Investigating the nature and time-course of the modality shift effect between vision and touch

It is well known that stimuli grab attention to their location, but do they also grab attention to their sensory modality? The modality shift effect (MSE), the observation that responding to a stimulus leads to reaction time benefits for subsequent stimuli in the same modality, suggests that this may be the case. If noninformative cue stimuli, which do not require a response, also lead to benefits for their modality, this would suggest that the effect is automatic. We investigated the time-course of the visuotactile MSE and the difference between the effects of cues and targets. In Experiment 1, when visual and tactile tasks and stimulus locations were matched, uninformative cues did not lead to reaction time benefits for targets in the same modality. However, the modality of the previous target led to a significant MSE. Only stimuli that require a response, therefore, appear to lead to reaction time benefits for their modality. In Experiment 2, increasing attention to the cue stimuli attenuated the effect of the previous target, but the cues still did not lead to a MSE. In Experiment 3, a MSE was demonstrated between successive targets, and this effect decreased with increasing intertrial intervals. Overall, these studies demonstrate how cue- and target-induced effects interact and suggest that modalities do not automatically capture attention as locations do; rather, the MSE is more similar to other task repetition effects.     

Flexible and inflexible task sets: Asymmetric interference when switching between emotional expression,sex, and age classification of perceived faces

The present study investigated whether the processing characteristics of categorizing emotional facial expressions are different from those of categorizing facial age and sex information. Given that emotions change rapidly, it was hypothesized that processing facial expressions involves a more flexible task set that causes less between-task interference than the task sets involved in processing age or sex of a face. Participants switched between three tasks: categorizing a face as looking happy or angry (emotion task), young or old (age task), and male or female (sex task). Interference between tasks was measured by global interference and response interference. Both measures revealed patterns of asymmetric interference. Global between-task interference was reduced when a task was mixed with the emotion task. Response interference, as measured by congruency effects, was larger for the emotion task than for the nonemotional tasks. The results support the idea that processing emotional facial expression constitutes a more flexible task set that causes less interference (i.e., task-set “inertia”) than processing the age or sex of a face     

Reward expectancy promotes generalized increases in attentional bias for rewarding stimuli

Expectations of drug availability increase the magnitude of attentional biases for drug-related cues. However, it is unknown whether these effects are outcome specific, or whether expectation of a specific reinforcer produces a general enhancement of attentional bias for other types of rewarding cues. In the present study, 31 social drinkers completed an eye-tracking task in which attentional bias for alcohol- and chocolate-related cues was assessed while the expectation of receiving alcohol and chocolate was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis. Participants showed attentional bias for alcohol and chocolate cues (relative to neutral cues) overall. Importantly, these attentional biases for reward cues were magnified when participants expected to receive alcohol and chocolate, but effects were not outcome specific: The expectation of receiving either alcohol or chocolate increased attentional bias for both alcohol and chocolate cues. Results suggest that anticipation of reward produces a general rather than an outcome-specific enhancement of attentional bias for reward-related stimuli.     

Attentional sets influence perceptual load effects,but not dilution effects

Perceptual load theory [Lavie, N. (1995). Perceptual load as a necessary condition for selective attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 451–468.; Lavie, N., & Tsal, Y. (1994) Perceptual load as a major determinant of the locus of selection in visual attention. Perception & Psychophysics, 56, 183–197.] proposes that interference from distractors can only be avoided in situations of high perceptual load. This theory has been supported by blocked design manipulations separating low load (when the target appears alone) and high load (when the target is embedded among neutral letters). Tsal and Benoni [(2010a). Diluting the burden of load: Perceptual load effects are simply dilution effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36, 1645–1656.; Benoni, H., & Tsal, Y. (2010). Where have we gone wrong? Perceptual load does not affect selective attention. Vision Research, 50, 1292–1298.] have recently shown that these manipulations confound perceptual load with “dilution” (the mere presence of additional heterogeneous items in high-load situations). Theeuwes, Kramer, and Belopolsky [(2004). Attentional set interacts with perceptual load in visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 697–702.] independently questioned load theory by suggesting that attentional sets might also affect distractor interference. When high load and low load were intermixed, and participants could not prepare for the presentation that followed, both the low-load and high-load trials showed distractor interference. This result may also challenge the dilution account, which proposes a stimulus-driven mechanism. In the current study, we presented subjects with both fixed and mixed blocks, including a mix of dilution trials with low-load trials and with high-load trials. We thus separated the effect of dilution from load and tested the influence of attentional sets on each component. The results revealed that whereas perceptual load effects are influenced by attentional sets, the dilution component is not. This strengthens the notion that dilution is a stimulus-driven mechanism, which enables effective selectivity.     

Inhibition from blinked category labels: Combining the attentional blink and the semantic priming paradigm

In the present experiment we combined the attentional blink and the semantic priming paradigm. We used category labels as primes and category exemplars as targets. The prime stimuli were embedded into a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream and presented at varying positions after a to-be-identified stimulus, albeit the stimulus–onset asynchrony between primes and targets remained constant throughout the experiment. As a result, participants’ prime awareness was reduced in some trials although the prime duration was always at levels usually considered to elicit awareness (60 ms). After each RSVP there was a forced choice discrimination test to assess participants’ prime awareness. When subjects could not identify the prime stimuli we observed slower responses to related as compared to unrelated targets. This result confirms results found with repeated masked primes. However, whereas former studies assessed unawareness rather coarsely at the level of individual participants, here unawareness was tested on a trial-by-trial basis.     

Self-relevance increases the irrelevant sound effect: Attentional disruption by one's own name

Memory performance is severely disrupted when task-irrelevant sound is played during item presentation or in a retention interval. Working memory models make contrasting assumptions on whether the semantic content of the auditory distractors modulates the irrelevant sound effect. In the present study, participants made more errors in serial recall when they had to ignore sentences containing their own name as opposed to that of a yoked-control partner. These results are only consistent with working memory models that allow for attentional processes to play a role in the explanation of the irrelevant sound effect. With repeated presentation the disruptive effect of one's own name decreased, whereas the disruptive effect of the auditory distractors in the control condition remained constant. The latter finding is most consistent with the duplex model of auditory attention, which assumes that the irrelevant sound effect is primarily caused by automatic interference of acoustic distractor features, but at the same time allows for a disruption of encoding due to attentional capture by unexpected deviants. However, to explain the present results, the mechanism responsible for the attentional capture has to be extended to highly (self-)relevant auditory distractors.     

Does low perceptual load enable capture by colour singletons?

There is considerable debate as to whether colour singletons can capture attention in a stimulus-driven manner. In this study, we explore one potential capture enabling condition—low perceptual load. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated perceptual load in a flanker task in which flanking letters sometimes were colour singletons. If low load enhances capture by colour singletons, then colour singletons should produce an especially large increase in overall reaction times and in flanker–target compatibility effects. Neither of these predictions was confirmed in any of the four experiments reported here, although we did replicate the classic load effects from previous studies. These experiments indicate that although perceptual load does strongly modulate overall performance, it does not facilitate capture by colour singletons. This finding contrasts sharply with findings from other types of salient stimuli (abrupt onsets and moving objects). Implications for theories of attentional capture will be discussed.     

Inaction inertia in retirement saving

In retirement saving, many people miss out on early opportunities to save and subsequently fail to take adequate actions for a long time thereafter. We examined whether these two observations—the initial failure to act and the subsequent inertia—could be related through the phenomenon of inaction inertia. In Experiment 1 (N = 180), participants were less likely to save for retirement when the difference in annual return between the current opportunity and the missed opportunity was large versus small. In Experiment 2 (N = 180), participants were less likely to start saving for retirement when reminded of a missed opportunity 10 years ago versus 1 year ago. These data constitute the first demonstration of inaction inertia in retirement saving: People's reluctance to act on attractive saving opportunities may be induced by their previous inaction. In Experiment 3 (N = 340) and Experiment 4 (N = 628), we find that the observed inertia is the product of a tendency to underestimate exponential growth combined with a focus on past opportunities. Building on this mechanism, Experiment 5 (N = 916) provided evidence for a potential remedy; the inaction inertia effect completely disappeared when focus was shifted from required contributions to future outcomes.     

The role of extinction and reinstatement in attentional bias to threat: a conditioning approach

We investigated the effects of extinction and reinstatement on attentional bias to fear-conditioned signals in healthy individuals using an emotional modification of a spatial cueing paradigm. Spatial cues were emotionally modulated using differential conditioning. The CS+ was sometimes followed by an aversive electrocutaneous stimulus (UCS), whereas the CS- was never followed by the UCS. During a subsequent extinction phase no UCS was presented anymore. The reinstatement phase started with one or four unpredicted UCS-only trials for half of the participants (reinstatement group). For the other half there were no additional UCS presentations (control group). We found that attention was biased to threat signals during acquisition. This biased attention largely disappeared during extinction. During the reinstatement phase attentional bias to threat signals re-emerged in the reinstatement group, but not in the control group.     

Decoupling the past from the present attenuates inaction inertia

Inaction inertia is the phenomenon that one is not likely to act upon an attractive opportunity after having bypassed an even more attractive opportunity. We investigated the boundary conditions of this inaction inertia effect. Based on the mental accounting literature and the transaction decoupling literature we predicted and found in three experiments that tight coupling of the forgone to the current opportunity is a necessary condition for inaction inertia to occur. Inaction inertia decreased when information about the missed opportunity was ambiguous (Experiment 1), when the past opportunity required an extra step to obtain (Experiment 2) and when the past and present opportunity decreased in comparability (Experiment 3). The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed in view of the literature on inaction inertia and on judgment and decision-making. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.