Attention Perception & Psychophysics最新文献

In everyday life, aesthetic liking largely depends on the fluency of stimulus-driven, default, rapid, and automatic processing. However, our understanding of how perceptual and conceptual fluency jointly shape aesthetic liking in automatic processing remains limited. In two experiments, the masked priming paradigm was employed to manipulate perceptual and conceptual fluency of target stimuli separately, and participants were instructed to rate liking for colored images of everyday objects based on their initial impressions. The results indicated that the masked matched contours and words significantly reduced response times for liking judgments of the target images and increased liking ratings, whereas mismatched contours and words had no significant effect. Both experiments additionally varied the target duration to investigate whether the effects of perceptual and conceptual priming were influenced by another manipulation of perceptual fluency. We found that the perceptual priming effect diminished with longer target duration, while the conceptual priming effect remained consistent. These findings provide direct evidence that both perceptual and conceptual fluency can enhance aesthetic liking in automatic processing, and their effects are dissociated and not interchangeable.

Working memory (WM) consolidation is the preservation of perceptual information to insulate it from distraction. A decision task following WM sample presentation retroactively disrupts consolidation, apparently regardless of whether the WM sample and decision task rely on the same representational formats. Critically, this representational-format-general interference suggests that consolidation entails “central” executive domain-general processing. However, the evidence for central interference is weak because verbal recoding of nonverbal samples is thought to be ubiquitous in WM. Typical decision tasks used to evoke interference also entail verbal materials, making it possible that the observed interference is really a product of competition for “peripheral” phonological storage resources. Moreover, some WM models suggest a direct connection between perceptual mechanisms and storage, without direct access of central processes to format-specific storage. Thus, it remains unknown whether WM consolidation entails central executive processing or could have a purely storage-buffer (verbal) locus. The current study embedded an established task to measure WM consolidation and its interruption by a decision task within a further within-participants 2 × 2 factorial design, using different WM sample and decision task representational format pairings in each task block. This allowed measurement of central processing contributions to consolidation (cross-format blocks), and evaluation of potential additional interference in format-specific storage buffers (same-format blocks). Interference in cross-format pairings did not increase for same-format pairings, supporting the view that WM consolidation is dependent on central processing. Subject-level data have been made publicly available on the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at the following link: https://osf.io/p387u/.

Your understanding of what you see now surely influences what you will look at next. Yet this simple concept has only recently begun to be systematically studied and elaborated within theoretical frameworks. The Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) distinguishes between front-end and back-end processes that occur while viewers perceive and comprehend dynamic real-world events. Front-end processes occur during each eye fixation (information extraction, attentional selection) and back-end processes occur in memory (the current event model, the stored event model, prior knowledge, and executive processes). We begin with a selective review of the scene perception literature on bottom-up and top-down effects on attentional selection in scenes, and highlight unanswered questions regarding the impact of the viewer’s event model–their understanding of what is happening now. Then, we outline the SPECT theoretical framework, and review empirical evidence about how the viewer’s current event model influences attentional selection. This influence is contrasted with those of visual saliency (e.g., color, brightness, motion) and task-driven control (i.e., goal setting, attentional control, inhibition). From this review, we specify a hierarchy of factors affecting attentional selection, in the order of task-driven control, visual saliency, and event models. We then propose several mechanisms by which the viewer’s event model influences attentional selection, and propose a systematic approach to investigating how that happens while watching dynamic scenes.

The human visual system adapts to statistical regularities in the environment to facilitate visual processing. While laboratory-based tasks make clear distinctions between how task-relevant and task-irrelevant visual information can guide this adaptation, such discretization is rarely available in the real world. As such, it remains unclear exactly what information the visual system tracks to flexibly adapt to a given task. The current study used a massive visual search dataset from the mobile game Airport Scanner. Effects of exposure over a range of more task-relevant (e.g., target presence) to less task-relevant (e.g., background context) features were analyzed in an omnibus model to predict response times in both target-present and target-absent trials. As in previous work (Kramer et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151 (8), 1854, 2022), increased exposure to target-present trials significantly sped up the detection of targets and slowed the rejection of target-absent trials. Exposure to salient distractors reduced response times for target-present trials, potentially as a result of learned distractor suppression (Gaspelin & Luck, Trends in cognitive sciences, 22 (1), 79-92, 2018) or increased familiarity (Mruczek & Sheinberg, Perception & psychophysics, 67 (6), 1016-1031, 2005), but had no effect on target-absent trials. Exposure to background information decreased response times in both target-present and target-absent trials, with notable interactions between target and background exposure. Specifically, the effect of background information was more pronounced when target exposure was low, suggesting that less task-relevant context information is more likely to be tracked in the absence of more task-relevant information, namely, the presentation of targets. The findings highlight the importance of considering multiple sources of exposure in visual search tasks and demonstrate the value of large datasets in quantifying their complex interactions.

When searching visual scenes, we use low-level visual information from objects’ defining features such as color and luminance contrasts. What is the relative influence of color and luminance for saccade target selection? Basic perceptual research suggests that we are not very sensitive to peripheral color, yet color is thought to be an important basic feature guiding visual search. Previous gaze-contingent research shows that targets can be localized faster in color than in grayscale scenes, therefore the availability of color in the visual periphery indeed helps visual search. However, object boundaries are typically defined by both color and luminance contrasts. Here we study the isolated roles of color and luminance during object-in-scene search by presenting either color-only or luminance-only contrasts in peripheral vision, using a gaze-contingent moving-window display with three varying window sizes. We found that peripheral target selection and search performance were more efficient with luminance contrasts, whereas color was used only sparingly beyond the parafovea. We conclude that color contrasts in peripheral vision are only efficiently used in scene search when they are jointly occurring with luminance contrasts.

Recent theoretical considerations suggest that preparatory attention mechanisms might play a pivotal role in the anticipation of distractors by proactively suppressing spatial locations and/or specific features. However, this notion stems primarily from studies employing visual search paradigms with simultaneous displays, and recent research using successive displays and isolated distractors challenges this assumption. The efficacy of proactive suppression in setups involving isolated distractors is questioned, underscoring the need for further investigation. The current study seeks to investigate the factors influencing proactive suppression when anticipating isolated distractors in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Across three experiments, we manipulated distractor interference, spatial predictability, and temporal predictability. Results consistently showed that even highly interfering distractors, when fully predictable in time and space, remained difficult to proactively suppress. These findings suggest clear limitations of proactive attentional control mechanisms in the context of isolated distractor anticipation.