Attention capture by own name decreases with speech compression.

Auditory stimuli that are relevant to a listener have the potential to capture focal attention even when unattended, the listener's own name being a particularly effective stimulus. We report two experiments to test the attention-capturing potential of the listener's own name in normal speech and time-compressed speech. In Experiment 1, 39 participants were tested with a visual word categorization task with uncompressed spoken names as background auditory distractors. Participants' word categorization performance was slower when hearing their own name rather than other names, and in a final test, they were faster at detecting their own name than other names. Experiment 2 used the same task paradigm, but the auditory distractors were time-compressed names. Three compression levels were tested with 25 participants in each condition. Participants' word categorization performance was again slower when hearing their own name than when hearing other names; the slowing was strongest with slight compression and weakest with intense compression. Personally relevant time-compressed speech has the potential to capture attention, but the degree of capture depends on the level of compression. Attention capture by time-compressed speech has practical significance and provides partial evidence for the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction.

Metacognitive bias resulting from trade-off between local and global motion signals.

Visual confidence generally depends on performance in targeted perceptual tasks. However, it remains unclear how factors unrelated to performance affect confidence. Given the hierarchical nature of visual processing, both local and global stimulus features can influence confidence, but their strengths of influence remain unknown. To address this question, we independently manipulated the local contrast signals and the global coherence signals in a multiple-aperture motion pattern. The drifting-Gabor elements were individually manipulated to give rise to a coherent global motion percept. In both dichotomous direction-discrimination task (Experiment 1) and analog direction-judgment task (Experiment 2), we found stimulus-dependent biases in metacognition despite matched perceptual performance. Specifically, participants systematically gave higher confidence ratings to an incoherent pattern with clear elements (i.e., strong local but weak global signals) than a coherent pattern with noisy elements (i.e., weak local but strong global signals). We did not find any systematic effects of local/global stimulus features on metacognitive sensitivity. Model comparisons show that variation in local/global signals in the stimulus should be considered a factor influencing confidence, even after controlling for the effects of performance. Our results suggest that the metacognitive system, when generating confidence for a perceptual task, puts more weights on local than global signals.

Face masks are less effective than sunglasses in masking face identity.

The effect of covering faces on face identification is recently garnering interest amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we investigated how face identification performance was affected by two types of face disguise: sunglasses and face masks. Observers studied a series of faces; then judged whether a series of test faces, comprising studied and novel faces, had been studied before or not. Face stimuli were presented either without coverings (full faces), wearing sunglasses covering the upper region (eyes, eyebrows), or wearing surgical masks covering the lower region (nose, mouth, chin). We found that sunglasses led to larger reductions in sensitivity (d') to face identity than face masks did, while both disguises increased the tendency to report faces as studied before, a bias that was absent for full faces. In addition, faces disguised during either study or test only (i.e. study disguised faces, test with full faces; and vice versa) led to further reductions in sensitivity from both studying and testing with disguised faces, suggesting that congruence between study and test is crucial for memory retrieval. These findings implied that the upper region of the face, including the eye-region features, is more diagnostic for holistic face-identity processing than the lower face region.

Consensus Goals in the Field of Visual Metacognition.

Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, these disciplines still trail other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across different laboratories, faster progress, and increased focus on solving important problems rather than pursuing isolated, niche efforts. Here, 26 researchers from the field of visual metacognition reached consensus on four long-term and two medium-term common goals. We describe the process that we followed, the goals themselves, and our plans for accomplishing these goals. If this effort proves successful within the next few years, such consensus building around common goals could be adopted more widely in psychological science.

A bibliometric evaluation of the impact of theories of consciousness in academia and on social media.

Consciousness science has faced both opportunities and challenges in recent years. Some popular theories of consciousness have been described as unfalsifiable and some as "overpromoted". To objectively evaluate the state of consciousness science as a field, we analyzed bibliometric data for five major theories of consciousness: Global workspace (GWT), Higher-order (HOT), Integrated information (IIT), Local recurrent (LRT), and Quantum theories (QT). We analyzed academic publications, citations, and Twitter activity for each theory. We found that IIT had the highest growth rates in quantity metrics (e.g. publication and citation counts) but was worse in quality metrics (e.g., per-publication citations, proportion of citations with empirical support/contradiction). On social media, IIT and QT were the most-tweeted theories, but their tweets mostly came from the general public. Our findings suggest that a theory's fast growth in quantity and lack of quality could be explained by its overpromotion on social media.

Incongruence in Lighting Impairs Face Identification.

The effect of uniform lighting on face identity processing is little understood, despite its potential influence on our ability to recognize faces. Here, we investigated how changes in uniform lighting level affected face identification performance during face memory tests. Observers were tasked with learning a series of faces, followed by a memory test where observers judged whether the faces presented were studied before or novel. Face stimuli were presented under uniform bright or dim illuminations, and lighting across the face learning and the memory test sessions could be the same ("congruent") or different ("incongruent"). This led to four experimental conditions: (1) Bright/Dim (learning bright faces, testing on dim faces); (2) Bright/Bright; (3) Dim/Bright; and (4) Dim/Dim. Our results revealed that incongruent lighting levels across sessions (Bright/Dim and Dim/Bright) significantly reduced sensitivity (d') to faces and introduced conservative biases compared to congruent lighting levels (Bright/Bright and Dim/Dim). No significant differences in performance were detected between the congruent lighting conditions (Bright/Bright vs. Dim/Dim) and between the incongruent lighting conditions (Bright/Dim vs. Dim/Bright). Thus, incongruent lighting deteriorated performance in face identification. These findings implied that the level of uniform lighting should be considered in an illumination-specific face representation and potential applications such as eyewitness testimony.

The roles of gaze and head orientation in face categorization during rapid serial visual presentation.

Little is known about how perceived gaze direction and head orientation may influence human categorization of visual stimuli as faces. To address this question, a sequence of unsegmented natural images, each containing a random face or a non-face object, was presented in rapid succession (stimulus duration: 91.7 ms per image) during which human observers were instructed to respond immediately to every face presentation. Faces differed in gaze and head orientation in 7 combinations - full-front views with perceived gaze (1) directed to the observer, (2) averted to the left, or (3) averted to the right, left ¾ side views with (4) direct gaze or (5) averted gaze, and right ¾ side views with (6) direct gaze or (7) averted gaze - were presented randomly throughout the sequence. We found highly accurate and rapid behavioural responses to all kinds of faces. Crucially, both perceived gaze direction and head orientation had comparable, non-interactive effects on response times, where direct gaze was responded faster than averted gaze by 48 ms and full-front view faster than ¾ side view also by 48 ms on average. Presentations of full-front faces with direct gaze led to an additive speed advantage of 96 ms to ¾ faces with averted gaze. The results reveal that the effects of perceived gaze direction and head orientation on the speed of face categorization probably depend on the degree of social relevance of the face to the viewer.

Global visual confidence.

Visual confidence is the observers' estimate of their precision in one single perceptual decision. Ultimately, however, observers often need to judge their confidence over a task in general rather than merely on one single decision. Here, we measured the global confidence acquired across multiple perceptual decisions. Participants performed a dual task on two series of oriented stimuli. The perceptual task was an orientation-discrimination judgment. The metacognitive task was a global confidence judgment: observers chose the series for which they felt they had performed better in the perceptual task. We found that choice accuracy in global confidence judgments improved as the number of items in the series increased, regardless of whether the global confidence judgment was made before (prospective) or after (retrospective) the perceptual decisions. This result is evidence that global confidence judgment was based on an integration of confidence information across multiple perceptual decisions rather than on a single one. Furthermore, we found a tendency for global confidence choices to be influenced by response times, and more so for recent perceptual decisions than earlier ones in the series of stimuli. Using model comparison, we found that global confidence is well described as a combination of noisy estimates of sensory evidence and position-weighted response-time evidence. In summary, humans can integrate information across multiple decisions to estimate global confidence, but this integration is not optimal, in particular because of biases in the use of response-time information.

Parts beget parts: Bootstrapping hierarchical object representations through visual statistical learning.

Previous research has shown that humans are able to acquire statistical regularities among shape parts that form various spatial configurations, via exposure to these configurations without any task or feedback. The present study extends this approach of visual statistical learning to examine whether prior knowledge of parts, acquired in a separate learning context, facilitates acquisition of multi-layer hierarchical representations of objects. After participants had learned to encode a shape-pair as a chunk into memory, they viewed cluttered scenes containing multiple shape chunks. One of the larger configurations was constructed by combining the learned shape-pair with an unfamiliar, complementary shape-pair. Although the complementary shape-pair had never been presented separately during learning, it was remembered better than other shape pairs that were parts of larger configurations. The greater perceived familiarity of the complementary shape-pair depended on the encoding strength of the previously learned shape-pair. This "parts-beget-parts" effect suggests that statistical learning, in combination with prior knowledge, can represent objects as a coherent whole and also as a spatial configuration of parts by bootstrapping multi-layer hierarchical structures.

The Confidence Database.

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analysed using multiple software packages. Each dataset is accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the Confidence Database (which is available at https://osf.io/s46pr/) contained 145 datasets with data from more than 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. Here we show the usefulness of this large collection of datasets in four different analyses that provide precise estimations of several foundational confidence-related effects.

Cross-Domain Association in Metacognitive Efficiency Depends on First-Order Task Types.

An important yet unresolved question is whether or not metacognition consists of domain-general or domain-specific mechanisms. While most studies on this topic suggest a dissociation between metacognitive abilities at the neural level, there are inconsistent reports at the behavioral level. Specifically, while McCurdy et al. (2013) found a positive correlation between metacognitive efficiency for visual perception and memory, such correlation was not observed in Baird et al. (2013). One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that the former included two-alternative-forced choice (2AFC) judgments in both their visual and memory tasks, whereas the latter used 2AFC for one task and yes/no (YN) judgments for the other. To test the effect of task on cross-domain association in metacognitive efficiency, we conducted two online experiments to mirror McCurdy et al. (2013) and Baird et al. (2013) with considerable statistical power (n = 100), and replicated the main findings of both studies. The results suggest that the use of task could affect cross-domain association in metacognitive efficiency. In the third experiment with the same sample size, we used YN judgments for both tasks and did not find a significant cross-domain correlation in metacognitive efficiency. This suggests that the cross-domain correlation found in McCurdy et al. (2013) was not simply due to the same task being used for both domains, and the absence of cross-domain correlation in Baird et al. (2013) might be due to the use of YN judgments. Our results highlight the importance of avoiding confusion between 2AFC and YN judgments in behavioral tasks for metacognitive research, which is a common problem in many behavioral studies.

An Informal Internet Survey on the Current State of Consciousness Science.

The scientific study of consciousness emerged as an organized field of research only a few decades ago. As empirical results have begun to enhance our understanding of consciousness, it is important to find out whether other factors, such as funding for consciousness research and status of consciousness scientists, provide a suitable environment for the field to grow and develop sustainably. We conducted an online survey on people's views regarding various aspects of the scientific study of consciousness as a field of research. 249 participants completed the survey, among which 80% were in academia, and around 40% were experts in consciousness research. Topics covered include the progress made by the field, funding for consciousness research, job opportunities for consciousness researchers, and the scientific rigor of the work done by researchers in the field. The majority of respondents (78%) indicated that scientific research on consciousness has been making progress. However, most participants perceived obtaining funding and getting a job in the field of consciousness research as more difficult than in other subfields of neuroscience. Overall, work done in consciousness research was perceived to be less rigorous than other neuroscience subfields, but this perceived lack of rigor was not related to the perceived difficulty in finding jobs and obtaining funding. Lastly, we found that, overall, the global workspace theory was perceived to be the most promising (around 28%), while most non-expert researchers (around 22% of non-experts) found the integrated information theory (IIT) most promising. We believe the survey results provide an interesting picture of current opinions from scientists and researchers about the progresses made and the challenges faced by consciousness research as an independent field. They will inspire collective reflection on the future directions regarding funding and job opportunities for the field.

The contribution of local and global motion adaptation in the repulsive direction aftereffect.

After adapting to a certain motion direction, our perception of a similar direction will be repelled away from the adapting direction, a phenomenon known as the direction aftereffect (DAE). As the motion system consists of local and global processing stages, it remains unclear how the adaptation of the two stages contributes in producing the DAE. The present study addresses this question by independently inducing adaptation at local and global motion-processing levels. Local adaptation was manipulated by presenting test stimuli at either adapted or nonadapted locations. Global adaptation was manipulated by embedding one or five global motion directions in the adapting motion. Repulsive DAE, when measured using a multiple-element test pattern, was stronger when it was produced by global adaptation than when produced by local adaptation. Specifically, the DAE resulting from local adaptation (a) decreased when test orientations differed from adapting orientation, (b) decreased when local directions were disambiguated using plaid stimuli, (c) remained the same even when attention was focused at specific test locations during adaptation, and (d) increased when tested with a single element. Overall, these findings suggest that the strength of repulsive DAE depends on both the motion-processing level at which adaptation occurs and the level at which the DAE was tested. Furthermore, the repulsive DAE arising from local adaptation alone can be explained by the propagation of local speed repulsion instead of local direction repulsion. Findings are discussed in the context of how motion aftereffects arise from the adaptation of a hierarchical motion system.

Global-motion aftereffect does not depend on awareness of the adapting motion direction.

It has been shown that humans cannot perceive more than three directions from a multidirectional motion stimulus. However, it remains unknown whether adapting to such imperceptible motion directions could generate motion aftereffects (MAEs). A series of psychophysical experiments were conducted to address this issue. Using a display consisting of randomly oriented Gabors, we replicated previous findings that observers were unable to perceive the global directions embedded in a five-direction motion pattern. However, adapting to this multidirectional pattern induced both static and dynamic MAEs, despite the fact that observers were unaware of any global motion directions during adaptation. Furthermore, by comparing the strengths of the dynamic MAEs induced at different levels of motion processing, we found that spatial integration of local illusory signals per se was sufficient to produce a significant global MAE. These psychophysical results show that the generation of a directional global MAE does not require conscious perception of the global motion during adaptation.

Two forms of aftereffects induced by transparent motion reveal multilevel adaptation.

Visual adaptation produces remarkable perceptual aftereffects. However, it remains unclear what basic neural mechanisms underlie visual adaptation and how these adaptation-induced neural changes are related to perceptual aftereffects. To address these questions, we examined transparent motion adaptation and traced the effects of adaptation through the motion processing hierarchy. We found that, after adapting to a bidirectional transparent motion display, observers perceived two radically different motion aftereffects (MAEs): segregated and integrated MAEs, depending on testing locations. The segregated MAE yielded an aftereffect opposite to one of the adapting directions in the transparent motion stimulus. Our results revealed that the segregated MAE relies on the integration of local adaptation effects. In contrast, the integrated MAE yielded an aftereffect opposite to the average of the adapting directions. We found that integrated MAE was dominant at non-adapted locations but was reduced when local adaptation effects were weakened. These results suggest that integrated MAE is elicited by a combination of two mechanisms: adaptation-induced changes at a high-level processing stage and integration of local adaptation effects. We conclude that distinct perceptual aftereffects can be observed due to adaptation-induced neural changes at different processing levels, supporting the general hypothesis of multilevel adaptation in the visual hierarchy.

A comparison of global motion perception using a multiple-aperture stimulus.

The human visual system integrates local motion signals to generate globally coherent motion percepts. However, it is unclear whether the perception of different types of global motion relies on a common motion integration mechanism. Using the multiple-aperture stimulus developed by K. Amano, M. Edwards, D. R. Badcock, and S. Nishida (2009), we compared the motion sensitivity (in terms of coherence threshold) for translational, circular, and radial motion. We found greater motion sensitivity for the two complex (circular and radial) motion types than for translational motion, implying that specific motion integration mechanisms are involved in the computation for different motion types. Our results reveal a "complexity advantage" in perceiving motion, which is consistent with physiological and computational evidence suggesting that specific mechanisms exist for processing complex circular/radial motion. We further examined the contributions of several critical factors that influence human global motion sensitivity. We found that human sensitivity for all motion types remained constant across a range of motion sampling density but varied depending on global speed. The minimum stimulus duration required for observers to reach constant sensitivity was found to be short ( approximately 140 ms) for all motion types.