Attention Perception & Psychophysics最新文献

Crossmodal correspondences (CMCs) are consistent associations between sensory features from different modalities. Previous research has demonstrated that these pairings can be recruited in the resolution of the Rubin face-vase illusion. This research builds upon and expands these findings into the resolution of language ambiguity. The study uses the feature pairings of elevation/pitch, lightness/pitch, and size/pitch to influence the perceived intonation of a spoken utterance. Participants listened to a range of auditory stimuli, varying in their intent, and attempted to classify them as questions or statements. We found that change in the irrelevant visual features of elevation or lightness could bias their judgements in a manner consistent with an actual change in the pitch of the auditory stimulus. Size/pitch does not appear to affect language judgements, and we confirm this in a series of follow-up experiments. This suggests that simple crossmodal correspondences can influence high-level ambiguity resolution, at least in some cases. These findings have important implications for the use of visual cues in audiovisual language studies such as the visual world paradigm.

This paper investigates the relationship between motor precision, visual feedback, and monetary incentives in two experiments. In both, participants exerted force via a hand dynamometer to maintain force production at identified levels while we manipulated the quality of visual feedback regarding their performance. In Experiment 1, monetary incentives improved motor performance only when visual feedback was provided. In Experiment 2, we simplified target representation by reducing the number of targets, making them easier to distinguish via proprioception and somatosensation. Under these conditions, incentives enhanced performance even without visual feedback. These findings suggest that while visual feedback is key to mediating motivational effects on fine motor control, incentives can also directly enhance performance when targets are easily represented through proprioceptive cues.

Beyond sources of listener-external variability such as variation in talker and acoustic context, listener-internal variation also plays a role in speech perception and cue weighting. The present study examines the effects of prosodic prominence, signaled by F0, and multi-talker babble noise as methods of boosting and decrementing listeners’ attention, respectively. Listeners categorized four English vowel contrasts, including two high vowel contrasts and two non-high vowel contrasts, with both formant cues and vowel duration varying along a continuum. In Experiment 1, results showed that prominence boosted formant cue usage, whereas babble noise was detrimental to formant cue usage, aligning with predicted roles in modulating listener attention. Listeners’ use of vowel duration, a secondary cue to the contrasts, was also impacted by prominence or babble noise. In Experiment 2, two methods of eliciting F0-based prominence, off-target (contextual) and on-target (target-internal), were investigated. Results showed that off-target prominence showed a very limited effect in boosting formant cue usage. Results are discussed in terms of the role of prosodic prominence in speech perception, and the role of attention in perceptual processing. The data and code for the experiments is available on the OSF at:https://osf.io/52khc/.

People can understand speech even when the speech signal is divided into equally long segments and each segment is reversed in time (locally time-reversed speech). In addition, Ishida (Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 83(6), 2675–2693, 2021) reported that Japanese words – composed of consonant–vowel (CV) units – were significantly more intelligible than English words when locally time-reversed. The current study investigates how tolerant and robust Japanese words are under more severe temporal distortions. In Experiment 1, native Japanese speakers listened to Japanese words and pseudowords that were locally time-reversed at intervals of 100, 120, 140, 160, 180, and 200 ms, which had not been previously examined. These lexical items contained either many fricatives or stops. Results showed that Japanese words were highly tolerant of local time reversal, even at these extreme durations. Perceptual restoration was sustained by dominant phoneme type (fricative-dominant > stop-dominant) and lexicality (words > pseudowords). In Experiment 2, participants listened to stop-dominant Japanese words and pseudowords, which were more susceptible to temporal distortion in Experiment 1. Temporal distortion was further increased by introducing extreme speech rates (fast vs. slow) while reversing the signal at 10, 30, 50, 70, 90, and 110 ms, commonly used intervals with normal speech rates. Results showed that stop-dominant Japanese words remained intelligible with increasing distortions, while pseudowords remained intelligible only up to 50 ms in the slow condition and became unintelligible in the fast condition. Overall, recognition of Japanese CV-based words was highly tolerant of severe temporal distortion, with perceptual restoration supported by dominant phoneme type, slower speech rate, and lexicality.

Cognitive control is the functional backbone of intelligent behavior, because it allows to act according to one’s intentions, even when the environment elicits opposed behaviors. Recently, it has been shown that reactions under urgency in a cognitive control task are dominated by stimulus-driven information and goal-directed actions are overpowered, as reflected by a temporary drop in performance below chance level in conflict situations. This effect was shown for eye movements as well as manual cognitive control tasks. Crucially, most previous studies used tasks that involved a natural processing asymmetry between the stimulus-driven information and the goal-directed information, leaving it unclear whether urgency affects cognitive control in general. Here, we investigated whether urgency also impacts performance in tasks that evoke a stimulus-stimulus conflict between similarly processed stimuli. Therefore, urgency was applied to two Eriksen flanker tasks, one using color stimuli, the other one using letter stimuli. In both experiments, urgency did not lead to a drop in performance below chance level in conflict situations, meaning that goal-directed behavior could be maintained. In a third experiment, an Eriksen flanker task with letter stimuli and a stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) of 120 ms between the appearance of the flanker stimuli and the target stimulus, urgency evoked a large drop in performance below chance level. These results reveal that the effect of urgency on cognitive control is based on an amplification of cognitive processing asymmetries induced by urgency and is thus specific for tasks involving processing asymmetries, thereby evoking early-onset cognitive conflicts.

Perceived time often diverges from physical time. This discrepancy is important given the crucial role of time perception in numerous cognitive processes. A critical question concerning the non-veridicality of timing is whether and how different physical attributes (e.g., size, speed, and numerosity) influence perceived duration. The present study deals specifically with how perceived time depends on stimulus brightness, both of a to-be-timed stimulus and the background on which this stimulus is presented. The results of two experiments show that increased brightness lengthens perceived duration, and, surprisingly, that this is the case both for the stimulus and the background. The finding that stimulus brightness affects time perception is a much needed replication of classic studies; however, the finding that background brightness similarly affects time perception is novel, and suggests that time perception may be biased by low-level visual perception. Additionally, we tested the hypothesis that large pupils (as a result of spontaneous pupil-size fluctuations) are associated with longer perceived durations. This hypothesis was based on the common assumption that arousal affects both pupil size and time perception; however, in contrast to this hypothesis, results show that pupil size has no relation to perceived time. Taken together, our study suggests that time perception is strongly affected by low-level visual input (brightness) but not—or hardly—by pupil-linked arousal.

Posner and his colleagues proposed a seminal theory of how alerting influenced information processing over 50 years ago (Posner et al., Memory & Cognition, 1, 2–12, 1973). In this study, participants were presented with warning signals at varying intervals before a target, and participants were asked to produce a spatial discrimination response. Trials in which participants were played a warning signal were compared to trials without a warning signal to understand the effect of phasic alerting using reaction time (RT) and error rate (ER). Posner and colleagues observed a general speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) across conditions, in which faster RTs led to higher ER, and concluded that phasic alertness shifts response criteria without improving the efficiency of information processing. More recent research has questioned whether this theory of alerting applies generally across all time-courses and conditions. The current meta-analysis aimed to test Posner’s theory of alerting (1975) using all available data in the field that closely matches the methodology used in Posner et al.’s Memory & Cognition, 1, 2–12, (1973) influential study. After including data from 16 published experiments across three different signal-target foreperiod durations, our conclusions support that while a speed-accuracy trade-off is likely present at shorter foreperiods (50 ms), the longer foreperiods (200 and 400 ms) show evidence of an increase in the rate of information processing when the participant was alerted.

A number of studies have suggested that biasing the probability by which distractors appear at locations in visual space may lead to attentional suppression of high-probability distractor locations. It effectively reduces capture by a distractor but also impairs target selection at this location. Recently, there is still debate on whether the distractor processing could be affected by the statistical regularities of the target location. In the current study, through four experiments, we manipulated search array size (the number of the elements on the display – four, six, ten, 12). In each experiment, we manipulated spatial regularities of the target including one low-probability target location and other high-probability target locations. We found that statistical regularities of the target location could affect the distractor processing, but this occurred only for larger search array sizes (e.g., ten and 12 elements). Our new finding provided the evidence for whether statistical regularities regarding the target could affect distractor processing. We concluded that search array size was a potential and critical factor for determining whether distractor suppression could be driven by statistical regularities of target location.

Emotional modulation of visual processing is observed across various domains of perception. We examined whether these modulations affect perceptual sensitivity, the perceived magnitude (biases) of visual stimuli, or both. We asked participants to reproduce the duration (Exp. 1) and size (Exp. 2) of threat-related stimuli (spiders), and those of neutral ones (2D disks and butterflies). Sensitivity was examined by measuring within-subject standard deviations of reproductions for varying magnitudes of the stimuli. Biases were examined by measuring regression to the-mean, a tendency of subjective estimates to gravitate toward the center of the distribution from which stimuli were sampled. Results showed a mild increase in the standard deviations of reproductions of larger magnitudes for negatively valenced stimuli, indicating lower sensitivity. While regression biases were overall observed for these stimuli, biases decreased for the higher levels of intensities, despite their lower sensitivity. Underestimation of above-mean magnitudes was relatively moderated, demonstrating altered relations between the reliability of the sensory input and perceptual biases for these stimuli. Overall, the results suggest that magnitude perception is biased toward the central tendency of the experienced stimuli, even for threatening stimuli; however, biases are milder for the intensified values, presumably to obtain more veridical perception of these stimuli.

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.