Attention Perception & Psychophysics最新文献

The process of adapting facial representations plays a critical role in face perception and memory, representing an interplay of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms. This process allows individuals to recognize faces despite dynamic changes, for example, aging. However, a full understanding of the adaptation characteristics of non-configural facial information is still lacking in the face-processing literature. The present study investigates face aftereffects in response to facial contrast information, extending the research beyond recent studies on adaptation regarding brightness and color saturation information to a new non-configural facial information type. The research involved four experiments using celebrity face images manipulated for facial contrast, with intervals ranging from 300 ms (Experiment 1) to 5 min (Experiment 2) between adaptation and test phases. Experiment 3 used inverted adaptation faces to investigate whether adaptation effects transfer to upright test faces. The results demonstrate adaptation effects for facial contrast that are robust over time and do not transfer from inverted to upright faces. In addition, these effect sizes were compared to those of brightness and saturation information (Experiment 4), revealing no significant differences in magnitude. In general, the present findings suggest that non-configural facial contrast information is an integral part of face representations, representing an interplay of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms in face processing. All data are available on the Open Science Framework.

Humans prepare motor actions when perceiving objects that afford specific behaviors, highlighting the tight link between perception and action. For example, seeing a graspable object like a mug can trigger hand movements aligned to its handle – a phenomenon known as the object affordance effect. Vainio et al. (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 64, 1094–1110, 2011) demonstrated this can produce a negative compatibility effect (NCE). This occurs when a spatially compatible prime object eliciting an affordance (e.g., a mug), but to be ignored, precedes a target requiring a spatial response. Given that task demands shape response execution (e.g., Schöpper & Frings, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 86, 171–185, 2024), we hypothesized that the effect of affordance would vary accordingly. In Experiment 1, participants performed three tasks: arrow direction discrimination, shape discrimination, and circle localization. In all tasks, the time interval between the affordance object (a mug) and the onset of the target, as well as the compatibility between the mug and the response, varied. The arrow task replicated the NCE – responses were slower in compatible trials at short intervals. No compatibility effects were observed in the shape task. Notably, the localization task revealed a positive compatibility effect (PCE). The variation in compatibility effects suggests task-dependent affordances. Experiment 2 manipulated the target position relative to the fixation to investigate the PCE in the localization task and explore the differences in the compatibility effect. Although the PCE was not replicated, the NCE now also appeared for location tasks. Our results suggest that task constraints shape the compatibility effect, and distractor-induced affordances engage inhibitory mechanisms only when spatial features are relevant.

This study investigated whether attentional orienting in response to gaze cues enhances visual working memory (WM) automatically, or whether engagement of top-down processes is necessary for such effects to emerge. Building on an existing gaze-cueing paradigm, we tested whether joint attention supports WM under two conditions. In Experiment 1, participants viewed centrally presented static images of human faces displaying directional gaze cues without any instruction to use gaze direction, and gaze validity was set at 50%, making the cue spatially uninformative of stimuli location. Following the cue, a memory array was presented, followed by a retention interval and a single-probe recall. Participants had to indicate whether the probe had appeared in the initial memory set. No WM advantage was found for validly cued items. In Experiment 2, we increased cue validity to 75% and explicitly informed participants that gaze direction was highly predictive of stimuli location. Under this condition, which presumably elicited higher engagement of top-down processes, valid gaze cues significantly enhanced WM performance relative to invalid cues. Interestingly, as cognitive load increased, the limited capacity of WM slightly constrained the extent to which this strategic orienting could translate into improved memory sensitivity. These results highlight the interplay between cue reliability, attentional control, and WM capacity in determining the efficacy of gaze cues. Our findings clarify the conditions under which joint attention facilitates WM and contribute to a growing literature showing that social attention effects on higher-level cognition are context-sensitive and cognitively mediated.

While previous studies have shown memory enhancement for items with statistical regularities, it remains unclear whether this advantage persists when people are not anticipating the need to recall that information. Here, we used the attribute amnesia paradigm to examine whether statistical regularities influence working memory encoding in the absence of intentional memorization. In Experiment 1, participants reported the location of a colored target that appeared more frequently in one color. On a surprise trial probing target color, participants who saw the target in the frequent color were significantly more likely to answer correctly than those who saw it in a less frequent color. More importantly, regardless of which color was actually shown, participants across both groups tended to choose the frequent color as target color, suggesting a response bias, rather than enhanced encoding, driven by statistical regularities. Experiment 2 inserted a separate visual search task with equalized color probabilities and found an attentional bias toward the frequent color, confirming its attentional prioritization. Experiment 3 extended the above findings to task-irrelevant, yet physically salient and attention-grabbing distractors. Together, these findings indicate that although statistical regularities do not enhance working memory encoding, participants implicitly extract summary statistics of attended item attributes across trials, which in turn shapes their subsequent decisions.

In rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) tasks, fearful faces are detected more readily than neutral faces, but it remains unclear whether this pattern extends to happy faces or whether the task difficulty of the first target (T1) modulates these fear and happiness superiority effects. This study investigated how T1 difficulty (an alphabetic search task) influenced the attentional blink (AB) for T2, which involved identifying emotional faces (fearful, happy, and neutral) in an emotion classification task. Forty-one college students from Xinxiang Medical University completed the RSVP task, and their behavioral and ERP data were recorded and analyzed. Behavioral results revealed that during the AB period, fearful and happy faces were detected with significantly higher accuracy than neutral faces under low T1 difficulty conditions, while fearful faces outperformed both happy and neutral faces under high T1 difficulty. ERP data showed that fearful faces (compared with neutral faces) elicited significantly more positive VPP and P3_b amplitudes, whereas happy faces (compared with neutral faces) triggered significantly more negative N170 and more positive P3_b amplitudes. Additionally, happy faces evoked more positive P3_a amplitudes than neutral faces under low and medium T1 difficulty conditions, while fearful faces elicited more positive P3_a amplitudes only under low difficulty conditions. These findings demonstrate that T1 task difficulty moderates the superiority of fearful and happy faces during the AB period, with fearful faces being detected more easily and earlier than happy and neutral faces, providing new insights into the temporal dynamics of emotional face processing under varying cognitive demands.

Operating a tool that moves incompatibly with one’s own body invokes conflict between representations of anticipated body-related and environment-related movement consequences. To revolve such conflict, agents might down-regulate (or “neglect”) representations of body-related movement consequences during action preparation and execution. We tested body-related neglect by probing participants’ tactile sensitivity when operating a tool which moved either spatially compatible or incompatible to their operating hand. Across four experiments, we found no evidence for conflict-induced body-neglect. These results suggest that any potential downregulation of body-related movement components does not extend to the processing of tactile stimulation. We discuss these results with respect to applied settings in which incompatibly moving tools are routinely used.

Although faces and bodies provide essential cues to one’s identity, it is not well understood how the observer encodes and processes the two sources of information in person perception. Compelling questions remain regarding the extent to which the body influences the perception of the face and conversely, the extent to which the face influences the perception of the body. To address these questions, we constructed pairs of face–body composites where face and body information was either congruent (i.e., “same” faces/“same” bodies or “different” faces/“different” bodies) or incongruent (i.e., “same” faces/“different” bodies or “different” faces/“same” bodies). The composite pairs were presented in a sequential matching paradigm where the participant’s task was to judge whether the to-be-attended faces (Experiment 1) or the to-be-attended bodies (Experiment 2) were identical (e.g., “same” response) or non-identical (e.g., “different” response). The key finding was that in both experiments, participants performed better on the congruent trials than the incongruent trials, indicating that the unattended body (Experiment 1) or unattended face (Experiment 2) interfered with “same/different” judgements. Critically, alignment had no effect on face–body congruency, suggesting that the face and body information are combined at the later decisional integration stage of processing than at the early integration perceptual stage. Together, our results indicate that information about faces and bodies is automatically combined in person perception where it is difficult to separate judgements about a person’s face independent of the body and vice versa. The raw trial-level data for each subject, analysis code, and materials for all experiments are available at https://osf.io/ajr4d/files/osfstorage?view_only=. The link for the preregistered Experiments 1 and 2 can be found at https://osf.io/k3gsh and the preregistered control experiment at https://osf.io/jmcnu.

How do people prepare for the appearance of upcoming distractors? According to the preparation effect, observers do not inhibit distractors before their appearance; rather, they are more alert at those moments. In two large, online, pre-registered studies, we tested possible individual differences in the magnitude of the preparation effect. Specifically, we examined whether the preparation effect is related to working memory capacity and/or to the ability to filter out irrelevant information. The results indicated that the magnitude of the preparation effect did not correlate with these factors. These results highlight the rigidity of the preparation effect that does not seem to be related to working memory capacity or selective attention abilities. Moreover, that increased preparation does not result in less (or more) interference from upcoming distractor display, indicates that the preparation effect does not influence distractor rejection and further supports a mandatory 'process-all mechanism' as the underlying mechanism of the effect.

Semantic information is used to guide attention during scene-viewing, but how exactly does this occur? We tested the hypothesis that “anchor objects” are a special class of semantic associate essential to efficient target search in naturalistic scenes. Adult participants completed a RSVP search task for a target object preceded by a prime. In Experiment 1a (N = 210), the prime was either a semantic anchor or an unrelated object followed by a target in a congruent or incongruent spatial location relative to the prime. Experiment 1b (N = 157) served as a direct replication of Experiment 1a with a more selective stimulus set. In Experiment 2 (N = 158) the prime and target objects were reversed to assess the directionality of the effects. Results showed that semantically related objects facilitated target identification no matter which object was the prime. However, only anchor objects acted as predictive spatial cues, relative to control object pairs. The results indicate that anchor objects are a unique type of semantic associate, providing information about “what” objects are nearby and “where” they might be. The role of anchor objects in predicting the location of associated objects goes beyond both general scene regularities (e.g., “small things go on top of big things”) and semantic associations (e.g., pots and stoves).