The modulation of task relevance on emotion-induced blindness depends on whether targets and distractors belong to the same category.

Previous research on emotion-induced blindness (EIB) argues emotional distractors capture attention in a bottom-up manner due to their physical and emotional salience. However, recent research has shown it is controversial whether EIB will be modulated by top-down factors. The present study further investigated whether the magnitude of EIB would be modulated by top-down factors, specifically the emotional relevance between tasks and distractors. Participants were divided into two groups having the same targets except for different task instructions. The orientation judgment group was asked to judge the orientation of the target (an emotionally irrelevant task), and the emotion judgment group was required to judge the emotional valence of the target (an emotionally relevant task). It was found the emotional relevance between tasks and distractors has no modulation on the magnitudes of EIB in two groups when targets and distractors are from different categories (Experiment 1), but a modulation when they are from the same category (Experiment 2). Consequently, we contend top-down task relevance modulates the EIB effect and distractors' priority is regulated by the emotional relevance between tasks and distractors. The current study holds attentional capture by stimulus-driven is unconditional in EIB, while attentional capture by goal-driven requires certain conditions.

Unconscious social relation threats: Invisible boss face biases attention.

Threatening stimuli as a kind of salient information often guide attentional orienting. Besides physically threatening stimuli, social threats can also strongly bias attention, even in the absence of conscious awareness. However, the available evidence mainly came from studies on an emotional face. It is unclear whether social relation threats, such as a boss face without emotional expressions, can also direct attentional orienting unconsciously. This study aimed to reveal the extent to which the attentional system has developed to process threatening stimuli by exploring whether invisible social relation threats unconsciously biased attention. We asked graduate and undergraduate students to perform a modified Posner's cue-target task, in which the probe was preceded by a pair of competitive face cues (an advisor's face and another faculty member's face), rendered invisible through continuous flash suppression. Experiment 1a's results showed that the advisor's face reflexively oriented graduate students' spatial attention, which was significantly correlated with subjective social threat evaluation. However, Experiment 1b showed that an invisible advisor's face did not induce the same effect in undergraduate students, as they reported significantly fewer threats from their advisors than graduates. To ensure the robustness of this new effect, we preregistered a replicate study and successfully replicated the above results in Experiments 2a and 2b. Our findings provide evidence for the existence of an attentional orienting bias toward invisible social relation threats. These results suggest that the attentional system evolved to promote the exploration of our visual environment for threatening social relation signals.

Contributions of gains and losses to attentional capture and disengagement: evidence from the gap paradigm.

It is known that movements of visual attention are influenced by features in a scene, such as colors, that are associated with value or with loss. The present study examined the detailed nature of these attentional effects by employing the gap paradigm-a technique that has been used to separately reveal changes in attentional capture and shifting, and changes in attentional disengagement. In four experiments, participants either looked toward or away from stimuli with colors that had been associated either with gains or with losses. We found that participants were faster to look to colors associated with gains and slower to look away from them, revealing effects of gains on both attentional capture and attentional disengagement. On the other hand, participants were both slower to look to features associated with loss, and faster to look away from such features. The pattern of results suggested, however, that the latter finding was not due to more rapid disengagement from loss-associated colors, but instead to more rapid shifting of attention away from such colors. Taken together, the results reveal a complex pattern of effects of gains and losses on the disengagement, capture, and shifting of visual attention, revealing a remarkable flexibility of the attention system.

Ensemble perception without attention depends upon attentional control settings.

People are able to rapidly extract summary statistical information about common patterns, or ensembles, that may exist in a scene, such as repeated textures or colors. Here we examined the extent to which such an ensemble perception can occur in the absence of focal visual attention using a method that has some advantages over methods previously used to study the issue. In particular, we assessed the extent to which ensembles can be processed without attention by measuring the indirect effect of a to-be-ignored ensemble on judgments of an attended ensemble. The results show that ensembles outside the focus of attention do influence judgments of attended ensembles when the to-be-ignored ensemble contains summary statistics that match a sought-for target category. Thus, an attentional control setting for specific summary statistical information permits the processing of ensembles outside of focal attention, facilitating the rapid perception of visual scenes.

Effects of reward associations on components of attentional network.

Previous research has revealed the influence of reward associations on attentional selection and control. The attentional network can be divided into three components according to its function: Alerting, orienting, and executive control. In the current research, we used training-test procedure and attention network test variant to investigate the effects of color-based reward associations on alerting (Experiment 1), orienting (Experiment 2), executive control (Experiment 3), as well as the interactions among these three networks (Experiment 4). The findings were as follows: Compared with colors previously associated with low reward, colors previously associated with high reward trigger stronger alerting and orienting effects (Experiments 1 and 2), and they had stronger interference effects when functioning as features of flanker distractor (Experiment 3). More importantly, reward associations had only a positive impact on the interaction of orienting by executive control but not on the interaction of alerting by executive control (Experiment 4). In summary, reward associations have different effects on the three attentional networks and can enhance the interaction of orienting by executive control.

Time-dependent effects of discrete post-encoding emotions on item memory and source memory.

This study examined time-dependent effects of discrete emotions on item and source memory. In Experiment 1, after encoding, participants watched a comic, disgust-inducing, anger-inducing or neutral video at different delays. Positive emotion did not affect item memory but enhanced source memory (only in the 5 min delay). Anger impaired recognition in all delays, but a trend occurred for anger to impair source memory only in the 50 min delay. Disgust did not affect item memory, but a trend emerged for it to enhance and impair source memory in the 5 and 35 min delays, respectively. Experiment 2 showed that positive emotion and disgust had no effect on recognition, and consistent with Experiment 1, positive emotion, not anger or disgust, enhanced source memory. A trend occurred for positive emotion and disgust to impair source memory in the 0 min delay but not in the other delays. Consistent with Experiment 1, Experiment 3 showed that anger impaired both recognition and source memory (for males). Taken together, these findings suggest that the effect of emotion does vary depending on nature of memory tasks, category of emotion, and delay in emotion elicitation.

Revisiting contextual cueing effects: The role of perceptual processing.

Incidental learning of invariant configurations of items can facilitate visual search, which is termed contextual cueing effect. Previous debates about the mechanisms of the contextual cueing effect mainly focused on the roles of attentional guidance and response-related components. Because the time for perceiving displays is very short, few studies have revealed the role of initial perceptual processing. Thus, in the present study, we manipulated the key variable of display contrast to prolong the perceptual processing duration in low-contrast displays. With response-time and eye-movement recording, the study explored the role of initial perceptual processing. In addition, we examined the roles of attentional guidance and response-related components. From three experiments we found: In addition to the role of attentional guidance, the initial perceptual processing could also contribute to a contextual cueing effect in a low-contrast condition; there was only the facilitation from attentional guidance in a high-contrast condition. These results suggest that perceptual processing can also play a role if the perceptual processing time is prolonged, but the main role involves improved attentional guidance.

Measuring Spectral Inconsistency of Multispectral Images for Detection and Segmentation of Retinal Degenerative Changes.

Multispectral imaging (MSI) creates a series of en-face fundus spectral sections by leveraging an extensive range of discrete monochromatic light sources and allows for an examination of the retina's early morphologic changes that are not generally visible with traditional fundus imaging modalities. An Ophthalmologist's interpretation of MSI images is commonly conducted by qualitatively analyzing the spectral consistency between degenerated areas and normal ones, which characterizes the image variation across different spectra. Unfortunately, an ophthalmologist's interpretation is practically difficult considering the fact that human perception is limited to the RGB color space, while an MSI sequence contains typically more than ten spectra. In this paper, we propose a method for measuring the spectral inconsistency of MSI images without supervision, which yields quantitative information indicating the pathological property of the tissue. Specifically, we define mathematically the spectral consistency as an existence of a pixel-specific latent feature vector and a spectrum-specific projection matrix, which can be used to reconstruct the representative features of pixels. The spectral inconsistency is then measured using the number of latent feature vectors required to reconstruct the representative features in practice. Experimental results from 54 MSI sequences show that our spectral inconsistency measurement is potentially invaluable for MSI-based ocular disease diagnosis.

Retinal Image Denoising via Bilateral Filter with a Spatial Kernel of Optimally Oriented Line Spread Function.

Filtering belongs to the most fundamental operations of retinal image processing and for which the value of the filtered image at a given location is a function of the values in a local window centered at this location. However, preserving thin retinal vessels during the filtering process is challenging due to vessels' small area and weak contrast compared to background, caused by the limited resolution of imaging and less blood flow in the vessel. In this paper, we present a novel retinal image denoising approach which is able to preserve the details of retinal vessels while effectively eliminating image noise. Specifically, our approach is carried out by determining an optimal spatial kernel for the bilateral filter, which is represented by a line spread function with an orientation and scale adjusted adaptively to the local vessel structure. Moreover, this approach can also be served as a preprocessing tool for improving the accuracy of the vessel detection technique. Experimental results show the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art image denoising techniques such as the bilateral filter.

Joint alignment of multispectral images via semidefinite programming.

In this paper, we introduce a novel feature-point-matching based framework for achieving an optimized joint-alignment of sequential images from multispectral imaging (MSI). It solves a low-rank and semidefinite matrix that stores all pairwise-image feature-mappings by minimizing the total amount of point-to-point matching cost via a convex optimization of a semidefinite programming formulation. This unique strategy takes a complete consideration of the information aggregated by all point-matching costs and enables the entire set of pairwise-image feature-mappings to be solved simultaneously and near-optimally. Our framework is capable of running in an automatic or interactive fashion, offering an effective tool for eliminating spatial misalignments introduced into sequential MSI images during the imaging process. Our experimental results obtained from a database of 28 sequences of MSI images of human eye demonstrate the superior performances of our approach to the state-of-the-art techniques. Our framework is potentially invaluable in a large variety of practical applications of MSI images.

Effect of post-encoding emotion on recollection and familiarity for pictures.

Although prior studies have examined the effect of post-encoding emotional arousal on recognition memory for words, it is unknown whether the enhancement effect observed on words generalizes to pictures. Furthermore, prior studies using words have showed that the effect of emotional arousal can be modulated by stimuli valence and delay in emotion induction, but it is unclear whether such modulation can extend to pictures and whether other factors such as encoding method (incidental vs. intentional encoding) can be modulatory. Five experiments were conducted to answer these questions. In Experiment 1, participants encoded a list of neutral and negative pictures and then watched a 3-min neutral or negative video. The delayed test showed that negative arousal impaired recollection regardless of picture valence but had no effect on familiarity. Experiment 2 replicated the above findings. Experiment 3 was similar to Experiment 1 except that participants watched a 3-min neutral, negative, or positive video and conducted free recall before the recognition test. Unlike the prior two experiments, the impairment effect of negative arousal disappeared. Experiment 4, where the free recall task was eliminated, replicated the results from Experiment 3. Experiment 5 replicated Experiments 1 and 2 and further showed that the impairment effects of negative arousal could be modulated by delay in emotion induction but not by encoding method or stimuli valence. Taken together, the current study suggests that the enhancement effect observed on words may not generalize to pictures.

Superordinate Level Processing Has Priority Over Basic-Level Processing in Scene Gist Recognition.

By combining a perceptual discrimination task and a visuospatial working memory task, the present study examined the effects of visuospatial working memory load on the hierarchical processing of scene gist. In the perceptual discrimination task, two scene images from the same (manmade-manmade pairing or natural-natural pairing) or different superordinate level categories (manmade-natural pairing) were presented simultaneously, and participants were asked to judge whether these two images belonged to the same basic-level category (e.g., street-street pairing) or not (e.g., street-highway pairing). In the concurrent working memory task, spatial load (position-based load in Experiment 1) and object load (figure-based load in Experiment 2) were manipulated. The results were as follows: (a) spatial load and object load have stronger effects on discrimination of same basic-level scene pairing than same superordinate level scene pairing; (b) spatial load has a larger impact on the discrimination of scene pairings at early stages than at later stages; on the contrary, object information has a larger influence on at later stages than at early stages. It followed that superordinate level processing has priority over basic-level processing in scene gist recognition and spatial information contributes to the earlier and object information to the later stages in scene gist recognition.