Attention Perception & Psychophysics最新文献

Ensemble perception is an important ability of human beings that allows one to extract summary information for scenes and environments that contain information that far exceeds the processing limit of the visual system. Although attention has been shown to bias ensemble perception, two important questions remain unclear: (1) whether direct manipulations on different types of spatial attention could produce similar effects on ensembles and (2) whether factors potentially influencing the attention distribution, such as depth perception, could evoke an indirect effect of attention on ensemble representation. This study aims to address these questions. In Experiments 1 and 2, two types of precues were used to evoke exogenous and endogenous attention, respectively, and the ensemble color perceptions were examined. We found that both exogenous and endogenous attention biased ensemble representation towards the attended items, and the latter produced a greater effect. In Experiments 3 and 4, we examined whether depth perception could affect color ensembles by indirectly influencing attention allocation in 3D space. The items were separated in two depth planes, and no explicit cues were applied. The results showed that color ensemble was biased to closer items when depth information was task relevant. This suggests that ensemble perception is naturally biased in 3D space, probably through the mechanism of attention. Computational modeling consistently showed that attention exerted a direct shift on the ensemble statistics rather than averaging the feature values over the cued and noncued items, providing evidence against an averaging process of individual perception.

Crossmodal correspondences are consistent associations between sensory features from different modalities, with some theories suggesting they may either reflect environmental correlations or stem from innate neural structures. This study investigates this question by examining whether retinotopic or representational features of stimuli induce crossmodal congruency effects. Participants completed an auditory pitch discrimination task paired with visual stimuli varying in their sensory (retinotopic) or representational (scene integrated) nature, for both the elevation/pitch and size/pitch correspondences. Results show that only representational visual stimuli produced crossmodal congruency effects on pitch discrimination. These results support an environmental statistics hypothesis, suggesting crossmodal correspondences rely on real-world features rather than on sensory representations.

Within musical scenes or textures, sounds from certain instruments capture attention more prominently than others, hinting at biases in the perception of multisource mixtures. Besides musical factors, these effects might be related to frequency biases in auditory perception. Using an auditory pattern-recognition task, we studied the existence of such frequency biases. Mixtures of pure tone melodies were presented in six frequency bands. Listeners were instructed to assess whether the target melody was part of the mixture or not, with the target melody presented either before or after the mixture. In Experiment 1, the mixture always contained melodies in five out of the six bands. In Experiment 2, the mixture contained three bands that stemmed from the lower or the higher part of the range. As expected, Experiments 1 and 2 both highlighted strong effects of presentation order, with higher accuracies for the target presented before the mixture. Notably, Experiment 1 showed that edge frequencies yielded superior accuracies compared with center frequencies. Experiment 2 corroborated this finding by yielding enhanced accuracies for edge frequencies irrespective of the absolute frequency region. Our results highlight the salience of sound elements located at spectral edges within complex musical scenes. Overall, this implies that neither the high voice superiority effect nor the insensitivity to bass instruments observed by previous research can be explained by absolute frequency biases in auditory perception.

When a spiky object is occluded, we expect its spiky features to continue behind the occluder. Although many real-world objects contain complex features, it is unclear how more complex features are amodally completed and whether this process is automatic. To investigate this issue, we created pairs of displays with identical contour edges up to the point of occlusion, but with occluded portions exchanged. We then asked participants to search for oddball targets among distractors and asked whether relations between searches involving occluded displays would match better with relations between searches involving completions that are either globally consistent or inconsistent with the visible portions of these displays. Across two experiments involving simple and complex shapes, search times involving occluded displays matched better with those involving globally consistent compared with inconsistent displays. Analogous analyses on deep networks pretrained for object categorization revealed a similar pattern of results for simple but not complex shapes. Thus, deep networks seem to extrapolate simple occluded contours but not more complex contours. Taken together, our results show that amodal completion in humans is sophisticated and can be based on extrapolating global statistical properties.

Error monitoring is the ability to report one's errors without relying on feedback. Although error monitoring is investigated mostly with choice tasks, recent studies have discovered that participants parametrically also keep track of the magnitude and direction of their temporal, spatial, and numerical judgment errors. We investigated whether temporal error monitoring relies on internal generative processes that lead to the to-be-judged first-order timing performance. We hypothesized that if the endogenous processes underlie temporal error monitoring, one can monitor timing errors in emitted but not observed timing behaviors. We conducted six experiments to test this hypothesis. The first two experiments showed that confidence ratings were negatively related to error magnitude only in emitted behaviors, but error directionality judgments of observed behaviors were more precise. Experiment 3 replicated these effects even after controlling for the motor aspects of first-order timing performance. The last three experiments demonstrated that belief of agency (i.e., believing that the error belongs to the self or someone else) was critical in accounting for the confidence rating effects observed in the first two experiments. The precision of error directionality judgments was higher in the non-agency condition. These results show that confidence is sensitive to belief, and short-long judgment is sensitive to the actual agency of timing behavior (i.e., whether the behavior was emitted by the self or someone else).

The aim of the study was to assess the ability to maintain a steady pace during a counting task, aloud or silently, when a fast (28 counts every 900 ms) or slow (18 counts every 1,400 ms) pace is adopted (target = 25,200 ms), and to test whether ability is the same for musician and nonmusicians. The study analyzes the mean and variability of 30 temporal productions. The results show more variability (a larger coefficient of variation: standard deviation/mean production) in the condition where the pace is slow, a finding consistent with previous reports with this task. This finding applies here in both the aloud and silent counting conditions and, most importantly, applies to both musicians and nonmusicians. The results also indicate that there is no significant difference for the absolute error (|mean production - target duration|). In brief, the capacity to keep variability low when maintaining a pace seems to gain benefit from musical training, and this training difference does not depend on counting aloud versus silently and is not restricted to brief intervals.

Three experiments explored how the repetition of a visual search display guides search during contextual cuing under conditions in which the search process is interrupted by an instructional (endogenous) cue for attention. In Experiment 1, participants readily learned about repeated configurations of visual search, before being presented with an endogenous cue for attention towards the target on every trial. Participants used this cue to improve search times, but the repeated contexts continued to guide attention. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the presence of the endogenous cue did not impede the acquisition of contextual cuing. Experiment 3 confirmed the hypothesis that the contextual cuing effect relies largely on localized distractor contexts, following the guidance of attention. Together, the experiments point towards an interplay between two drivers of attention: after the initial guidance of attention, memory representations of the context continue to guide attention towards the target. This suggests that the early part of visual search is inconsequential for the development and maintenance of the contextual cuing effect, and that memory representations are flexibly deployed when the search procedure is dramatically interrupted.

This study investigated threat-related attention biases using a new visual search paradigm with eye tracking, which allows for measuring attentional disengagement in isolation. This is crucial as previous studies have been unable to distinguish between engagement, disengagement, and behavioral freezing. Thirty-three participants (M_age = 28.75 years, SD = 8.98; 21 women) with self-reported specific phobia (spiders, snakes, and pointed objects) and their matched controls (M_age = 28.38 years, SD = 8.66; 21 women) took part in the experiment. The participants were instructed to initially focus on a picture in the center of the screen, then search for a target picture in an outer circle consisting of six images, and respond via a button press whether the object in the target picture was oriented to the left or right. We found that phobic individuals show delayed disengagement and slower decision times compared with non-phobic individuals, regardless of whether the stimulus was threat-related or neutral. These results indicate that phobic individuals tend to exhibit poorer attentional control mechanisms and problems inhibiting irrelevant information. We also confirmed a threat-unrelated shared feature effect with complex stimuli (delayed disengagement when an attended stimulus and an unattended target share common stimulus features). This process might play a role in various experimental setups investigating attentional disengagement that has not yet been considered. These findings are important, as good attentional control may serve as a protective mechanism against anxiety disorders.

We report 10 experiments exploring the proposition that memory retrieval is perceptual attention turned inward. The experiments adapt the Eriksen and Eriksen perceptual flanker effect to a memory task in which subjects must decide whether a cued item in a probe display appeared in the same position in a memory list. Previous research with this episodic flanker task found distance and compatibility effects like those in the perceptual flanker task, suggesting that the same attentional spotlight is turned inward in memory retrieval. The previous experiments used lists of six consonants. The experiments reported here were designed to generalize the results to a broader range of conditions, from letters to words, colors, and pictures, and from set size 6 to set sizes of 4 and 5. Experiments 1-4 varied distance and set size with lists of four, five, or six letters, words, colors, and pictures, respectively. The distance effect was observed with all materials and all set sizes. Experiments 5-8 varied compatibility by presenting context items in the probe that were either the same as the memory list (and therefore compatible with "yes" responses and incompatible with "no" responses) or different from the memory list (and therefore incompatible with "yes" responses and compatible with "no" responses). We found compatibility effects with all materials and all set sizes. These results support the proposition that memory retrieval is attention turned inward. Turned inward or outward, attention is a general process that applies the same computations to different kinds of materials.

Our visual world consists of multiple objects, necessitating the identification of individual objects. Nevertheless, the representation of visual objects often exerts influence on each other. Even when we selectively attend to a subset of visual objects, the representations of surrounding items are encoded and influence the processing of the attended item(s). However, it remains unclear whether the effect of group ensemble representation on individual item representation occurs at the perceptual encoding phase, during the memory maintenance period, or both. Therefore, the current study conducted visual psychophysics experiments to investigate the contributions of perceptual and mnemonic bias on the observed effect of ensemble representation on individual size representation. Across five experiments, we found a consistent pattern of repulsive ensemble bias, such that the size of an individual target circle was consistently reported to be smaller than it actually was when presented alongside other circles with larger mean size, and vice versa. There was a perceptual component to the bias, but mnemonic factors also influenced its magnitude. Specifically, the repulsion bias was strongest with a short retention period (0-50 ms), then reduced within a second to a weaker magnitude that remained stable for a longer retention period (5,000 ms). Such patterns of results persisted when we facilitated the processing of ensemble representation by increasing the set size (Experiment 1B) or post-cueing the target circle so that attention was distributed across all items (Experiment 2B).