Crossmodal attention switching: Auditory dominance in temporal discrimination tasks

Visual stimuli are often processed more efficiently than accompanying stimuli in another modality. In line with this “visual dominance”, earlier studies on attentional switching showed a clear benefit for visual stimuli in a bimodal visual–auditory modality-switch paradigm that required spatial stimulus localization in the relevant modality. The present study aimed to examine the generality of this visual dominance effect. The modality appropriateness hypothesis proposes that stimuli in different modalities are differentially effectively processed depending on the task dimension, so that processing of visual stimuli is favored in the dimension of space, whereas processing auditory stimuli is favored in the dimension of time. In the present study, we examined this proposition by using a temporal duration judgment in a bimodal visual–auditory switching paradigm. Two experiments demonstrated that crossmodal interference (i.e., temporal stimulus congruence) was larger for visual stimuli than for auditory stimuli, suggesting auditory dominance when performing temporal judgment tasks. However, attention switch costs were larger for the auditory modality than for visual modality, indicating a dissociation of the mechanisms underlying crossmodal competition in stimulus processing and modality-specific biasing of attentional set.     

Hemispheric asymmetries in interpreting forms vs colors in ambiguous patterns

Prior to receiving briefly lateralized presentations of ambiguous visual patterns (Rorschach inkblots), 28 normal right-handed males heard two words, each describing a different interpretation of the pattern, e.g., one word might describe an interpretation based on attending to shapes or forms (form choices) and the other might describe an interpretation based on attending to chromatic color (e.g., color choices). Color choices were more frequent than form choices on left-hemisphere (LH) presentations of the patterns, and form choices were more frequent than color choices on right-hemisphere (RH) presentations. These results were interpreted as consistent with the theory that the LH's favored mental representation is semantic (i.e., frequent choices of concepts associated with names of colors in the patterns) and the RH's favored representation is imaginal (i.e., frequent choices of concepts associated with difficult-to-label forms in the patterns).     

Processing of order information for numbers and months

Despite a great deal of research on the processing of numerical magnitude (e.g., the quantity denoted by the number 5), few studies have investigated how this magnitude information relates to the ordinal properties of numbers (e.g., the fact that 5 is the fifth integer). In the present study, we investigated order-related processing of numbers, as well as months of the year, with a novel ordering task to see whether the processing of order information differs from the processing of magnitude information. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were shown three numbers (Experiment 1) or three months (Experiment 2) and were required to indicate whether the stimuli were in the correct order. In Experiment 3, participants were again shown three numbers; however, now they were instructed to indicate whether the three numbers were ordered in a forward, backward, or mixed direction. Whereas number comparison tasks typically reveal distance effects (comparisons become easier with increased distance between two numbers), these three experiments reveal a different pattern of results. There were reverse distance effects when the stimuli crossed a boundary (i.e., when numbers crossed a decade or months crossed the year boundary) and no effect of distance when the stimuli did not cross a boundary (i.e., when numbers were within a decade and months were within the January—December calendar year). These data suggest that additional mechanisms are involved in the processing of order information: a scanning mechanism and a long-term memory checking mechanism.     

基于名人面孔视觉特征和语义信息的视觉统计学习

视觉统计学习是指个体依据视觉刺激之间的转接概率来掌握统计规律的过程。本研究通过5个实验探讨了个体基于名人面孔视觉特征和语义信息进行视觉统计学习的加工机制。每个实验均包括熟悉(学习)和测试两个阶段：在熟悉阶段, 让被试观看名人面孔并完成重复图片探测的无关任务; 在测试阶段, 让被试进行二选一迫选任务。其中, 实验1和2分别考察基于名人面孔视觉特征和语义信息的视觉统计学习效果; 实验3分别考察基于名人面孔视觉特征和语义信息视觉进行统计学习的精确性; 实验4进一步考察基于名人面孔视觉特征和语义信息进行视觉统计学习的时间特征; 实验5验证基于名人面孔视觉特征的视觉统计学习具有面孔特异性。结果表明：个体能同时基于名人面孔视觉特征和语义信息进行精确的视觉统计学习; 基于正立名人面孔的视觉统计学习效果显著高于基于倒置名人面孔的视觉统计学习效果; 虽然基于视觉特征和语义信息的统计加工都具有一致的精确性, 但后者需要更多的加工时间。这提示：基于名人面孔视觉特征的视觉统计学习具有面孔特异性, 个体基于名人面孔视觉特征和语义信息的视觉统计学习过程是分离的, 统计运算发生于面孔特征加工完成之后。     

Authoritarianism,Cognitive Rigidity,and the Processing of Ambiguous Visual Information

Intolerance of ambiguity and cognitive rigidity are unifying aspects of authoritarianism as defined by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1982/1950), who hypothesized that authoritarians view the world in absolute terms (e.g., good or evil). Past studies have documented the relationship between authoritarianism and intolerance of ambiguity and rigidity. Frenkel-Brunswik (1949) hypothesized that this desire for absolutism was rooted in perceptual processes. We present a study with three samples that directly tests the relationship between right wing authoritarianism (RWA) and the processing of ideologically neutral but ambiguous visual stimuli. As hypothesized, in all three samples we found that RWA was related to the slower processing of visual information that required participants to recategorize objects. In a fourth sample, RWA was unrelated to speed of processing visual information that did not require recategorization. Overall, results suggest a relationship between RWA and rigidity in categorization.     

An attention account of neural priming

Repetition priming of familiar stimuli (e.g., objects) produces a decrease in visual cortical activity for repeated versus novel items, which has been attributed to more fluent processing for repeated items. By contrast, priming of unfamiliar stimuli (e.g., abstract shapes) produces an increase in visual cortical activity. The mechanism for priming-related increases in activity for repeated unfamiliar stimuli is unknown. We hypothesised that such increases in activity may reflect attentional allocation to these items. We tested this hypothesis using a priming-spatial attention paradigm. During Phase 1 of Experiment 1, participants viewed unfamiliar abstract shapes and familiar objects. During Phase 2, participants identified target letters (S or H). Each target letter was preceded by a non-informative shape or object cue that was repeated (from Phase 1) or novel in the same (valid) or opposite (invalid) hemifield. In Experiment 2, we manipulated shape familiarity by presenting shapes once or six times during Phase 1. For both experiments, at valid locations, target identification accuracy was higher following repeated versus novel unfamiliar item cues and lower following repeated versus novel familiar item cues. These findings support our hypothesis that priming-related increases in visual cortical activity for repeated unfamiliar items may, in part, reflect attentional allocation.     

Visual search and contextual cueing: differential effects in 10-year-old children and adults

The development of contextual cueing specifically in relation to attention was examined in two experiments. Adult and 10-year-old participants completed a context cueing visual search task (Jiang & Chun, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54A(4), 1105-1124, 2001) containing stimuli presented in an attended (e.g., red) and unattended (e.g., green) color. When the spatial configuration of stimuli in the attended and unattended color was invariant and consistently paired with the target location, adult reaction times improved, demonstrating learning. Learning also occurred if only the attended stimuli's configuration remained fixed. In contrast, while 10 year olds, like adults, showed incrementally slower reaction times as the number of attended stimuli increased, they did not show learning in the standard paradigm. However, they did show learning when the ratio of attended to unattended stimuli was high, irrespective of the total number of attended stimuli. Findings suggest children show efficient attentional guidance by color in visual search but differences in contextual cueing.     

Tracking fear in snake and spider fearful participants during visual search: A multi-response domain study

In visual search tasks snake or spider fearful participants showed shorter reaction times (RTs) to respond to their feared animal (e.g., snake) than to the nonfeared animal (i.e., spider) (Öhman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001). Here, we used this paradigm with heart rate (HR), RTs, and event-related potential (ERP) measures, to investigate the nature of the responses to the feared animal, a nonfeared (but fear-relevant) animal, and fear-irrelevant target stimuli with snake fearful, spider fearful, and nonfearful participants. Fearful participants showed shorter RTs and evoked larger amplitudes on a late positive potential (LPP; 500–700 ms) for their feared compared to the nonfeared and the fear-irrelevant targets. No relevant significant differences were found on early ERP components and HR measures. These findings do not support an involvement of early information processing in the detection of the feared animal in fearful participants, they favour instead a more elaborated analysis of these complex stimuli to achieve the detection.     

Learning efficient visual search for stimuli containing diagnostic spatial configurations and color-shape conjunctions

Visual search is often slow and difficult for complex stimuli such as feature conjunctions. Search efficiency, however, can improve with training. Search for stimuli that can be identified by the spatial configuration of two elements (e.g., the relative position of two colored shapes) improves dramatically within a few hundred trials of practice. Several recent imaging studies have identified neural correlates of this learning, but it remains unclear what stimulus properties participants learn to use to search efficiently. Influential models, such as reverse hierarchy theory, propose two major possibilities: learning to use information contained in low-level image statistics (e.g., single features at particular retinotopic locations) or in high-level characteristics (e.g., feature conjunctions) of the task-relevant stimuli. In a series of experiments, we tested these two hypotheses, which make different predictions about the effect of various stimulus manipulations after training. We find relatively small effects of manipulating low-level properties of the stimuli (e.g., changing their retinotopic location) and some conjunctive properties (e.g., color-position), whereas the effects of manipulating other conjunctive properties (e.g., color-shape) are larger. Overall, the findings suggest conjunction learning involving such stimuli might be an emergent phenomenon that reflects multiple different learning processes, each of which capitalizes on different types of information contained in the stimuli. We also show that both targets and distractors are learned, and that reversing learned target and distractor identities impairs performance. This suggests that participants do not merely learn to discriminate target and distractor stimuli, they also learn stimulus identity mappings that contribute to performance improvements.     

Are crossmodal correspondences relative or absolute? Sequential effects on speeded classification

Crossmodal correspondences have often been demonstrated using congruency effects between pairs of stimuli in different sensory modalities that vary along separate dimensions. To date, however, it is still unclear the extent to which these correspondences are relative versus absolute in nature: that is, whether they result from pre-defined values that rigidly link the two dimensions or rather result from flexible values related to the previous occurrence of the crossmodal stimuli. Here, we investigated this issue in a speeded classification task featuring the correspondence between auditory pitch and visual size (e.g., congruent correspondence between high pitch/small disc and low pitch/large disc). Participants classified the size of the visual stimuli (large vs. small) while hearing concurrent high- or low-pitched task-irrelevant sounds. On some trials, visual stimuli were paired instead with “intermediate” pitch, that could be interpreted differently according to the auditory stimulus on the preceding trial (i.e., as “lower” following the presentation of a high pitch tone, but as “higher” following the presentation of a low pitch tone). Performance on sequence-congruent trials (e.g., when a small disc paired with the intermediate-pitched tone was preceded by a low pitch tone) was compared to sequence-incongruent trials (e.g., when a small disc paired with the intermediate-pitch tone was by a high-pitched tone). The results revealed faster classification responses on sequence-congruent than on sequence-incongruent trials. This demonstrates that the effect of the pitch/size correspondence is relative in nature, and subjected to trial-by-trial interpretation of the stimulus pair.     

Manipulating cues in involuntary autobiographical memory: Verbal cues are more effective than pictorial cues

In two experiments, pictorial cues were compared with their verbal labels to assess their effectiveness in eliciting involuntary autobiographical memories. Cues were relatively complex in Experiment 1 (e.g., relaxing on a beach) and simple objects in Experiment 2 (e.g., a ball). In both experiments, participants went through a vigilance task in which they were presented with frequent nontarget and rare target visual stimuli. Pictures or their corresponding verbal labels were also displayed on both target and nontarget stimuli, but participants were told that these were irrelevant to the task. They were asked to interrupt the vigilance task whenever they became aware of task-unrelated mental contents and to report them. In both experiments, more involuntary memories were elicited in the verbal cue condition, rather than in the pictorial cue condition. This result is discussed in relation to previous work that highlighted the greater effectiveness of verbal cues in memory tasks.     

Parts of me: Identity-relevance moderates self-prioritization

Recent research has revealed a pervasive bias for self-relevant information during decision-making, a phenomenon termed the self-prioritization effect. Focusing almost exclusively on between-target (e.g., self vs. friend) differences in task performance, however, this work has overlooked the influence stimulus factors potentially exert during decisional processing. Accordingly, based on pertinent social-psychological theorizing (i.e., Identity-Based Motivation Theory), here we explored the possibility that self-prioritization is sensitive to the identity-based relevance of stimuli. The results of three experiments supported this hypothesis. In a perceptual-matching task, stimulus enhancement was greatest when geometric shapes were associated with identity-related information that was important (vs. unimportant) to participants. In addition, hierarchical drift-diffusion modeling revealed this effect was underpinned by differences in the efficiency of visual processing. Specifically, evidence was extracted more rapidly from stimuli paired with consequential compared to inconsequential identity-related components. These findings demonstrate how identity-relevance moderates self-prioritization.     

Attentional biases in PTSD: More evidence for interference

Attentional biases to trauma-related stimuli have been widely demonstrated in individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, the majority of these studies used methods not suited to differentiating difficulty disengaging attention from threatening stimuli (interference) from facilitated detection of threat. In the current study, a visual search task (VST) with a lexical decision component was used to differentiate between attentional interference and facilitation. Forty-six sexual assault survivors with High PTSD or Low PTSD symptoms completed the VST with three types of stimuli (trauma-related, general threat-related, and semantically-related neutral words), to examine the specificity of attentional biases associated with PTSD symptoms. High PTSD participants showed increased interference to trauma-related words relative to Low PTSD participants. Furthermore, the increased attentional interference in High PTSD participants was specific to trauma-related stimuli. No evidence was found for facilitated detection of threatening stimuli in PTSD. These results provide additional support for attentional biases in PTSD relating to attentional interference with trauma-related cues rather than facilitated detection of threat. The implications for this pattern of results are discussed in relation to anxiety disorders that are characterized by rumination and/or intrusions (e.g., PTSD, GAD) rather than those more circumscribed to fight or flight response (e.g., phobias).     

Inverting the joint Simon effect by intention

The joint Simon effect (JSE) is a spatial-compatibility effect that emerges when two people complete complementary components of a Simon task. In typical JSE studies, two participants sit beside each other and perform go-no-go tasks in which they respond to one of two stimuli by pressing a button. According to the action co-representation account, JSEs emerge because each participant represents their partner's response in addition to their own, causing the same conflicts in processing that would occur if an individual responded to both stimuli (i.e., as in a two-choice task). Because the response buttons are typically in front of participants, however, an alternative explanation is that JSEs are the result of a dimensional overlap between target and response locations coded with respect to another salient object (e.g., the co-actor's effector). To contrast these hypotheses, the participants in the present study completed two-choice and joint Simon tasks in which they were asked to focus on generating an aftereffect in the space contralateral to their response. Hommel (Psychological Research 55:270-279, 1993) previously reported that, when participants completed a two-choice task under such effect-focused instructions, spatial-compatibility effects emerged that were based on the aftereffect location instead of the response location. Consistent with the co-representation account, the results of the present study were that an inverse aftereffect-based (i.e., not a response-location-based) compatibility effect was observed in both the two-choice and joint tasks. The overall pattern of results does not fit with the spatial-coding account and is discussed in the context of the extant JSE literature.     

Independence between implicit and explicit processing as revealed by the Simon effect

Studies showing human behavior influenced by subliminal stimuli mainly focus on implicit processing per se, and little is known about its interaction with explicit processing. We examined this by using the Simon effect, wherein a task-irrelevant spatial distracter interferes with lateralized response. Lo and Yeh (2008) found that the visual Simon effect, although it occurred when participants were aware of the visual distracters, did not occur with subliminal visual distracters. We used the same paradigm and examined whether subliminal and supra-threshold stimuli are processed independently by adding a supra-threshold auditory distracter to ascertain whether it would interact with the subliminal visual distracter. Results showed auditory Simon effect, but there was still no visual Simon effect, indicating that supra-threshold and subliminal stimuli are processed separately in independent streams. In contrast to the traditional view that implicit processing precedes explicit processing, our results suggest that they operate independently in a parallel fashion.     

视觉适应及其神经机制

视适应使得视觉系统可以连续地根据外界环境的变化做出调整, 改善了对世界的感知。研究提示, 适应影响了对许多基本的视觉属性的加工, 诸如亮度、对比度、运动、颜色等, 也包括对复杂的刺激如面孔等。视适应发生于视觉加工流的多个阶段, 从视网膜到初级视觉皮层以及之后的脑区(例如纹外皮层, 梭状回面孔区)。关于视适应的机制解释, 已从早期的神经元反应疲劳解释发展成当今更流行的标准化模型理论等。最近的适应研究证明, 视觉适应由时间尺度上快慢不同的多重机制控制, 这被认为赋予了视觉系统有效应对环境中不同时间尺度的变化的能力。     

The dimensional arrow: Agreement in directional mapping of dimensions among Mandarin Chinese- and English-speakers

We present evidence that English- and Mandarin-speakers agree about how to map dimensions (e.g., size and clarity) to vertical space and that they do so in a directional way. We first developed visual stimuli for four dimensions—size, clarity, complexity, and darkness—and in each case we varied the stimuli to express a range of the dimension (e.g., there were five total items expressing the range covering big, medium, and small). In our study, English- and Mandarin-speakers mapped these stimuli to an unlabelled vertical scale. Most people mapped dimensional endpoints in similar ways; using size as a standard, we found that the majority of participants mapped the clearest, most complex, and darkest items to the same end of the vertical scale as they mapped the biggest items. This indicates that all four dimensions have a weighted or unmarked end (i.e., all are directional or polar). The strong similarities in polarity across language groups contrasted with group differences on a lexical task, for which there was little cross-linguistic agreement about which comparative words to use to describe stimulus pairs (e.g., “bigger” vs. “smaller”). Thus, we found no evidence in this study that the perception of these dimensions is influenced by language.