Journal of Experimental Psychology-Human Perception and Performance最新文献

Establishing causal beliefs by observing regularities between actions and events in the environment is a crucial part of goal-directed behavior. Sense of agency (SoA) describes the corresponding experience of generating and controlling actions and subsequent events. Investigating how SoA adapts to situational changes in action-effect contingency, we observed even singular disturbances of perfect action-effect contingencies to yield a striking impact on SoA formation. Moreover, we additionally included disturbances of regularity that are not directly linked to one's own actions. Doing so allowed us to investigate how SoA might be a concept that goes beyond own actions toward a more generalized, subjective representation of control regarding environmental events. Indeed, the present experiments establish that, while SoA is highly tuned toward action-effect relations, it is also sensitive to events that occur without one's own action contribution. SoA thus appears to be exceptionally sensitive to singular breakpoints of perfect control with agents disproportionally incorporating such events during SoA formation while at the same time building on a rich situation model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The slope of the function relating response times to the number of stimuli in a visual-search display is commonly considered a measure of search speed and is extensively used to test theories of visual cognition. Unfortunately, this important measure is confounded in multiple ways so that many classical findings in the literature must be called into question. As a way out of this predicament, we here develop a new technique to measure search speed (data collected in 2022 and 2023): Instead of manipulating the number of stimuli that need to be searched via a set-size manipulation, we achieve the intended purpose by placing the search target at different spatial positions with respect to an a-priori-known search order. Reliably inducing such a search order is the main achievement of the present study, but we also report several additional data patterns that might turn out instrumental for future research on visual attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent work has shown that the idiosyncrasies of the observer can contribute more to the variance of social judgments of faces than the features of the faces. However, it is unclear what conditions determine the relative contributions of shared and idiosyncratic variance. Here, we examine two conditions: type of judgment and diversity of face stimuli. First, we show that for simpler, directly observable judgments that are consistent across observers (e.g., masculinity) shared exceeds idiosyncratic variance, whereas for more complex and less directly observable judgments (e.g., trustworthiness), idiosyncratic exceeds shared variance. Second, we show that judgments of more diverse face images increase the amount of shared variance. Finally, using machine-learning methods, we examine how stimulus (e.g., incidental emotion resemblance, skin luminosity) and observer variables (e.g., race, age) contribute to shared and idiosyncratic variance of judgments. Overall, our results indicate that an observer's age is the most consistent and best predictor of idiosyncratic variance contributions to face judgments measured in the current research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The tendency for our minds to wander is a pervasive and disruptive influence on continued task performance. Models of sustained attention have implicated mind wandering, moments when attention has turned inwards toward task-unrelated thought, in characteristic patterns of worsening performance with greater time-on-task, known as the vigilance decrement. Despite their theoretical connection, associations between mind wandering and the vigilance decrement have not been investigated systematically. Across two studies (N = 730), we evaluated covariance between within-task change in rates of probe-caught mind wandering and patterns of worsening behavioral task performance that characterize the vigilance decrement. Bivariate growth curve models characterized patterns of intraindividual linear change in mind wandering alongside concomitant changes in task accuracy, response time (RT), and RT variability. Importantly, models assessing the covariance between intraindividual change in mind wandering and behavioral outcome measures confirmed that increases in mind wandering are associated with patterns of worsening behavioral performance with greater time-on-task. In addition, we investigated the role of several moderating factors associated with patterns of within-task change: self-reported task interest and motivation, and individuals' propensity for mind wandering, and mindfulness in their daily lives. These factors moderated either the overall level or rate of within-task change in mind wandering. Our results provide support for models of sustained attention that directly implicate mind wandering in worsening behavioral performance with greater time-on-task in continuous performance tasks requiring sustained attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Attention is a limited resource that must be carefully controlled to prevent distraction. Much research has demonstrated that distraction can be prevented by proactively suppressing salient stimuli to prevent them from capturing attention. It has been suggested, however, that prior studies showing evidence of suppression may have used stimuli that were not truly salient. This claim has been difficult to test because there are currently no agreed-upon methods to demonstrate that an object is salient. The current study aims to help resolve this by introducing a new technique to test the role of salience in attentional capture. Low- and high-salience singletons were generated via a manipulation of color contrast. An initial experiment then verified the manipulation of salience using a search task where the color singleton was the target and could only be found via its bottom-up popout. High-salience singletons were found much more easily than low-salience singletons, suggesting that salience powerfully influenced attention when task relevant. A following experiment then used the same stimulus displays but adapted the task so that the singletons were task-irrelevant distractors. Both low- and high-salience singletons were suppressed, suggesting neither was able to capture attention. These results challenge purely stimulus-driven accounts by showing that improving salience only enhances attentional allocation in situations where the object is also task relevant. The results are instead consistent with the signal suppression hypothesis, which predicts that task-irrelevant singletons can be suppressed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A basic function of human visual perception is the ability to recognize and locate objects in the environment. It has been shown that two-dimensional (2D) location can reliably bias judgments on object identity (spatial congruency bias; Golomb et al., 2014), suggesting that 2D location information is automatically bound with object features to induce such a bias. Although the binding problem of feature and location has been vigorously studied under various 2D settings, it remains unclear how depth location can be bound with object features in a three-dimensional (3D) setting. Here we conducted five experiments in various 3D contexts using the congruency bias paradigm, and found that changes of object's depth location could influence perceptual judgments on object features differently depending on whether its relative depth order with respect to others changed or not. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the judgments on an object's color could be affected by changes in its ordinal depth, but not by changes in its absolute metric depth. Experiment 3 showed that the bias was asymmetric-changes in an object's color did bias the judgments on metric-depth location, but not if its depth order had changed. Experiments 4 and 5 investigated whether these findings could be generalized to a peripersonal near space and a large-scale far space, respectively, using more ecological virtual environments. Our findings suggest that ordinal depth plays a special role in feature-location binding: an object may be automatically bound with its relative depth relation, but not with its absolute metric-depth location. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent research on duration perception suggests that duration encoding is not a single general process but involves several separate processes, some of which are specific to visual modality. Moreover, different functional aspects of visual processing can influence duration perception in distinct ways. One of the most important functions of the visual system is to identify and recognize features, shapes, and objects. However, it is still unclear whether and how computations related to these processes affect duration perception. To clarify this issue, we used a spatial crowding phenomenon, which allows the dissociation of low-level feature extraction from high-level processes such as object recognition. We created letter and vernier stimuli matched for their low-level properties but different in their discriminability due to spatial crowding. Here, we show that stimuli that became more difficult to discriminate appeared shorter in duration (data collected in 2019-2023). This difference in perceived duration could not be explained by low-level stimulus properties, cognitive bias due to discriminability, or perceived stimulus onsets or offsets. These results suggest the existence of time-sensitive structures specific to visual processing of features, shapes, and objects that is affected by crowding. These findings support the notion of distributed timing mechanisms in the visual system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Subsecond temporal perception is critical for understanding time-varying events. Many studies suggest that subsecond timing is an intrinsic property of neural dynamics, distributed across sensory modalities and brain areas. However, our recent finding of the transfer of temporal interval discrimination (TID) learning across sensory modalities supports the existence of a more abstract and conceptual representation of subsecond time that guides the temporal processing of distributed mechanisms. One major challenge to this hypothesis is that TID learning consistently fails to transfer from trained intervals to untrained intervals. To address this issue, here, we examined whether this interval specificity can be removed with double training, a procedure originally developed to eliminate various specificities in visual perceptual learning. Specifically, participants practiced the primary TID task, the learning of which per se was specific to the trained interval (e.g., 100 ms). In addition, they also received exposure to a new interval (e.g., 200 ms) through a secondary and functionally independent tone-frequency discrimination task. This double training successfully enabled complete transfer of TID learning to the new interval, indicating that training improved an interval-invariant component of temporal interval perception, which supports our proposal of an abstract and conceptual representation of subsecond time in the brain. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Spatial attention enhances processing of information, but how does unattended and task-irrelevant information influence visual processing within the spatial focus of attention? We tested this by asking participants to extract the average emotional expression of a set of sequentially presented faces while simultaneously presenting task-irrelevant faces at a spatially unattended and task-irrelevant location. Across several experiments, we found that participants' reports of the emotional expression of faces at the attended location were biased toward the task-irrelevant faces. For example, when happier faces were presented at the unattended location, participants were biased to perceive the attended faces as happier. A control experiment in which participants were asked to also detect probes at cued and uncued locations showed that spatial attention was directed towards the cued location as instructed. Together, these results reveal that unattended and task-irrelevant inputs do not only affect the efficiency of target processing, for example by slowing responses or lowering accuracies, but that they can systematically bias ensemble representations within the spatial focus of attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Comprehensive understanding of visual scenes necessitates grasping the relations among visual objects. Given the potentially pivotal role of visual working memory (VWM) in processing visual relations, it is important to investigate the representation of relations in VWM. In our previous study, we proposed the integrated storage hypothesis, postulating that relations and objects are stored together as an integrated structured representation in VWM. The present study aimed to test this hypothesis against the alternative separate encoding hypothesis by probing the irrelevant-distracting effect. Across three experiments, where participants memorized object shapes/colors while disregarding relations, an irrelevant-distracting effect was consistently observed across varying types of changes in relation and set sizes. Critically, recombining the probe with irrelevant relation from another memory item (Experiment 2) or reversing the relational roles of probed objects relative to the memory item (Experiment 3) were perceived as inconsistency with stored representations and impaired change detection. These findings supported the integrated storage hypothesis, indicating that the dynamic relations between the objects are automatically encoded alongside object identities to form an integrated structured representation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).