclear, as prior studies used computer-generated objects ill-suited to dissociate different representation types. To address this knowledge gap, we investigated the nature of information encoded in periphery-to-fovea feedback using real-world stimuli. Participants performed a same/different discrimination task on peripherally displayed images of vehicles and faces. Using fMRI multivariate decoding, we found that both peripheral and foveal V1 could decode images separated by low-level perceptual models (vehicles) but not those separated by semantic models (faces). This suggests the feedback primarily carries low-level perceptual information. In contrast, higher visual areas resolved semantically distinct images. A functional connectivity analysis revealed foveal V1 connections to both peripheral V1 and later-stage visual areas. These findings indicate that while both early and late visual areas may contribute to information transfer from peripheral to foveal processing streams, higher-to-lower area transfer may involve information loss. |
Markus Conci; Leonie Nowack; Paul C. J. Taylor; Kathrin Finke; Hermann J. Müller Right parietal rTMS induces bidirectional effects of selective attention upon object integration Journal Article In: Brain Sciences, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Conci2025,Background/Objectives: Part-to-whole object completion and search guidance by salient, integrated objects has been proposed to require attentional resources, as shown by studies of neglect patients suffering from right-parietal brain damage. The current study was performed to provide further causal evidence for the link between attention and object integration. Methods: Healthy observers detected targets in the left and/or right hemifields, and these targets were in turn embedded in various Kanizsa-type configurations that systematically varied in the extent to which individual items could be integrated into a complete, whole object. Moreover, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) was applied over the right intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and compared to both active and passive baseline conditions. Results: The results showed that target detection was substantially facilitated when the to-be detected item(s) were fully embedded in a salient, grouped Kanizsa figure, either a unilateral triangle or a bilateral diamond. However, object groupings in one hemifield did not facilitate target detection to the same extent when there were bilateral targets, one inside the (triangle) grouping and the other outside of the grouped object. These results extend previous findings from neglect patients. Moreover, a subgroup of observers was found to be particularly sensitive to IPS stimulation, revealing neglect-like extinction behavior with the single-hemifield triangle groupings and bilateral targets. Conversely, a second subgroup showed the opposite effect, namely an overall, IPS-dependent improvement in performance. Conclusions: These explorative analyses show that the parietal cortex, in particular IPS, seems to modulate the processing of object groupings by up- and downregulating the deployment of attention to spatial regions were to-be-grouped items necessitate attentional resources for object completion. |
Erick G. Chuquichambi; Tobiasz Trawinski; Enric Munar; Letizia Palumbo Reassessing the curvature effect in tables and chairs Journal Article In: i-Perception, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 1–20, 2025. @article{Chuquichambi2025,Several studies have consistently demonstrated that people generally prefer curved over angular contours. However, the magnitude of the curvature effect varies across stimuli, for example, with a larger effect reported for abstract stimuli compared to interior spaces. A comparison across stimuli that share similar physical features and belong to the same categories is warranted to determine whether curvature is a basis of object preference. Another important question is whether inspection differences, based on contour and object category, affect object preference. In Experiment 1, we addressed these questions by recording eye movements as participants rated their preferences for images of two types of common-use objects: tables and chairs. In Experiment 2, we limited the stimuli presentation to 84 ms, as brief presentations are thought to enhance the curvature effect. Neither of the two experiments confirmed a clear preference for curvature in tables or chairs. Yet, curvature significantly influenced fixation durations, with curvilinear tables eliciting longer fixations than rectilinear ones, although without affecting overall preference. The findings are discussed in the context of familiarity and object functionality in shaping preference judgements. |
Anna Chrabaszcz; Anna Laurinavichyute; Nina Ladinskaya; Liubov Baladzhaeva; Anat Prior; Andriy Myachykov; Olga Dragoy Writing direction influences the spatial representations of past- and future-tense forms: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 1079–1094, 2025. @article{Chrabaszcz2025,The present study tests the hypothesis that the directionality of reading habits (left-to-right or right-to-left) impacts individuals' representation of nonspatial events. Using the blank screen paradigm, we examine whether eye movements reflect culture-specific spatial biases in processing temporal information, specifically, grammatical tense in Russian and Hebrew. Sixty-two native speakers of Russian (a language with a left-to-right reading and writing system) and 62 native speakers of Hebrew (a language with a right-to-left reading and writing system) listened to verbs in the past or future tense while their spontaneous gaze positions were recorded. Following the verb, a visual spatial probe appeared in one of the five locations of the screen, and participants responded manually to indicate its position. While participants' response latencies to the spatial probe revealed no significant effects, their gaze positions along the horizontal axis for past- and future-tensed verbs aligned with the reading and writing direction in their language. These results provide novel evidence that eye movements during auditory processing of grammatical tense are influenced by culturally specific reading and writing conventions, shifting leftward or rightward on the horizontal plane depending on the stimuli's time reference (past or future) and the participants' language (Russian or Hebrew). This spatial bias indicates a common underlying cognitive mechanism that uses spatial dimensions to represent temporal constructs. |
Ankan Biswas; Wupadrasta Santosh Kumar; Kanishka Sharma; Supratim Ray Stimulus-induced gamma sources reduce in power but not in spatial extent with healthy aging in human EEG Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 61, no. 10, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Biswas2025,Aging alters brain structure and function, and studying such changes may help understand the neural basis underlying aging and devise interventions to detect deviations from healthy progression. Electroencephalogram (EEG) offers an effective way to study healthy aging owing to its high temporal resolution and affordability. Recent studies have shown that narrow-band stimulus-induced gamma oscillations (20–70 Hz) in EEG, induced with Cartesian gratings in a fixation task paradigm, weaken with healthy aging and onset of Alzheimer's disease (AD) while remaining highly reproducible for a given subject and thus hold promise as potential biomarkers. However, functional connectivity (FC) sometimes changes in a different way compared with sensor power with aging. This difference could be potentially addressed by studying how underlying gamma sources change with aging, since either a reduction in source power or a shrinkage of the sources (or both) could reduce the power in the sensors but may have different effects on other measures such as FC. We therefore reconstructed EEG gamma sources through a linear inverse method called exact low-resolution tomography analysis (eLORETA) on a large (N = 217) cohort of healthy elderly subjects (> 50 years). We further characterized gamma distribution in cortical space as an exponential fall-off from a seed voxel with maximal gamma source power to delineate a reduction in magnitude versus shrinkage. We found a significant reduction in magnitude but not shrinkage with healthy aging. Overall, our results shed light on changes in EEG gamma source distribution with healthy aging, which could provide clues about underlying neural mechanisms. |
P. Bernardis; M. Grassi; D. G. Pearson Differential eye movements and greater pupil size during mental scene construction in autobiographical recall Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 211, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Bernardis2025,There is growing evidence supporting a role for eye movements during autobiographical recall, but their potential functionality remains unclear. We hypothesise that the oculomotor system facilitates the process of mental scene construction, in which complex scenes associated with an autobiographical event are generated and maintained during recall. To explore this, we examined spontaneous eye movements during retrieval of cued autobiographical memories. Participants' verbal descriptions of each memory were recorded in synchronisation with their eye movements and pupil size during recall. For each memory participants described the place (details of the environment where the event took place) and the event (details of what happened). Narratives were analyzed using the Autobiographical Interview procedure, which separated internal spatial (place) and non-spatial (event, thoughts and emotion) details. Eye movements during recall of spatial details had significantly higher fixation duration and smaller saccade amplitude and peak velocity, and a higher number of consecutive unidirectional saccades, in comparison to recall of non-spatial details. Recurrence quantification analysis indicated longer sequences of refixations and more repetitions of the same fixation pattern when participants described spatial details. Recall of spatial details was also associated with significantly greater pupil area. Overall findings are consistent with the spontaneous production of more structured saccade patterns and greater cognitive load during the recall of internal spatial episodic scene details in comparison to episodic non-spatial details. These results are consistent with the oculomotor system facilitating the activation and correct positioning of elements of a complex scene relative to other imagined elements during autobiographical recall. |
Xing Nan Zhao; Sheng Hui Zhang; Shi Ming Tang; Cong Yu Surround modulation is predominantly orientation-unspecific in macaque V1 Journal Article In: Progress in Neurobiology, vol. 247, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Zhao2025d,Surround modulation is a fundamental property of V1 neurons, playing critical roles in stimulus integration and segregation. It is believed to be orientation-specific, as neurons' responses at preferred orientations are suppressed more by iso-oriented surrounds than by cross-oriented surrounds. Here, we investigated an alternative hypothesis that surround modulation is primarily orientation-unspecific, in that the observed “orientation-specific” surround effects actually reflect overall gain changes that affect neurons tuned to all orientations. We employed two-photon calcium imaging to compare V1 population orientation tuning functions under iso- and cross-surround modulation in awake, fixating macaques. While confirming “orientation-specific” surround suppression in individual neurons, our analysis of the population orientation tuning functions revealed that iso-surrounds induce a general orientation-unspecific suppression across all orientation-tuned neurons, plus weak orientation-specific suppression to neurons tuned to the center stimulus orientation. Furthermore, cross-surrounds mainly reduce orientation-unspecific suppression by scaling up responses of all orientation-tuned neurons. These findings suggest a model of population gain control where surround stimuli mostly scale the responses of the neuronal population. Further population coding analyses supported this conclusion, demonstrating that surround suppression leads to degraded target orientation information at least partially due to a reduced number of contributing neurons with diverse orientation preferences. |
Yang Zhang; Yangping Li; Weiping Hu; Huizhi Bai; Yuanjing Lyu Applying machine learning to intelligent assessment of scientific creativity based on scientific knowledge structure and eye-tracking data Journal Article In: Journal of Science Education and Technology, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 401–419, 2025. @article{Zhang2025s,Scientific creativity plays an essential role in science education as an advanced cognitive ability that inspires students to solve scientific problems inventively. The cultivation of scientific creativity relies heavily on effective assessment. Typically, human raters manually score scientific creativity using the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), which is a labor-intensive, time-consuming, and error-prone process. The assessment procedure is susceptible to subjective biases stemming from cognitive prejudice, distractions, fatigue, and fondness, potentially compromising its reliability, consistency, and efficiency. Previous research has sought to mitigate these risks by automating the assessment through latent semantic analysis and artificial intelligence. In this study, we developed machine learning (ML) models based on a training dataset that included output labels from the Scientific Creativity Test (SCT) evaluated by human experts, along with input features derived from objectively measurable semantic network parameters (representing the scientific knowledge structure) and eye-tracking blink duration (indicating attention patterns during the SCT). Most models achieve over 90% accuracy in predicting the scientific creativity levels of new individuals outside the training set, with some models achieving perfect accuracy. The results indicate that the ML models effectively capture the underlying relationship between scientific knowledge, eye movements, and scientific creativity. These models enable the fairly objective prediction of scientific creativity levels based on semantic network parameters and blink durations during the SCT, eliminating the need for ongoing human scoring. Therefore, laborious and complex manual assessment methods typically used for SCT can be avoided. This new method improves the efficiency of scientific creativity assessment by automating processes, minimizing subjectivity, providing rapid feedback, and enabling large-scale evaluations, all while reducing evaluators' workloads. |
Xinni Zhang; Mengshi Dai; Feiyan Cheng; Lijun Yun; Zaiqing Chen Eye movement indicator difference based on binocular color fusion and rivalry Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 1–24, 2025. @article{Zhang2025p,Color fusion and rivalry are two key information integration mechanisms in binocular vision, representing the visual system's processing patterns for consistent and conflicting inputs, respectively. This study hypothesizes that there are quantifiable differences in eye movement indicators under states of binocular color fusion and rivalry, which can be verified through multi-paradigm eye movement experiments. The experiment recruited eighteen subjects with normal vision (nine males and nine females), employing the Gaze Stability paradigm, Straight Curve Eye Hopping paradigm, and Smoothed Eye Movement Tracking paradigm for eye movement tracking. Each paradigm included a binocular color rivalry experimental group (R-G) and two binocular color fusion control groups (R-R, G-G). Data analysis indicates significant differences in indicators such as Average Saccade Amplitude, Median Saccade Amplitude, and SD of Saccade Amplitude between binocular color fusion and rivalry states. For instance, through Z-Score normalization and cross-paradigm merged analysis, specific ranges of these indicators were identified to distinguish between the two states. When the Average Saccade Amplitude falls within the range of −0.905–−0.693, it indicates a state of binocular color rivalry; when the range is 0.608–1.294, it reflects a state of binocular color fusion. Subsequently, ROC curve analysis confirmed the effectiveness of the experimental paradigms in analyzing the mechanisms of binocular color fusion and rivalry, with AUC values of 0.990, 0.741, and 0.967, respectively. These results reveal the potential of eye movement behaviors as biomarkers for the dynamic processing of visual conflicts. This finding provides empirical support for understanding the neural computational models of binocular vision and lays a methodological foundation for developing visual impairment assessment tools based on eye movement features. |
Tian-yu Zhang; Run-ze He; Wen-guang He Effects of animacy on Chinese RCs processing in younger and old adults: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Literature and Art Studies, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 294–309, 2025. @article{Zhang2025l,Syntax and semantics are two important factors that influence sentence processing. Studies have found different aging effects in syntactic and semantic processing during sentence comprehension. While there is consensus on the aging effects in syntactic processing, the presence of aging in semantic processing remains debated. The present study aimed to explore whether there were aging effects in lexical-semantic information processing in complex sentence. 79 participants were recruited to take part in this study, including 40 younger adults (mean age of 21.1 ± 1.19 years) and 39 older adults (mean age of 66.24 ± 3.02 years). Using eye-movement tracking technology and manipulating the animacy of head nouns in Chinese subject relative clauses (SRCs) and object relative clauses (ORCs), we investigated the abilities of young and old adults in relative clauses (RCs) processing. The results of comprehension accuracy revealed a significant effect of aging in RCs processing, with older participants exhibiting poor performance compared with younger counterparts across all four clause conditions. Furthermore, younger participants demonstrated a clear animacy effect in RCs processing, but this effect was not found in older participants. Reading times indicated a prominent aging effect in clause processing, with older participants showing significantly longer reading times across all four types of RCs compared to younger participants. It was observed that processing ORCs in Chinese was relatively easier than processing SRCs. Additionally, a noticeable aging effect in semantic processing was found, specifically, the difficulties of processing SRCs and ORCs vary with the animacy configuration of the head nouns for younger participants but were not observed in older participants. In summary, aging in cognition would also inhinder semantic processing in complex sentence comprehension. |
Tsuyoshi Yoshioka; Hiroyuki Muto; Jun Saiki Functional perspectives in mental jigsaw puzzles: Insights from eye-tracking, questionnaire, and behavioral data Journal Article In: PLoS One, vol. 20, pp. 1–25, 2025. @article{Yoshioka2025,This study investigated cognitive strategies in mental jigsaw puzzles, integrating mental rotation and translation with a focus on directionality and detour arguments. Unlike object mental rotation tasks, these puzzles introduced physical constraints, revealing systematic directional tendencies in both eye movements and subjective reports. Specifically, smaller protruding objects were consistently directed toward larger indented objects. This was accompanied by longer completion times and reduced linearity, paralleling strategies used in physical puzzle-solving. Behavioral asymmetries observed in the puzzles unexpectedly mirrored those found in object mental rotation tasks. While controlling for mental motion directions showed comparable completion times at 300° between tasks, the study did not fully clarify the role of detours, indicating the need for further research. |
Amit Yashar; Marisa Carrasco When periphery rules: Enhanced sampling weights of the visual periphery in crowding across dimensions Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 779–790, 2025. @article{Yashar2025,Crowding, our inability to identify a feature or object – the target – due to its proximity to adjacent features or objects – flankers – exhibits a notable inner-outer asymmetry. This asymmetry is characterized by the outer flanker – more peripheral – creating stronger interference than the inner one – closer to the fovea. But crowding is not uniform across different feature dimensions. For example, in the case of orientation, this asymmetry reflects misreport errors: observers are more likely to misidentify the outer flanker as the target than the inner one. However, for spatial frequency (SF), observers tend to average the features of the target and flankers (Yashar et al., 2019). Here, we investigated whether and how the inner-outer asymmetry manifests across various feature dimensions: Gabor orientation and SF, as well as T-shape tilt and color. We reanalyzed continuous estimation reports data published by Yashar et al. (2019), focusing on a previously unanalyzed factor: the relative position of each flanker (inner vs. outer). We fit probabilistic models that assign variable weights to each flanker. Our analysis revealed that observers predominantly misreport the outer flanker as the target with Gabor orientation and T-shape tilt stimuli, and slightly so with color stimuli, whereas with Gabor SF, observers perform a weighted average of all features but also with a bias towards the outer flanker over the inner one. These findings suggest that an increased weighting on the more peripheral items is a general characteristic of crowding in peripheral vision. |
Yanfang Xia; Huaiyu Liu; Oliver K. Kälin; Samuel Gerster; Dominik R. Bach Measuring human Pavlovian reward conditioning and memory retention after consolidation Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Xia2025,While a body of literature has addressed the quantification of aversive Pavlovian conditioning in humans, Pavlovian reward conditioning with primary reinforcers and its recall after overnight consolidation remain understudied. In particular, few studies have directly compared different conditioned response types and their retrodictive validity. Here, we sought to fill this gap by investigating heart period responses (HPR), skin conductance responses (SCR), pupil size responses (PSR), and respiration amplitude responses (RAR). We conducted two independent experiments (N1 = 37 |
Robert Woodry; Clayton E. Curtis; Jonathan Winawer Feedback scales the spatial tuning of cortical responses during both visual working memory and long-term memory Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 17, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Woodry2025,Perception, working memory, and long-term memory each evoke neural responses in the visual cortex. While previous neuroimaging research on the role of the visual cortex in memory has largely emphasized similarities between perception and memory, we hypothesized that responses in the visual cortex would differ depending on the origins of the inputs. Using fMRI, we quantified spatial tuning in the visual cortex while participants (both sexes) viewed, maintained in working memory, or retrieved from long-term memory a peripheral target. In each condition, BOLD responses were spatially tuned and aligned with the target's polar angle in all measured visual field maps including V1. As expected given the increasing sizes of receptive fields, polar angle tuning during perception increased in width up the visual hierarchy from V1 to V2, V3, hV4, and beyond. In stark contrast, the tuned responses were broad across the visual hierarchy during long-term memory (replicating a prior result) and during working memory. This pattern is consistent with the idea that mnemonic responses in V1 stem from top-down sources, even when the stimulus was recently viewed and is held in working memory. Moreover, in long-term memory, trial-to-trial biases in these tuned responses (clockwise or counterclockwise of target) predicted matched biases in memory, suggesting that the reinstated cortical responses influence memory-guided behavior. We conclude that feedback widens spatial tuning in the visual cortex during memory, where earlier visual maps inherit broader tuning from later maps thereby impacting the precision of memory. |
Yue Wang; Chencan Qian; Yige Gao; Yulian Zhou; Xiaotong Zhang; Wen Wen; Peng Zhang Attenuated and delayed neural activity in cortical microcircuitry of monocular processing and binocular interactions in human amblyopia Journal Article In: Imaging Neuroscience, vol. 3, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Wang2025q,Disruption of retinal input early in life can lead to amblyopia, a condition characterized by reduced visual acuity after optical correction. While functional abnormalities in the early visual areas have been observed in amblyopia, mesoscale deficits in cortical microcircuitry across cortical depth remain unexplored in humans. Using a combination of submillimeter 7T fMRI and EEG frequency-tagging methods, we investigated neural deficits in monocular processing and binocular interactions in human adults with unilateral amblyopia. The results revealed attenuated and delayed monocular activity in the thalamic input layers of V1, followed by imbalanced binocular suppression and weakened binocular integration in the superficial layers. These disruptions further reduced visual signal strength and processing speed. Our findings pinpoint specific neural deficits in the cortical microcircuitry associated with human amblyopia, offering valuable insights into the mesoscale mechanisms of developmental plasticity and paving the way for more effective treatments for this visual disorder. |
Sisi Wang; Freek Ede Re-focusing visual working memory during expected and unexpected memory tests Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 13, pp. 1–21, 2025. @article{Wang2025k,A classic distinction from the domain of external attention is that between anticipatory orienting and subsequent re-orienting of attention to unexpected events. Whether and how humans also re-orient attention ‘in mind' following expected and unexpected working-memory tests remains elusive. We leveraged spatial modulations in neural activity and gaze to isolate re-orienting within the spatial layout of visual working memory following central memory tests of certain, expected, or unexpected mnemonic content. Besides internal orienting after predictive cues, we unveil a second stage of internal attentional deployment following both expected and unexpected memory tests. Following expected tests, internal attentional deployment was not contingent on prior orienting, suggesting an additional verification – ‘double checking' – in memory. Following unexpected tests, re-focusing of alternative memory content was prolonged. This brings attentional re-orienting to the domain of working memory and underscores how memory tests can invoke either a verification or a revision of our internal focus. |
Kiomars Sharifi; Mojtaba Abbaszadeh; Ali Ghazizadeh Spatial processing enhancement in the prefrontal cortex for rapid detection of valuable objects Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 16, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Sharifi2025,It is recently shown that objects with long-term reward associations can be efficiently located during visual search. The neural mechanism for valuable object pop-out is unknown. In this work, we recorded neuronal responses in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) with known roles in visual search and reward processing in macaques while monkeys engaged in efficient versus inefficient visual search for high-value fractal objects (targets). Behavioral results and modeling using multialternative attention-modulated drift-diffusion indicated that efficient search was concurrent with enhanced processing for peripheral objects. Notably, neural results showed response amplification and receptive field widening to peripherally presented targets in vlPFC during visual search. Both neural effects predict higher target detection and were found to be correlated with it. Our results suggest that value-driven efficient search independent of low-level visual features arises from reward-induced spatial processing enhancement of peripheral valuable objects. |
Hayden Scott; Allison J. Murphy; Farran Briggs; Adam C. Snyder Using generative models of naturalistic scenes to sample neural population tuning manifolds Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 61, no. 7, pp. 1–24, 2025. @article{Scott2025,Investigations into sensory coding in the visual system have typically relied on the use of either simple, unnatural visual stimuli or natural images. Simple stimuli, such as Gabor patches, have been effective when looking at single neurons in early visual areas such as V1 but seldom produce large responses from mid-level visual neurons or neural populations with diverse tuning. Many types of “naturalistic” image models have been developed recently, which bridge the gap between overly simple stimuli and experimentally infeasible natural images. These stimuli can vary along a large number of feature dimensions, introducing new challenges when trying to map those features to neural activity. This “curse of dimensionality” is exacerbated when neural responses are themselves high dimensional, such as when recording neural populations with implanted multielectrode arrays. We propose a method that searches high-dimensional stimulus spaces for characterizing neural population manifolds in a closed-loop experimental design. Stimuli were generated using a deep neural network in each block by using neural responses to previous stimuli to make predictions about the relationship between the latent space of the image model and neural responses. We found that these latent variables from the deep generative image model explained stronger linear relationships with neural activity than various alternative forms of image compression. This result reinforces the potential for deep generative image models for efficient characterization of high-dimensional tuning manifolds for visual neural populations. |
Matthew C. Rosen; David J. Freedman Multiplexing of cognitive encoding by oculomotor networks leads to incidental gaze shifts Journal Article In: PNAS, vol. 122, no. 15, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Rosen2025,Humans and other animals are adept at learning to perform cognitively demanding behavioral tasks. Neurophysiological recordings in nonhuman primates during such tasks find that the requisite cognitive variables are encoded strongly in core oculomotor brain regions. Here, we assembled a large dataset—11 monkeys performing an abstract visual categorization task, surveyed across more than 1,000 neural recording sessions— to reveal that this produces a robust but uninstructed behavioral “tell,” observed in all subjects and experiments: small, cognitively modulated eye movements. We find that these eye movements are causally linked to activity in SC but not LIP, and that they occur following transient alignment of cognitive and saccadic population coding subspaces in SC. This behavioral signature of oculomotor engagement is absent during a similar task that does not require rule-based categorization, suggesting that abstract task behaviors recruit primate oculomotor networks more strongly than previously understood. |
Ying Que; Xiao Hu Enhancing learners' reading comprehension with preferred background music: An eye-tracking, EEG, and heart rate study Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 1–17, 2025. @article{Que2025,It is often observed that many learners prefer reading texts with background music (BGM), which may enhance engagement and mood in reading. However, the impact of BGM on reading comprehension performance or process remains heterogeneous. This study examined how learners' self-provided preferred BGM affected reading comprehension accuracy and cognitive processes as measured by self-reports and multimodal psychophysiological signals (e.g., eye movements, EEG signals, heart rates) during reading, while also considering the role of personal traits and music characteristics. Data were collected from a within-subject experiment with 52 nonnative English speakers, who read half of the English text passages with their self-provided BGM and the other half in silence. The results indicated that overall BGM did not significantly affect reading task performance, self-reports, or multimodal psychophysiological responses. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that learners' personal traits (e.g., working memory capacity, multitasking ability, language proficiency, BGM listening habits, prior knowledge) moderated the effects of BGM on their cognitive processes during reading as indicated by the psychophysiological responses. Stepwise linear regression showed that the presence of lyrics predicted decreased reading comprehension accuracy and disrupted word-level lexical processing, while a fast tempo was related to more efficient text processing. These findings offer empirical evidence on how BGM influences learners' reading task performance and cognitive processes and provide practical guidance for stakeholders (e.g., learners, instructors, learning environment designers) on the personalized and appropriate use of BGM for enhancing reading comprehension. |
Zhongling Pi; Xuemei Huang; Yujing Yuan; Yuan Yang; Xin Zhao; Xiying Li Intermittent mouse pointing enhances students' learning from instructional videos Journal Article In: Education and Information Technologies, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 7863–7876, 2025. @article{Pi2025b,Mouse pointing can effectively guide students to pay attention to the relevant information on slides that an instructor is verbally dearth of studies systematically examining the role of mouse pointing in instructional videos. To address this gap, the present study aims to test the impact of different types of mouse pointing (continuous pointing vs. intermittent pointing vs. no pointing) on students' dwell time on slides and the instructor, fixation counts on slides and the instructor, intersubject correlation (ISC) of eye movements, average blink duration, and learning performance. Eye movements data found that students viewing instructional videos with continuous pointing exhibited longer dwell time on slides, shorter dwell time on the instructor, and greater ISC, compared to viewing videos with intermittent pointing and without pointing. Furthermore, students viewing instructional videos with intermittent pointing exhibited longer blink duration compared to those viewing videos with continuous pointing and without pointing. More importantly, students showed better learning performance in the instructional video featuring intermittent pointing. The results suggest that intermittent pointing is more effective at enhancing learning from instructional videos than continuous pointing, and continuous pointing is more effective than no pointing. Consequently, we suggest that instructors employ intermittent mouse pointing as a strategy to enhance students' learning performance in instructional videos. |
Mykola Petrenko; Lena Coenen; Alice Doubliez; Thomas M. Ernst; Enzo Nio; Nicolas Diekmann; Metin Uengoer; Sen Cheng; Christian J. Merz; Dagmar Timmann; Giorgi Batsikadze Appetitive and aversive classical conditioning: Self-reports and physiological responses Journal Article In: Behavioural Brain Research, vol. 484, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Petrenko2025,Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying appetitive and aversive conditioning has important clinical implications because maladaptive associative learning processes are thought to contribute to various mental disorders, including anxiety, mood and eating disorders, as well as addiction and chronic pain. Since brain areas related to appetitive and aversive conditioning overlap with one another, but are probably also distinct, it is of interest to directly compare appetitive and aversive conditioning in behavioral and imaging studies. To what extent do behavioral outcome recordings in appetitive and aversive conditioning tasks match? We compared self-reports and physiological responses (skin conductance responses and pupil size) using commonly applied appetitive and aversive unconditioned stimuli (US) in 40 young and healthy participants (20 women). Different to animal studies, secondary reinforcers, particularly monetary rewards, are most commonly used as appetitive US in humans. Therefore, the first study compared self-reports and physiological assessments that were elicited by electric shock and three monetary rewards (one Euro, two Euros and five Euros). In the second study, differential aversive and appetitive conditioning were performed on two consecutive days with order being randomized between participants. Since outcome measures of electric shock best matched the one Euro reward, one Euro was used as US in the appetitive conditioning paradigm. In both studies, physiological responses were significantly lower towards appetitive conditioned stimuli (CS) and US compared to aversive CS and US (all p-values < 0.001). Self-reports, on the other hand, showed much fewer differences in response magnitude and differential CS responding comparing appetitive and aversive CS and US. Overall, self-reports of valence were higher towards monetary rewards compared to the electrical stimulus considering both responses to the US in study 1 and CS in study 2 (p-values < 0.001). Our findings show that full comparability between behavioral outcomes can probably not be achieved in appetitive and aversive conditioning paradigms since outcomes might easily diverge. Future studies comparing the neural responses in processing of aversive and appetitive stimuli using brain imaging, electroencephalography or other neurobiological methods need to control for possible differences in response magnitudes and learning rates. |
Nir Ofir; Ayelet N. Landau Motor preparation tracks decision boundary crossing rather than accumulated evidence in temporal decision-making Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 17, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Ofir2025,Interval timing, the ability of animals to estimate the passage of time, is thought to involve diverse neural processes rather than a single central “clock” (Paton and Buonomano, 2018). Each of the different processes engaged in interval timing follows a different dynamic path, according to its specific function. For example, attention tracks anticipated events, such as offsets of intervals (Rohenkohl and Nobre, 2011), while motor processes control the timing of the behavioral output (De Lafuente et al., 2024). However, which processes are involved and how they are orchestrated over time to produce a temporal decision remains unknown. Here, we study motor preparation in the temporal bisection task, in which human (female and male) participants categorized intervals as “long” or “short.” In contrast to typical perceptual decisions, where motor plans for all response alternatives are prepared simultaneously (Shadlen and Kiani, 2013), we find that temporal bisection decisions develop sequentially. While preparation for “long” responses was already underway before interval offset, no preparation was found for “short” responses. Furthermore, within intervals categorized as “long,” motor preparation was stronger at interval offset for faster responses. Our findings support the two-stage model of temporal decisions, where “long” decisions are considered during the interval itself, while “short” decisions are only considered after the interval is over. Viewed from a wider perspective, our study offers methods to study the neural mechanisms of temporal decisions, by studying the multiple processes that produce them. |
Catherine N. Moran; David P. McGovern; Mike Melnychuk; Alan F. Smeaton; Paul M. Dockree Oscillations of the wandering mind: Neural evidence for distinct exploration/exploitation strategies in younger and older adults Journal Article In: Human Brain Mapping, vol. 46, no. 6, pp. 1–23, 2025. @article{Moran2025a,This study traced the neurophysiological signals of fluctuating attention and task-related processing to ascertain the mechanistic basis of transient strategic shifts between competing task focus and mind-wandering, as expressed by the ‘exploitation/exploration' framework, and explored how they are differentially affected with age. Thirty-four younger (16 female, mean age 22 years) and 34 healthy older (20 female, mean age 71 years) adults performed the Gradual Contrast Change Detection task; monitoring a continuously presented flickering annulus for intermittent gradual contrast reductions and responding to experience sampling probes to discriminate the nature of their thoughts at discrete moments. Electroencephalography and pupillometry were concurrently recorded during target- and probe-related intervals. Older adults tracked the downward stimulus trajectory with greater sensory integrity (reduced target SSVEP amplitude) and demonstrated earlier initiation of evidence accumulation (earlier onset CPP), attenuated variability in the attentional signal (posterior alpha) and more robust phasic pupillary responses to the target, suggesting steadier attentional engagement with age. Younger adults only exhibited intermittent sensory encoding, indexed by greater variability in the sensory (SSVEP) and attentional (alpha) signals before mind-wandering relative to focused states. Attentional variability was accompanied by disrupted behavioural performance and reduced task-related neural processing, independent of age group. Together, this elucidates distinct performance strategies employed by both groups. Older adults suspended mind-wandering and implemented an exploitative oscillation strategy to circumvent their reduced cognitive resources and allay potential behavioural costs. Conversely, younger adults exhibited greater exploration through mind-wandering, utilising their greater cognitive resources to flexibly alternate between competing goal-directed and mind-wandering strategies, with limited costs. |
Mary E. McNamara; Jason Shumake; Christopher G. Beevers Attention allocation for dysphoric information in adults with depression symptoms using eye-tracking and mouse-tracking Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 20, pp. 1–22, 2025. @article{McNamara2025,Biased attention for dysphoric stimuli is thought to maintain depression, but poor measurement has limited prior tests of this hypothesis. The current study examined the association between biased attention for dysphoric information and depression using a novel free viewing attention bias task combined with measuring line of visual gaze via eye tracking or a behavioral proxy for line of visual gaze via mouse tracking in three samples of college students using in-person eye-tracking (Experiment 1 |