Stimulus-locked auditory information facilitates real-time visuo-motor sequence learning.

Prior research investigating whether and how multisensory information facilitates skill learning is quite mixed; whereas some research points to congruent information improving learning, other work suggests that people become reliant on the redundant information, such that its removal ultimately detracts from the ability to perform a unisensory task. We examined this question using the Serial Interception Sequence Learning (SISL) task, a visuo-motor paradigm in which participants implicitly learn a sequence embedded in noise. We investigated whether adding auditory information in different ways would enhance real time sequence learning and whether any benefits of multisensory learning would persist with visual-only testing. Auditory information was used either as feedback on the visuo-motor task (Experiments 1 and 2) or was presented synchronously with visual information during learning (Experiment 3). Robust sequence-specific performance advantages occurred across conditions and experiments; however, auditory information enhanced real-time performance only when it was synchronized with visual information. Participants were significantly more accurate, faster, and more precise with stimulus-locked auditory information during training. Notably, these benefits did not generalize to the visual-only context, suggesting that the benefits of stimulus-locked auditory information are primarily useful only when the perceptual information is present.

The Psychological Science Accelerator's COVID-19 rapid-response dataset.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures for each experimental study, a general questionnaire examining health prevention behaviors and COVID-19 experience, geographical and cultural context characterization, and demographic information for each participant. Each participant started the study with the same general questions and then was randomized to complete either one longer experiment or two shorter experiments. Data were provided by 73,223 participants with varying completion rates. Participants completed the survey from 111 geopolitical regions in 44 unique languages/dialects. The anonymized dataset described here is provided in both raw and processed formats to facilitate re-use and further analyses. The dataset offers secondary analytic opportunities to explore coping, framing, and self-determination across a diverse, global sample obtained at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can be merged with other time-sampled or geographic data.

A multi-lab test of the facial feedback hypothesis by the Many Smiles Collaboration.

Following theories of emotional embodiment, the facial feedback hypothesis suggests that individuals' subjective experiences of emotion are influenced by their facial expressions. However, evidence for this hypothesis has been mixed. We thus formed a global adversarial collaboration and carried out a preregistered, multicentre study designed to specify and test the conditions that should most reliably produce facial feedback effects. Data from n = 3,878 participants spanning 19 countries indicated that a facial mimicry and voluntary facial action task could both amplify and initiate feelings of happiness. However, evidence of facial feedback effects was less conclusive when facial feedback was manipulated unobtrusively via a pen-in-mouth task.

Mask wearing affects emotion perception.

To reduce the spread of COVID-19, mask wearing has become ubiquitous in much of the world. We studied the extent to which masks impair emotion recognition and dampen the perceived intensity of facial expressions by naturalistically inducing positive, neutral, and negative emotions in individuals while they were masked and unmasked. Two groups of online participants rated the emotional intensity of each presented image. One group rated full faces (N=104); the other (N=102) rated cropped images where only the upper face was visible. We found that masks impaired the recognition of and rated intensity of positive emotions. This happened even when the faces were cropped and the lower part of the face was not visible. Masks may thus reduce positive emotion and/or expressivity of positive emotion. However, perception of negativity was unaffected by masking, perhaps because unlike positive emotions like happiness which are signaled more in the mouth, negative emotions like anger rely more on the upper face.

Delivering the Multisensory Experience of Dining-Out, for Those Dining-In, During the Covid Pandemic.

In many parts of the world, restaurants have been forced to close in unprecedented numbers during the various Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns that have paralyzed the hospitality industry globally. This highly-challenging operating environment has led to a rapid expansion in the number of high-end restaurants offering take-away food, or home-delivery meal kits, simply in order to survive. While the market for the home delivery of food was already expanding rapidly prior to the emergence of the Covid pandemic, the explosive recent growth seen in this sector has thrown up some intriguing issues and challenges. For instance, concerns have been raised over where many of the meals that are being delivered are being prepared, given the rise of so-called "dark kitchens." Furthermore, figuring out which elements of the high-end, fine-dining experience, and of the increasingly-popular multisensory experiential dining, can be captured by those diners who may be eating and drinking in the comfort of their own homes represents an intriguing challenge for the emerging field of gastrophysics research; one that the chefs, restaurateurs, restaurant groups, and even the food delivery companies concerned are only just beginning to get to grips with. By analyzing a number of the high-end fine-dining home food delivery options that have been offered (in the UK and in the US) in this narrative review, we highlight a number of promising directions for those wanting to optimize the at-home multisensory dining experience, wherever in the world they might be.

Explaining Crossmodal Correspondences Between Colours and Tastes.

For centuries, if not millennia, people have associated the basic tastes (e.g., sweet, bitter, salty, and sour) with specific colours. While the range of tastes may have changed, and the reasons for wanting to connect the senses in this rather surprising way have undoubtedly differed, there would nevertheless appear to be a surprisingly high degree of consistency regarding this crossmodal mapping among non-synaesthetes that merits further consideration. Traditionally, colour-taste correspondences have often been considered together with odour-colour and flavour-colour correspondences. However, the explanation for these various correspondences with the chemical senses may turn out to be qualitatively different, given the presence of identifiable source objects in the case of food aromas/flavours, but not necessarily in the case of basic tastes. While the internalization of the crossmodal statistics of the environment provides one appealing account for the existence of colour-taste correspondences, emotional mediation may also be relevant. Ultimately, while explaining colour-taste correspondences is of both theoretical and historical interest, the growing awareness of the robustness of colour-taste correspondences would currently seem to be of particular relevance to those working in the fields of design and multisensory experiential marketing.

Multisensory processing of facial expressions in binocular rivalry.

Binocular rivalry occurs when two percepts, each presented to a single eye, compete for perceptual dominance. Across two experiments, we investigated whether emotional music influenced perceptual dominance of an emotionally congruent face. In the first experiment, participants heard music (happy, threatening, none) while viewing a positive or negative emotional face pitted against a neutral face or emotional faces pitted against each other. Several key findings emerged. As expected, emotional faces significantly dominated over neutral faces, irrespective of music. For emotional face pairings, negative faces were predominantly reported as initial percepts. Interestingly, this negativity bias was transient and did not persist for the duration of the trial. Rather, positive faces dominated perception throughout trials. Moreover, emotional music affected rivalry dynamics such that congruent music drove attention toward congruent emotional percepts and incongruent music suppressed incongruent percepts. In a second experiment with the same group of participants, we investigated whether explicit attention modulated binocular rivalry of emotional faces. We demonstrated that attention affected both initial and sustained percepts by suppressing automatic emotional biases and stabilizing attention-congruent expressions. Together, our results demonstrate the importance of investigating multisensory expression perception in transient and sustained contexts, the role of emotion as a mediator of sensory integration across perceptual modalities, and the influence of attention on emotional competition in binocular rivalry. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

What you saw is what you will hear: Two new illusions with audiovisual postdictive effects.

Neuroscience investigations are most often focused on the prediction of future perception or decisions based on prior brain states or stimulus presentations. However, the brain can also process information retroactively, such that later stimuli impact conscious percepts of the stimuli that have already occurred (called "postdiction"). Postdictive effects have thus far been mostly unimodal (such as apparent motion), and the models for postdiction have accordingly been limited to early sensory regions of one modality. We have discovered two related multimodal illusions in which audition instigates postdictive changes in visual perception. In the first illusion (called the "Illusory Audiovisual Rabbit"), the location of an illusory flash is influenced by an auditory beep-flash pair that follows the perceived illusory flash. In the second illusion (called the "Invisible Audiovisual Rabbit"), a beep-flash pair following a real flash suppresses the perception of the earlier flash. Thus, we showed experimentally that these two effects are influenced significantly by postdiction. The audiovisual rabbit illusions indicate that postdiction can bridge the senses, uncovering a relatively-neglected yet critical type of neural processing underlying perceptual awareness. Furthermore, these two new illusions broaden the Double Flash Illusion, in which a single real flash is doubled by two sounds. Whereas the double flash indicated that audition can create an illusory flash, these rabbit illusions expand audition's influence on vision to the suppression of a real flash and the relocation of an illusory flash. These new additions to auditory-visual interactions indicate a spatio-temporally fine-tuned coupling of the senses to generate perception.

The Psychological Science Accelerator: Advancing Psychology through a Distributed Collaborative Network.

Concerns have been growing about the veracity of psychological research. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which one or more research projects are conducted across multiple lab sites, offers a pragmatic solution to these and other current methodological challenges. The Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) is a distributed network of laboratories designed to enable and support crowdsourced research projects. These projects can focus on novel research questions, or attempt to replicate prior research, in large, diverse samples. The PSA's mission is to accelerate the accumulation of reliable and generalizable evidence in psychological science. Here, we describe the background, structure, principles, procedures, benefits, and challenges of the PSA. In contrast to other crowdsourced research networks, the PSA is ongoing (as opposed to time-limited), efficient (in terms of re-using structures and principles for different projects), decentralized, diverse (in terms of participants and researchers), and inclusive (of proposals, contributions, and other relevant input from anyone inside or outside of the network). The PSA and other approaches to crowdsourced psychological science will advance our understanding of mental processes and behaviors by enabling rigorous research and systematically examining its generalizability.

A single mechanism account of duration and rate processing via the pacemaker-accumulator and beat frequency models.

Time is an essential dimension of our environment that allows us to extract meaningful information about speed of movement, speech, motor actions and fine motor control. Traditionally, models of time have tried to quantify how the brain might process the duration of an event. The most commonly cited are the pacemaker-accumulator model and the beat frequency model of interval timing, which explain how duration is perceived, represented and encoded. Here we posit such models as providing a powerful tool for simultaneously extracting, representing and encoding stimulus rate information. That is, any model that can process duration has all the information needed to code stimulus rate. We explore different processing strategies which would enable rate to be read off from both the pacemaker-accumulator and beat frequency model of interval timing. Finally we explore open questions that, when answered, will shed light upon potential mechanisms for duration and rate estimation.

Response to Comment on "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science".

Gilbert et al. conclude that evidence from the Open Science Collaboration's Reproducibility Project: Psychology indicates high reproducibility, given the study methodology. Their very optimistic assessment is limited by statistical misconceptions and by causal inferences from selectively interpreted, correlational data. Using the Reproducibility Project: Psychology data, both optimistic and pessimistic conclusions about reproducibility are possible, and neither are yet warranted.

What's that smell? An ecological approach to understanding preferences for familiar odors.

How do odor preferences arise? Following Palmer and Schloss's (2010, PNAS, 107, 8877-8882) ecological valence theory of color preferences, we propose that preference for an odor is determined by preferences for all objects and/or entities associated with that odor. The present results showed that preferences for familiar odors were strongly predicted by average preferences for all things associated with the odors (eg people liked the apple odor which was associated with mostly positive things, such as apples, soap, and candy, but disliked the fish odor, which was associated with mostly negative things, such as dead fish, trash, and vomit). The odor WAVEs (weighted affective valence estimates) performed significantly better than one based on preference for only the namesake object (eg predicting preference for the apple odor based on preference for apples). These results suggest that preferences for familiar odors are based on a summary statistic, coding the valence of previous odor-related experiences. We discuss how this account of odor preferences is consistent with the idea that odor preferences exist to guide organisms to approach beneficial objects and situations and avoid harmful ones.

Conducting perception research over the internet: a tutorial review.

This article provides an overview of the recent literature on the use of internet-based testing to address important questions in perception research. Our goal is to provide a starting point for the perception researcher who is keen on assessing this tool for their own research goals. Internet-based testing has several advantages over in-lab research, including the ability to reach a relatively broad set of participants and to quickly and inexpensively collect large amounts of empirical data, via services such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk or Prolific Academic. In many cases, the quality of online data appears to match that collected in lab research. Generally-speaking, online participants tend to be more representative of the population at large than those recruited for lab based research. There are, though, some important caveats, when it comes to collecting data online. It is obviously much more difficult to control the exact parameters of stimulus presentation (such as display characteristics) with online research. There are also some thorny ethical elements that need to be considered by experimenters. Strengths and weaknesses of the online approach, relative to others, are highlighted, and recommendations made for those researchers who might be thinking about conducting their own studies using this increasingly-popular approach to research in the psychological sciences.

Rate perception adapts across the senses: evidence for a unified timing mechanism.

The brain constructs a representation of temporal properties of events, such as duration and frequency, but the underlying neural mechanisms are under debate. One open question is whether these mechanisms are unisensory or multisensory. Duration perception studies provide some evidence for a dissociation between auditory and visual timing mechanisms; however, we found active crossmodal interaction between audition and vision for rate perception, even when vision and audition were never stimulated together. After exposure to 5 Hz adaptors, people perceived subsequent test stimuli centered around 4 Hz to be slower, and the reverse after exposure to 3 Hz adaptors. This aftereffect occurred even when the adaptor and test were different modalities that were never presented together. When the discrepancy in rate between adaptor and test increased, the aftereffect was attenuated, indicating that the brain uses narrowly-tuned channels to process rate information. Our results indicate that human timing mechanisms for rate perception are not entirely segregated between modalities and have substantial implications for models of how the brain encodes temporal features. We propose a model of multisensory channels for rate perception, and consider the broader implications of such a model for how the brain encodes timing.

Cross-cultural color-odor associations.

Colors and odors are associated; for instance, people typically match the smell of strawberries to the color pink or red. These associations are forms of crossmodal correspondences. Recently, there has been discussion about the extent to which these correspondences arise for structural reasons (i.e., an inherent mapping between color and odor), statistical reasons (i.e., covariance in experience), and/or semantically-mediated reasons (i.e., stemming from language). The present study probed this question by testing color-odor correspondences in 6 different cultural groups (Dutch, Netherlands-residing-Chinese, German, Malay, Malaysian-Chinese, and US residents), using the same set of 14 odors and asking participants to make congruent and incongruent color choices for each odor. We found consistent patterns in color choices for each odor within each culture, showing that participants were making non-random color-odor matches. We used representational dissimilarity analysis to probe for variations in the patterns of color-odor associations across cultures; we found that US and German participants had the most similar patterns of associations, followed by German and Malay participants. The largest group differences were between Malay and Netherlands-resident Chinese participants and between Dutch and Malaysian-Chinese participants. We conclude that culture plays a role in color-odor crossmodal associations, which likely arise, at least in part, through experience.

Red hot: the crossmodal effect of color intensity on perceived piquancy.

Color cues can influence the experience of flavor, both by influencing identification and perceived intensity of foods. Previous research has largely focused on the crossmodal influence of vision upon taste or olfactory cues. It is plausible that color cues could also affect perceived trigeminal sensation; these studies demonstrate a crossmodal influence of color on piquancy. In our first two experiments, participants rated the spiciness of images of salsas that were adjusted to vary in color and intensity. We found that red was associated with significantly higher ratings of expected spice than blue, and that darker reds were expected to be spicier than lighter reds. In our third experiment, participants tasted and then rated the spiciness of each of four salsas (with two levels of color and of piquancy) when sighted and when blindfolded. Spiciness ratings were unaffected by differing colors when the salsa was mild, but when the piquancy was increased, a lack of increase in color corresponded to a depressed spiciness. These results can be explained using a model of assimilation and contrast. Taken together, our findings show that in our US sample, there is a crossmodal correspondence between visual and trigeminal senses that can influence perception of spiciness.

An expectations-based approach to explaining the cross-modal influence of color on orthonasal olfactory identification: the influence of the degree of discrepancy.

In the present study, we explored the conditions under which color-generated expectations influence participants' identification of flavored drinks. Four experiments were conducted in which the degree of discrepancy between the expected identity of a flavor (derived from the color of a drink) and the actual identity of the flavor (derived from orthonasal olfactory cues) was examined. Using a novel experimental approach that controlled for individual differences in color-flavor associations, we first measured the flavor expectations held by each individual and only then examined whether the same individual's identification responses were influenced by his or her own expectations. Under conditions of low discrepancy, the perceived disparity between the expected and the actual flavor identities was small. When a particular color--identified by participants as one that generated a strong flavor expectation--was added to these drinks (as compared with when no such color was added), a significantly greater proportion of identification responses were consistent with this expectation. This held true even when participants were explicitly told that color would be an uninformative cue and were given as much time as desired to complete the task. By contrast, under conditions of high discrepancy, adding the same colors to the drinks no longer had the same effect on participants' identification responses. Critically, there was a significant difference in the proportion of responses that were consistent with participants' color-based expectations in conditions of low as compared with high discrepancy, indicating that the degree of discrepancy between an individual's actual and expected experience can significantly affect the extent to which color influences judgments of flavor identity.

Grape expectations: the role of cognitive influences in color-flavor interactions.

Color conveys critical information about the flavor of food and drink by providing clues as to edibility, flavor identity, and flavor intensity. Despite the fact that more than 100 published papers have investigated the influence of color on flavor perception in humans, surprisingly little research has considered how cognitive and contextual constraints may mediate color-flavor interactions. In this review, we argue that the discrepancies demonstrated in previously-published color-flavor studies may, at least in part, reflect differences in the sensory expectations that different people generate as a result of their prior associative experiences. We propose that color-flavor interactions in flavor perception cannot be understood solely in terms of the principles of multisensory integration (the currently dominant theoretical framework) but that the role of higher-level cognitive factors, such as expectations, must also be considered.

A signal detection study of the Colavita visual dominance effect.

When presented with auditory, visual, or bimodal audiovisual stimuli in a speeded detection/discrimination task, participants fail to respond to the auditory component of the bimodal targets significantly more often than they fail to respond to the visual component. Signal detection theory (SDT) was used to explore the contributions of perceptual (sensitivity shifts) and decisional (shifts in response criteria) factors to this effect, known as the Colavita visual dominance effect. Participants performed a version of the Colavita task that had been modified to allow for SDT analyses. The participants had to detect auditory and visual targets (presented unimodally or bimodally) at their individually determined 75% detection thresholds. The results showed a significant decrease in participants' sensitivity to auditory stimuli when presented concurrently with visual stimuli (in the absence of any significant change in their response criterion), suggesting that Colavita visual dominance does not simply reflect a decisional effect, but can be explained, at least in part, as a truly perceptual phenomenon. The decrease in sensitivity (to auditory stimuli) may be attributable to the exogenous capture of participants' attention by the visual component of the bimodal target, thus leaving fewer attentional resources for the processing of the auditory stimulus. The reduction in auditory sensitivity reported here may be considered an example of crossmodal masking.

How does saccade adaptation affect visual perception?

Three signals are used to visually localize targets and stimulate saccades: (1) retinal location signals for intended saccade amplitude, (2) sensory-motor transform (SMT) of retinal signals to extra-ocular muscle innervation, and (3) estimates of eye position from extra-retinal signals. We investigated effects of adapting saccade amplitude to a double-step change in target location on perceived direction. In a flashed-pointing task, subjects pointed an unseen hand at a briefly displayed eccentric target without making a saccade. In a sustained-pointing task, subjects made a horizontal saccade to a double-step target. One second after the second step, they pointed an unseen hand at the final target position. After saccade-shortening adaptation, there was little change in hand-pointing azimuth toward the flashed target suggesting that most saccade adaptation was caused by changes in the SMT. After saccade-lengthening adaptation, there were small changes in hand-pointing azimuth to flashed targets, indicating that 1/3 of saccade adaptation was caused by changes in estimated retinal location signals and 2/3 by changes in the SMT. The sustained hand-pointing task indicated that estimates of eye position adapted inversely with changes of the SMT. Changes in perceived direction resulting from saccade adaptation are mainly influenced by extra-retinal factors with a small retinal component in the lengthening condition.