Attention Perception & Psychophysics最新文献

Previous research has shown that people tend to display attentional biases toward faces with strong emotions within crowds, often overestimating the extremity of the average emotional expression. However, this emotional amplification effect has not been consistently observed in tasks where observers summarize other crowd features, such as the number of faces. This study aims to explore the attentional mechanisms underlying these inconsistent findings. To do so, we recruited 584 participants across four online experiments and employed an equivalence judgment task to assess participants’ ability to estimate the number of emotional faces. In the task, participants determined whether the number of two types of facial expressions within a series of crowds was the “same” or “different.” Experiment 1 revealed that the number of emotional faces (angry and happy) was underestimated relative to neutral faces. Experiment 2 replicated this underestimation effect across different face types and exposure durations. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the emotional amplification effect may be caused by strong emotion contrasts within crowds. Experiment 4 confirmed that the underestimation of the number of emotional faces could be replicated in the numerosity estimation task with different instructions. Our findings suggest that people may strategically suppress attention to emotional faces to mitigate their emotional response. This study provides important empirical evidence to enhance our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying emotion perception and social behavior.

The visual system can encode multiple objects in the form of ensemble representations. Such representations can be accessed with either explicit or implicit reports, but depending on the type of report, the observed properties of the ensemble representation can differ in detail. Previous studies have suggested that the saliency of individual items biases the perceived mean of ensembles (the so-called amplification effect). It is unclear, however, whether saliency affects implicit representations of the whole feature distribution (beyond mean and variance). Our observers were presented with sets of lines varying in orientation and size where size was a task-irrelevant salient feature. To estimate explicit representations, observers adjusted the mean orientation. To access the implicit representation of the feature distribution, we used a visual search task (Feature Distribution Learning) for an oddly oriented line among heterogeneous distractors and measured the search times. The results revealed a strong saliency-induced bias in the explicit report task, with mean orientation estimates biased toward the more salient items. However, no such amplification effect was observed for the implicit report. Our results support the hypothesis that distinct mechanisms may underlie the implicit and explicit ensemble representations.

Recently, there have been many attempts to replicate effects that have traditionally been observed in laboratory-based settings using web-based settings. While many classic effects have indeed been found to replicate, it is also true that web-based experiments often yield slower reaction times and less accurate responses compared with lab-based experiments. The aim of the current study was to compare performance on the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) across lab-based and web-based settings using a repeated-measures, within-subjects design. The results indicated no significant differences between the lab-based and web-based settings in reaction times for both go and no-go trials, as well as in post-error slowing. Additionally, no significant differences were observed in the accuracy of no-go trials. However, the standard deviation of reaction times was smaller in the lab-based setting, and accuracy in go trials was higher in the lab-based setting compared with the web-based setting. These findings suggest that a web-based setting can effectively replicate a laboratory-based setting in terms of reaction times, indicating that sustained attention effects are comparable across settings. However, the lower accuracy observed in the web-based setting suggests that participants may engage with the task less carefully. Furthermore, the greater variability in reaction times in the web-based setting implies a higher susceptibility to external influences. These results highlight the importance of careful methodological considerations when designing and interpreting the results of web-based experiments.

Recent behavioral studies have shown that humans possess self-awareness of their individual timing ability in that they can discern the direction of their timing error. However, in these studies which included a single repeat (re-do) trial for each duration, it remains unclear whether the reduction in errors in the re-do trials was due to self-awareness of individual timing ability or because the participants used the feedback from the initial trials to improve on the re-do ones. To investigate this further, we conducted a behavioral study in which subjects were divided into two groups: one in which the “re-do” phase occurred frequently, but not always (80% of trials; called the “high-double” group), and one in which re-do trials were rare (20% of trials; called the “low-double” group). This was done to test the possibility of subjects relying on the re-do trials as a method of improvement. Subjects significantly improved in their performance on re-do trials regardless of whether re-dos were rare or frequent. Further, an unexpected finding was observed, where subjects in the low-double group also overall performed better than those in the high-double group. This finding suggests that subjects, knowing that re-do opportunities were rare, engaged better timing at the outset; yet these subjects still improved on re-do trials, suggesting humans are able to incorporate both global uncertainty and feedback.

Facial attractiveness is a crucial factor in social interactions. During the judgments of facial attractiveness, individuals not only can form the perception of single faces but also can extract summary statistics of multiple faces (i.e., ensemble perception). It is largely unknown whether and how recent perceptual history could have an influence on the ensemble perception of facial attractiveness. Here we combined a facial attractiveness rating task with a linear regression model to address these issues. In Experiment 1a and 1b we found that attractiveness judgments of an ensemble of current multiple faces were significantly biased toward an ensemble of previous multiple faces (i.e., a positive serial dependence effect). Experiment 2 further demonstrated that this positive effect originated from the global ensemble perception rather than the local perception. Moreover, Experiment 3 revealed serial dependence effects between the perception of a single face and the ensemble perception of multiple faces. Taken together, these findings showed the positive effect of recent perceptual history on the ensemble perception of facial attractiveness, indicating that the ensemble perception of high-level visual features such as facial attractiveness is controlled by the serial dependence mechanism.

People are able to take advantage of statistical regularities in scenes, using those regularities to bias their attention to the likely locations of items of interest. People also seem able to learn object-centered statistical regularities—for example, that the top of an object is the most likely target location. We show here that such regularities transfer to new spatial locations even in the absence of any explicit object and hence may not be truly object centered. Additionally, when transfer is measured on a new object with a new shape—the transfer is substantially reduced. The findings suggest that statistical information about likely target locations can be encoded in a configuration-based reference frame that is sensitive to the context established by the objects in the scene. The results lead to a new interpretation of earlier findings and have important implications for understanding the coordinate systems in which attentional priorities are represented.

The visual memory of others’ postures has been proposed to be shaped by knowledge and expectations. For example, the visual memory of a lifted arm was recently shown to be biased downward, suggesting that observers predicted the upcoming state of the arm based on knowledge of the effort required to hold the arm up against gravity. Alternatively, the downward bias for body postures could reflect an automatic normalization toward the most frequently observed arm position, with arms more often observed in a low position. Here, in three experiments, we provide evidence that the downward bias is flexibly modulated by knowledge of effort. In Experiment 1, we found a stronger downward bias for arm postures that are relatively effortful (lifting an arm above the shoulders while standing) compared with arm postures that are less effortful (lifting an arm above the chest while lying down). In Experiment 2, we found a stronger downward bias when the actor was standing (viewed from the side) than when the actor was lying down (viewed from above), even though the arm postures were visually identical. Moreover, dividing attention during the encoding stage reduced the bias, showing that attentive processing of the stimulus was required for the bias to emerge. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that concurrently executing the observed posture during the visual memory task did not further increase the downward bias. Together, these findings demonstrate a high-level cognitive influence on the visual memory for body postures.

Previous research suggests that action video game players (AVGPs) often outperform non-action video game players (NAVGPs) in cognitive tasks. This study compared the precision of visual short-term memory (VSTM) for motion direction between AVGPs and age- and gender-matched NAVGPs. Participants memorized the direction of random dot kinematograms (RDKs) presented sequentially (one to four per trial) and reproduced the direction of a probed RDK after either a short (0.5 s) or long (3 s) delay. Initial training ensured that all participants reached a predefined performance level with a single stimulus, with AVGPs requiring fewer training blocks to meet this criterion. While no significant group differences emerged at short delays, AVGPs showed significantly higher raw precision than NAVGPs in long-delay trials involving a single stimulus. However, this group difference did not reach significance in the corresponding precision parameter estimated by the Standard Mixture Model. To investigate memory-encoding strategies, we applied the resource-rational model (RRM), which formalizes the trade-off between behavioral accuracy and neural cost. Model estimates showed that NAVGPs placed greater weight on neural cost relative to behavioral benefits during encoding, particularly in long-delay trials, leading to reduced precision. In contrast, AVGPs allocated memory resources more efficiently, maintaining higher precision over extended intervals. These findings suggest that AVGPs adopt more effective encoding strategies, dynamically adjusting resource allocation to task demands. This study highlights the utility of resource-rational modeling for understanding cognitive performance differences linked to action video game experience. Future research could further explore how these strategies translate across different cognitive domains.

This study uses an indirect recognition procedure to examine whether prior exposure to nonverbal visual objects affects recognition judgments in later, unrelated recognition tests. We also examined the effect of matching operations between study and test on recognition judgments. The experiment consisted of two sessions. The first session was an incidental learning task: Each object was presented twice, and participants were asked to count the number of corners of the presented object. In the second session after 3 weeks, participants performed the same task as in the first session and then performed an unexpected recognition test. In this test, participants were asked to identify whether the presented object had appeared in the second session. To unify the operation between study and test, some participants were required to count the number of corners of the presented object before the recognition judgment. The results revealed that recognition performance for the objects that appeared in the first session was significantly different from that of objects that had not appeared, even when participants were not asked to recall the episode of the first session when performing the recognition test. Although the results of the effect of the matching operation suggested a negative effect on recognition, the results were unclear. This finding indicates that representations for nonverbal objects are preserved for at least 3 weeks. This also highlights the need to consider the implicit effect of a brief prior experience on recognition judgments.

There is an ongoing controversy over whether human vision first estimates area and number, deriving our sense of density via division, or if it first estimates area and density, deriving our sense of number via multiplication. If number and area are both primary independent dimensions of visual perception then we should observe cross-magnitude influence between them in a simple choice task, especially if that influence would improve performance and this is explicitly explained to the participants. In contrast, here we show that human vision exhibits a specific kind of number blindness: performance on an area-choice task (which of these rectangles is larger?) is not improved by the addition of a perfectly correlated number signal (the larger one always has more dots on it) that creates equivalent density – even when explanations, reminders, and accurate feedback are given to the participants. This replicated across two experiments (N = 82, 122) with slightly different stimuli. Control analyses with brightness in Experiment 1 indicate that this is not a general resistance to the predicted cross-magnitude influence. This indicates that density, not number, is the primary independent perceptual dimension in human vision.