Temporal speed prevails on interval duration in the SNARC-like effect for tempo.

The Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect is evidence of an association between number magnitude and response position, with faster left-key responses to small numbers and faster right-key responses to large numbers. Similarly, recent studies revealed a SNARC-like effect for tempo, defined as the speed of an auditory sequence, with faster left-key responses to slow tempo and faster right-key responses to fast tempo. In order to address some methodological issues of previous studies, in the present study we designed an experiment to investigate the occurrence of a SNARC-like effect for tempo, employing a novel procedure in which only two auditory beats in sequence with a very short interstimulus interval were used. In the "temporal speed" condition, participants were required to judge the temporal speed (slow or fast) of the sequence. In the "interval duration" condition, participants were required to judge the duration of the interval between the two beats (short or long). The results revealed a consistent SNARC-like effect in both conditions, with faster left-hand responses to slow tempo and faster right-hand responses to fast tempo. Interestingly, the consistency of the results across the two conditions indicates that the direction of the SNARC-like effect was influenced by temporal speed even when participants were explicitly required to focus on interval duration. Overall, the current study extends previous findings by employing a new paradigm that addresses potential confounding factors and strengthens evidence for the SNARC-like effect for tempo.

Habituation to visual onsets is affected by local and global distractors rate.

Recent findings demonstrate that habituation of capture is stronger where onset distractors are frequent and weaker where they are rare, thus showing that habituation to onsets has a spatial selective nature. However, a debated question is whether habituation at a specific location is exclusively determined by the distractors' local rate, or whether instead local habituation is also affected by the global rate of the distractors, which may occur also at other locations. Here, we report the results from a between-participants experiment involving three groups of participants exposed to visual onsets during a visual search task. In two groups, onsets appeared at a single location with a high 60% rate or a low 15% rate, respectively, whereas in a third group, distractors could appear in four distinct locations with the same 15% local rate, leading to a 60% global rate. Our results confirmed that locally, habituation of capture was stronger the higher the distractors rate. However, the key finding was that we found a clear and robust modulation of the global distractors rate on the local habituation level. Taken together, our results unambiguously show that habituation has both a spatially selective and a spatially nonselective nature.

Ignoring visual distractors: Habituation to onsets is driven by time-based expectation.

An increasing bulk of evidence shows that through different mechanisms, experienced-based or voluntary, reactive or proactive, human beings can attenuate the distracting impact of salient visual, albeit irrelevant, stimuli. Current mechanisms assume that this is achieved by suppressing the salient distractor's features or location at the priority map level, or at lower dimension-based maps levels. However, this functional architecture has so far ignored the role of time in distractors filtering, a key question that we have addressed in the present study. We found that during a visual discrimination task, a "standard" onset distractor, always appearing at the same interval from the beginning of the trial, was subject to habituation. Crucially, however, when the onset distractor was unfrequently presented with an unexpected 1-second delay, it reboosted capture at full strength, while the "standard" distractor continued to remain overall habituated. As predicted by Sokolov's (1963, Annual Review of Physiology, 25[1], 545-580) theory, our results show that habituation mechanisms filter the irrelevant distracting sensory input also on the basis of its temporal parameters. We conclude that habituation to onsets is controlled also by time-based expectation mechanisms and suggest that more recently proposed theories of distractors filtering should also incorporate the temporal parameter among the factors that allow an efficient handling of visual distraction.

Testing reward-cue attentional salience: Attainment and dynamic changes.

A great wealth of studies has investigated the capacity of motivationally relevant stimuli to bias attention, suggesting that reward predicting cues are prioritized even when reward is no longer delivered and when attending to such stimuli is detrimental to reward achievement. Despite multiple procedures have been adopted to unveil the mechanisms whereby reward cues gain attentional salience, some open questions remain. Indeed, mechanisms different from motivation can be responsible for the capture of attention triggered by the reward cue. In addition, we note that at present only a few studies have sought to address whether the cue attractiveness dynamically follows changes in the associated reward value. Investigating how and to what extent the salience of the reward cue is updated when motivation changes, could help shedding light on how reward-cues attain and maintain their capacity to attract attention, and therefore on apparent irrational attentive behaviors.

On the resilience of reward cues attentional salience to reward devaluation, time, incentive learning, and contingency remapping.

Previous evidence has shown that after conditioning reward cues may continue to grab attention even when the paired reward is devalued, thus triggering an irrational attentional capture. Here, we investigated whether such persistent cue attentional salience, once established, can be abolished. In Experiment 1, we first confirmed that the cue attentional salience outlasted reward devaluation, and then we found that such persistent capture did not change after an incentive-learning procedure with a devalued reward. In Experiment 2, we showed that the reward cue salience remained unaltered after reward devaluation for at least 1 week. In Experiment 3, we finally succeeded in modifying the cue attentional salience when a new contingency between the cue and the reward was learned, and the reward was not devalued, such that the organism was in a high motivational state. The pattern of results emerging from our study reveals a complex interaction between attention, learning, and motivation, and may help shedding light on the learning mechanisms underlying addiction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Slow and fast beat sequences are represented differently through space.

The Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) suggests the existence of an association between number magnitude and response position, with faster left-hand responses to small numbers and faster right-hand responses to large numbers. Recent studies have revealed similar spatial association effects for non-numerical magnitudes, such as temporal durations and musical stimuli. In the present study we investigated whether a spatial association effect exists between music tempo, expressed in beats per minutes (bpm), and response position. In particular, we were interested in whether this effect is consistent through different bpm ranges. We asked participants to judge whether a target beat sequence was faster or slower than a reference sequence. Three groups of participants judged beat sequences from three different bpm ranges, a wide range (40, 80, 160, 200 bpm) and two narrow ranges ("slow" tempo, 40, 56, 88, 104 bpm; "fast" tempo 133, 150, 184, 201 bpm). Results showed a clear SNARC-like effect for music tempo only in the narrow "fast" tempo range, with faster left-hand responses to 133 and 150 bpm and faster right-hand responses to 184 and 201 bpm. Conversely, a similar association did not emerge in the wide nor in the narrow "slow" tempo ranges. This evidence suggests that music tempo is spatially represented as other continuous quantities, but its representation might be narrowed to a particular range of tempos. Moreover, music tempo and temporal duration might be represented across space with an opposite direction.

Multiple reward-cue contingencies favor expectancy over uncertainty in shaping the reward-cue attentional salience.

Reward-predicting cues attract attention because of their motivational value. A debated question regards the conditions under which the cue's attentional salience is governed more by reward expectancy rather than by reward uncertainty. To help shedding light on this relevant issue, here, we manipulated expectancy and uncertainty using three levels of reward-cue contingency, so that, for example, a high level of reward expectancy (p = .8) was compared with the highest level of reward uncertainty (p = .5). In Experiment 1, the best reward-cue during conditioning was preferentially attended in a subsequent visual search task. This result was replicated in Experiment 2, in which the cues were matched in terms of response history. In Experiment 3, we implemented a hybrid procedure consisting of two phases: an omission contingency procedure during conditioning, followed by a visual search task as in the previous experiments. Crucially, during both phases, the reward-cues were never task relevant. Results confirmed that, when multiple reward-cue contingencies are explored by a human observer, expectancy is the major factor controlling both the attentional and the oculomotor salience of the reward-cue.

Naïve 3-day-old domestic chicks (Gallus gallus) are attracted to discrete acoustic patterns characterizing natural vocalizations.

Nonsongbirds can produce rhythmical sounds that, at times, have been shown to be meaningful in their communication. This raises the possibility that rhythm is a separate ability that might have evolved earlier than song. We asked whether nearly completely naïve domestic chicks perceive rhythm and respond in specific ways to different rhythmic patterns. To do so, specific constituent parameters of rhythmicity were used based on the sound of a natural mother hen's cluck. The sound samples created ranged from a continuous sound to articulated rhythmic patterns of alternating strong and weak events. Chicks' reactivity to the patterns was tested over a series of sound exposure experiments by their propensity to operate a running wheel toward the acoustic source, a paradigm simulating chicks' natural affiliative response to the hen's call. Results showed that motor activity increased markedly when acoustic events were discrete (compared with continuous), and significantly when accent structure was faster (compared with slower rates). Similar to human infants, chicks showed a significant preference for pulsed over continuous patterns. Chicks also ran harder toward calls with fast strong pulsating events, suggesting that different arrangements of events in time can be differently arousing, but independently of whether the events were presented in a regular or nonregular fashion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The salience of a reward cue can outlast reward devaluation.

Reward cues can be perceived as highly attractive stimuli because of their acquired motivational properties. However, because the motivational value of reward changes after reward receipt, a debated question is whether the attentional salience of reward cues changes accordingly. In Experiment 1, thirsty participants learned 3 cue-reward associations involving different contingencies. Then, while thirsty, participants performed a visual-search task under extinction, during which the previous reward cues appeared as irrelevant stimuli containing target and distractor items. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except that participants drank ad libitum before the visual-search task. In Experiment 3, instead, participants quenched their thirst at the beginning of the learning session. The results of Experiment 1 showed that attention was preferentially deployed toward the cue that best predicted the reward in the previous conditioning phase. Crucially, Experiment 2 revealed that the attentional bias persisted despite reward devaluation. By contrast, no attentional bias was found in Experiment 3. The novelty of our study is that the attentional salience of a reward cue can outlast reward devaluation, suggesting that some incentive properties of the cue can become independent from those of the reward. (PsycINFO Database Record

Octave Bias in Pitch Perception: The Influence of Pitch Height on Pitch Class Identification.

Pitch height and pitch class are different, but strictly related, percepts of music tones. To investigate the influence of pitch height in a pitch class identification task, we systematically analyzed the errors-in terms of direction and amount-committed by a group of musicians. The aim of our study was to verify the existence of constant errors in the identification of pitch classes across consecutive octaves. Stimuli were single piano tones from the C major scale executed in two consecutive octaves. Participants showed different response patterns in the two octaves. The direction of errors revealed a constant tendency to underestimate pitch classes in the lowest octave and to overestimate pitch classes in the highest octave. Thus, pitch height showed to influence pitch class identification. We called this bias "pitch class polarization", since the same pitch class was judged to be respectively lower and higher, depending on relatively low or high pitch height.

Separate mechanisms for magnitude and order processing in the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect: The strange case of musical note values.

The spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect is considered an evidence of the association between numbers and space, with faster left key-press responses to small numbers and faster right key-press responses to large numbers. We examined whether visually presented note values produce a SNARC-like effect. Differently from numbers, note values are represented as a decreasing left-to-right progression, allowing us to disambiguate the contribution of order and magnitude in determining the direction of the effect. Musicians with formal education performed a note value comparison in Experiment 1 (direct task), a line orientation judgment in Experiment 2 (indirect task), and a detection task in Experiment 3 (indirect task). When note values were task relevant (direct task), participants responded faster to large note values with the left key-press, and vice versa. Conversely, when note values were task irrelevant (indirect tasks), the direction of this association was reversed. This evidence suggests the existence of separate mechanisms underlying the SNARC effect. Namely, an Order-Related Mechanism (ORM) and a Magnitude-Related Mechanism (MRM) that are revealed by different task demands. Indeed, according to a new model we proposed, ordinal and magnitude related information appears to be preferentially involved in direct and indirect tasks, respectively. (PsycINFO Database Record