Components of reflexive visual orienting to moving objects

Posner and Cohen (1984) and Maylor (1985) initially observed that a luminance change produces both facilitatory and inhibitory effects on subsequent detection. While Posner and Cohen claimed that the facilitatory effect was mapped in retinotopic coordinates, they showed that inhibition of return (IOR) was mapped in “environmental coordinates.” Tipper and colleagues (Tipper, Driver, & Weaver, 1991; Tipper et al., 1997; Tipper, Weaver, Jerreat, & Burak, 1994) and Abrams and Dobkin (1994b) have recently reported that IOR can be object based, but contradictory results have also been reported (Muller & von Mühlenen, 1996). Here we report six experiments showing that an uninformative peripheral cue can generate either facilitatory or inhibitory object-based effects that can tag moving objects and that can persist for several hundred milliseconds. Although the boundary conditions determining which effect will be manifest remain to be defined, the present results suggest that facilitation and inhibition are generated independently, rather than being components of the same biphasic process.     

Components of reflexive visual orienting to moving objects.

Posner and Cohen (1984) and Maylor (1985) initially observed that a luminance change produces both facilitatory and inhibitory effects on subsequent detection. While Posner and Cohen claimed that the facilitatory effect was mapped in retinotopic coordinates, they showed that inhibition of return (IOR) was mapped in "environmental coordinates." Tipper and colleagues (Tipper, Driver, & Weaver, 1991; Tipper et al., 1997; Tipper, Weaver, Jerreat, & Burak, 1994) and Abrams and Dobkin (1994b) have recently reported that IOR can be object based, but contradictory results have also been reported (Müller & von Mühlenen, 1996). Here we report six experiments showing that an uninformative peripheral cue can generate either facilitatory or inhibitory object-based effects that can tag moving objects and that can persist for several hundred milliseconds. Although the boundary conditions determining which effect will be manifest remain to be defined, the present results suggest that facilitation and inhibition are generated independently, rather than being components of the same biphasic process.     

Examining location-based and object-based components of inhibition of return in static displays

Tipper and Colleagues (e.g., Jordan & Tipper, 1998; Tipper, Driver, & Weaver, 1991; Tipper, Weaver, Jerreat, & Burak, 1994) have provided support for inhibition of return (IOR) being composed of a location-based and an object-based component. They were able to separate out the effects of locationbased and object-based IOR by using complex displays and displays that involved moving the cued object. The present study was designed to further examine the object- and location-based components of IOR in static displays. Three experiments were conducted that looked at the presence or absence of placeholder boxes on IOR. The first experiment was designed to replicate the results of Jordan and Tipper by presenting both objects and no-objects in the same display. In the second experiment, trials were blocked, and in the third experiment trials were presented in a random order. Overall, the results are inconsistent with the notion that independent object-based and location-based IOR components combine to produce the overall IOR effect and that additive effects are realized due to the context in which the trials are presented. We propose that a single inhibitory mechanism can account for the data.     

Negative priming for spatial location?

The term negative priming has been used to describe the deleterious consequences for performance when the current target shares properties with an ignored distractor from the previous trial. Location-based negative priming was first reported by Tipper, Brehaut, and Driver (1990) who used a prime-probe procedure wherein the task was to localize targets defined by their identity (shape). Design imbalances in this seminal study, and others, are illustrated and it is indicated how these might have contaminated the reported effects. The findings, from three experiments using an unbiased design, suggest that negative priming in the spatial location procedure may be more closely related to inhibition of return (IOR), or to the automatic attraction of attention by new objects, than to the concepts of distractor inhibition, episodic retrieval, and feature mismatch, which have traditionally been used to explain negative priming for spatial location.     

Differential age effects on attention-based inhibition: inhibitory tagging and inhibition of return

The purpose of this study was to determine whether 2 forms of attentional inhibition, inhibition of return (IOR) and inhibitory tagging, are differentially affected by the aging process. The authors tested 24 younger adults (mean age = 22 years) and 24 older adults (mean age = 69 years) on a combined IOR and Stroop task (Vivas & Fuentes, 2001). As predicted, younger adults' performance was consistent with inhibitory tagging of objects at inhibited locations. Although older adults demonstrated intact IOR, there was no evidence of inhibitory tagging. The results suggest that age deficits in inhibition are selective.     

A developmental shift in processes underlying successful belief-desire reasoning

Young children's failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the most likely content for the belief to be attributed from amongst several competing contents [Leslie, A. M., & Polizzi, P. (1998). Developmental Science, 1, 247-254]. We tested this model with an ‘avoidance false belief task’ in which subjects predict the behavior of a character, who wants to avoid an object but who is mistaken about which of three locations it is in. The task has two equally correct answers—in seeking to avoid the location where she mistakenly believes the object to be, the character might equally go to the location where the object actually is, or to the remaining empty location. However, the model predicts that subjects will prefer one of these answers, selecting the object's actual location over the empty location. This bias was confirmed in a series of five experiments with children aged between 4 and 8 years of age. A sixth experiment ruled out two rival explanations for children's biased responding. Two further experiments found the opposite bias in adults. These findings support one selection model as an account of belief-desire reasoning in children, and suggest that a different model is needed for adults. The process of selecting contents for mental state attributions shows a developmental shift between 8 years of age and adulthood.     

The development of selective inhibitory control: The influence of verbal labeling

The role of language in the development of selective inhibitory control was examined in four groups: Children aged 7-9 years, children aged 11-13 years, adults aged 20-27 years, and adults aged 62-76 years. We used a modified stop-signal task in which participants inhibited or executed responses based on a visual signal. Response execution and inhibition were assessed by measurement of reaction times (RTs) and error rates to a go signal and RTs to a stop signal. Four task variations were compared in which subjects named (1) the stimulus, (2) the intended action (go/stop), (3) something irrelevant, or (4) nothing. Results showed different developmental trends for response execution and inhibition across the lifespan. Moreover, response execution was faster and more accurate when subjects named the stimulus instead of the intended action. The increase in response accuracy when naming the stimulus was greatest for children. In contrast to expectations, naming the intended action did not influence response inhibition. Overall, these findings suggest that verbal labeling supports the initiation but not the inhibition of actions.     

The effects of age on sensory thresholds and temporal gap detection in hearing, vision, and touch

Differences in sensory function between young (n 5 42, 18—31 years old) and older (n 5 137, 60—88 years old) adults were examined for auditory, visual, and tactile measures of threshold sensitivity and temporal acuity (gap-detection threshold). For all but one of the psychophysical measures (visual gap detection), multiple measures were obtained at different stimulus frequencies for each modality and task. This resulted in a total of 14 dependent measures, each based on four to six adaptive psychophysical estimates of 75% correct performance. In addition, all participants completed the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Wechsler, 1997). Mean data confirmed previously observed differences in performance between young and older adults for 13 of the 14 dependent measures (all but visual threshold at a flicker frequency of 4 Hz). Correlational and principalcomponents factor analyses performed on the data from the 137 older adults were generally consistent with task and modality independence of the psychophysical measures.     

The enhanced Simon effect for older adults is reduced when the irrelevant location information is conveyed by an accessory stimulus

The Simon effect, better performance when irrelevant stimulus location corresponds with the response location than when it does not, typically is larger for older than younger adults. However, Simon and Pouraghabagher [Simon, R. J., & Pouraghabagher, A. R. (1978). The effect of aging on the stages of processing in a choice reaction time task. Journal of Gerontology, 33, 553-561] found no age difference using an accessory-stimulus Simon task in which the relevant dimension was the color of a visual stimulus and the irrelevant dimension the location of a tone. Experiment 1 confirmed that older adults show a larger Simon effect than younger adults for the visual Simon task and that this age-related deficit is reduced or eliminated for the auditory-accessory task. Experiment 2 provided evidence suggesting that a small part of the age-related deficit in the visual Simon task is due to having to code the location of the relevant stimulus, but Experiment 3 showed that the majority of the deficit is due to the relevant and irrelevant information being conveyed by the same stimulus. Reaction-time distribution analyses show similar functions for younger and older adults, suggesting that the time course of activation is similar for both age groups.     

It's not what you play,it's how you play it: Timbre affects perception of emotion in music

Salient sensory experiences often have a strong emotional tone, but the neuropsychological relations between perceptual characteristics of sensory objects and the affective information they convey remain poorly defined. Here we addressed the relationship between sound identity and emotional information using music. In two experiments, we investigated whether perception of emotions is influenced by altering the musical instrument on which the music is played, independently of other musical features. In the first experiment, 40 novel melodies each representing one of four emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, or anger) were each recorded on four different instruments (an electronic synthesizer, a piano, a violin, and a trumpet), controlling for melody, tempo, and loudness between instruments. Healthy participants (23 young adults aged 18–30 years, 24 older adults aged 58–75 years) were asked to select which emotion they thought each musical stimulus represented in a four-alternative forced-choice task. Using a generalized linear mixed model we found a significant interaction between instrument and emotion judgement with a similar pattern in young and older adults (p < .0001 for each age group). The effect was not attributable to musical expertise. In the second experiment using the same melodies and experimental design, the interaction between timbre and perceived emotion was replicated (p < .05) in another group of young adults for novel synthetic timbres designed to incorporate timbral cues to particular emotions. Our findings show that timbre (instrument identity) independently affects the perception of emotions in music after controlling for other acoustic, cognitive, and performance factors.     

Identity and Location Priming Effects and their Temporal Stability in Young and Older Adults

ABSTRACT

Unlike previous studies, the present experiment was designed to directly compare negative (NP) and positive priming (PP) in 37 young (mean age: 21.5 years) and 37 older adults (mean age: 69.4 years) by means of two independent identity- and location-based priming tasks. While identity PP was shown to be reduced in older adults, no age-related differences were found for location PP. This pattern of results supports the notion that mechanisms involved in identity- and location-based PP are largely independent of each other. Both age groups exhibited reliable identity and location NP although location NP was decreased in older adults. Extremely low temporal test–retest coefficients indicated that mechanisms underlying identity and location NP represent situational states rather than stable traits. This lack of temporal stability may also account for highly ambiguous results obtained in previous studies.     

Identity matching to sample and exclusion performance in elderly with and without neurocognitive disorders

Neurocognitive disorders (NCDs) affect complex processes of stimulus control, such as relational performance. The aims of this study were (a) to compare the performance of older adults with NCD with that of control older adults in generalized identity matching (GI) tests and in responding by exclusion probes and (b) to verify the effect of identity matching training on subsequent GI and exclusion tests, in older adults with NCD. Participants were 24 older adults (aged 60 to 92 years), eight without NCD (control group I [CG I]), and 16 with NCD: CG II, with accurate performance in the GI tests and the experimental group (EG), with low performance in these tests. After exclusion and GI tests with all participants, the EG underwent identity matching training with 3 pairs of visual stimuli, and exclusion and identity matching posttests. All participants of the CG I and CG II presented accurate performance in the tests. Seven of the 8 older adults of the EG achieved the learning criterion in the training and showed some improvement in the GI posttest; however, positive effects of the training were not observed in the exclusion posttests. Teaching procedures for identity matching in older adult patients with NCD can produce positive results; however, it is necessary to understand the relationship between cognitive decline and other relational performances.     

Age-related differences in the use of spatial and categorical relationships in a visuo-spatial working memory task

Research examining object identity and location processing in visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) has yielded inconsistent results on whether age differences exist in VSWM. The present study investigated whether these inconsistencies may stem from age-related differences in VSWM sub-processes, and whether processing of component VSWM information can be facilitated. In two experiments, younger and older adults studied 5 × 5 grids containing five objects in separate locations. In a continuous recognition paradigm, participants were tested on memory for object identity, location, or identity and location information combined. Spatial and categorical relationships were manipulated within grids to provide trial-level facilitation. In Experiment 1, randomizing trial types (location, identity, combination) assured that participants could not predict the information that would be queried. In Experiment 2, blocking trials by type encouraged strategic processing. Thus, we manipulated the nature of the task through object categorical relationship and spatial organization, and trial blocking. Our findings support age-related declines in VSWM. Additionally, grid organizations (categorical and spatial relationships), and trial blocking differentially affected younger and older adults. Younger adults used spatial organizations more effectively whereas older adults demonstrated an association bias. Our finding also suggests that older adults may be less efficient than younger adults in strategically engaging information processing.     

Impairment and recovery in inhibitory control after traumatic brain injury in children: effect of age at injury, injury severity and lesion location

We examined the effect of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on inhibitory control, trajectories of recovery of inhibitory control, and the effect of age at injury, severity, and lesion location on recovery. Participants were 127 children with TBI aged 5-16 years and 117 controls of similar age.Latency of response inhibition was measured with the stop signal task within 1 month of the injury and again at 3, 6, 12, and 24 months.Performance of children with TBI was compared with that of controls.Growth curve analyses showed impairments in response inhibition postinjury.Compared with controls, TBI children improved over time in response inhibition. Younger TBI children recovered better on response inhibition than older TBI children. No significant effect of severity or right frontal lesion on recovery of response inhibition was found. TBI has an acute effect on inhibitory control but which recovers over time.     

Negative priming from ignored distractors in visual selection: A review

Ignoring a distractor on a prime trial generally impairs responses to that object on a subsequent probe trial. This negative-priming (NP) effect supports the notion that distracting objects are actively inhibited during target selection (Tipper, 1985). Alternatively, NP may be caused either by amismatch between the features of items across prime and probe trials (Park & Kanwisher, 1994) or by the episodic retrieval of information from the prime trial which conflicts with the current, correct response (Neill & Valdes, 1992). These alternative accounts are called theselective inhibition,feature mismatching, andepisodic retrieval hypotheses, respectively. The present paper reviews the NP literature and considers the evidence for each of the three accounts. Feature mismatching does produce NP in a limited number of cases, but it is not a necessary condition for NP. In other cases, NP must be due to either selective inhibition or episodic retrieval of previously ignored distractors. Though results from critical tests designed to discriminate among these hypotheses have not yet been reported, such results are crucial for both theoretical and practical reasons.     

认知老化中有意控制对自动抑制的调节作用

结合比例控制范式与基于空间位置的返回抑制范式, 探讨了认知老化过程中自上而下的有意认知控制对自动抑制的调节作用。结果表明, 当线索有效率由50%提升至80%时, 两组被试的返回抑制量均下降, 老年组表现为返回抑制消失, 但年轻组出现返回抑制的反转, 表明有意认知控制对自动抑制的调节作用受认知老化的影响而发生衰减。同时文章还就认知老化机制的新兴理论—— 执行衰退假说进行了讨论。     

Integration of internal and external facial features in 8- to 10-year-old children and adults

Investigation of whole-part and composite effects in 4- to 6-year-old children gave rise to claims that face perception is fully mature within the first decade of life (Crookes & McKone, 2009). However, only internal features were tested, and the role of external features was not addressed, although external features are highly relevant for holistic face perception (Sinha & Poggio, 1996; Axelrod & Yovel, 2010, 2011). In this study, 8- to 10-year-old children and adults performed a same–different matching task with faces and watches. In this task participants attended to either internal or external features. Holistic face perception was tested using a congruency paradigm, in which face and non-face stimuli either agreed or disagreed in both features (congruent contexts) or just in the attended ones (incongruent contexts). In both age groups, pronounced context congruency and inversion effects were found for faces, but not for watches. These findings indicate holistic feature integration for faces. While inversion effects were highly similar in both age groups, context congruency effects were stronger for children. Moreover, children's face matching performance was generally better when attending to external compared to internal features. Adults tended to perform better when attending to internal features. Our results indicate that both adults and 8- to 10-year-old children integrate external and internal facial features into holistic face representations. However, in children's face representations external features are much more relevant. These findings suggest that face perception is holistic but still not adult-like at the end of the first decade of life.     

The Effects of Ego Identity,Gender Role,and Attachment on Depression and Anxiety in Young Adults

Main and interaction effects of Ego Identity Status/Type (Bennion & Adams, 1986), Gender-Role Orientation (Bem, 1981a), and Adult Attachment Style (Feeney, Noller, & Hanrahan, 1994) on Depression (Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996) and Anxiety (Beck, Epstein, Brown, & Steer, 1988) were examined. Participants included adults 18 years and older from a midwestern U.S. university. Multivariate analysis revealed significant interactions between ego identity status and gender-role orientation only for participants with an insecure attachment style. A significant main effect for attachment style revealed that secure individuals were less anxious and depressed than insecure individuals. The influence of gender (rather than gender role) is explored. The influence of ethnicity on levels of depression and anxiety for various ego identity statuses and clinical implications are discussed.     

Target localization among concurrent sound sources: No evidence for the inhibition of previous distractor responses

The visuospatial negative priming effect—that is, the slowed-down responding to a previously ignored location—is partly due to response inhibition associated with the previously ignored location (Buckolz, Goldfarb, & Khan, Perception & Psychophysics 66:837-845 2004). We tested whether response inhibition underlies spatial negative priming in the auditory modality as well. Eighty participants localized a target sound while ignoring a simultaneous distractor sound at another location. Eight possible sound locations were arranged in a semicircle around the participant. Pairs of adjacent locations were associated with the same response. On ignored repetition trials, the probe target sound was played from the same location as the previously ignored prime sound. On response control trials, prime distractor and probe target were played from different locations but were associated with the same response. On control trials, prime distractor and probe target shared neither location nor response. A response inhibition account predicts slowed-down responding when the response associated with the prime distractor has to be executed in the probe. There was no evidence of response inhibition in audition. Instead, the negative priming effect depended on whether the sound at the repeatedly occupied location changed identity between prime and probe. The latter result replicates earlier findings and supports the feature mismatching hypothesis, while the former is compatible with the assumption that response inhibition is irrelevant in auditory spatial attention.     

Inhibition of return in children and adolescents

Inhibition of return (IOR), slowed responding to targets at a cued location after attention is removed from this location, has been shown to occur both in adults and in infants. To explore suggestion that the timecourse of IOR depends on factors that might affect the efficiency with which attention is removed from the cued location, we compared the performance of young children (5-10-year-olds, N=49, M=8 years, 4 months) to older children and adolescents (11-17-year-olds, N=61, M=14 years) in single and double cue procedures. Cue-target interval was varied to measure the timecourse of IOR in this within-subjects localization task. Whereas no IOR was found in the young group unless a double cue procedure was used, in the older group, we found IOR at all intervals with the double cue procedure and the typical crossover pattern, with early facilitation followed by inhibition in the single cue procedure.