Moving Beyond the Keypress: As Technology Advances, so Should Psychology Response Time Measurements.

Decades of research in cognitive psychology have largely relied on simple key or button presses to quantify human behavior. While many valuable discoveries have been made, a richer response modality may reveal more information regarding the different processes that underlie complex human behavior. This study provides a proof of concept for using a touch-and-swipe response method to separate response time into two components to extract more meaningful behavioral insights. Across several analyses, the two components were consistently shown to be separable, independent measurements of behavior. Furthermore, evaluating these isolated response time components improved inferential power and clarity of behavioral patterns. The touch-and-swipe response method is simple and easy-to-use, and it shows promise for more accurately targeting mechanisms of interest.

Predicting Airport Screening Officers' Visual Search Competency With a Rapid Assessment.

Objective The study's objective was to assess a new personnel selection and assessment tool for aviation security screeners. A mobile app was modified to create a tool, and the question was whether it could predict professional screeners' on-job performance. Background A variety of professions (airport security, radiology, the military, etc.) rely on visual search performance-being able to detect targets. Given the importance of such professions, it is necessary to maximize performance, and one means to do so is to select individuals who excel at visual search. A critical question is whether it is possible to predict search competency within a professional search environment. Method Professional searchers from the USA Transportation Security Administration (TSA) completed a rapid assessment on a tablet-based X-ray simulator (XRAY Screener, derived from the mobile technology app Airport Scanner; Kedlin Company). The assessment contained 72 trials that were simulated X-ray images of bags. Participants searched for prohibited items and tapped on them with their finger. Results Performance on the assessment significantly related to on-job performance measures for the TSA officers such that those who were better XRAY Screener performers were both more accurate and faster at the actual airport checkpoint. Conclusion XRAY Screener successfully predicted on-job performance for professional aviation security officers. While questions remain about the underlying cognitive mechanisms, this quick assessment was found to significantly predict on-job success for a task that relies on visual search performance. Application It may be possible to quickly assess an individual's visual search competency, which could help organizations select new hires and assess their current workforce.

Visual Search: You Are Who You Are (+ A Learning Curve).

Not everyone is equally well suited for every endeavor-individuals differ in their strengths and weaknesses, which makes some people better at performing some tasks than others. As such, it might be possible to predict individuals' peak competence (i.e., ultimate level of success) on a given task based on their early performance in that task. The current study leveraged "big data" from the mobile game, Airport Scanner (Kedlin Company), to assess the possibility of predicting individuals' ultimate visual search competency using the minimum possible unit of data: response time on a single visual search trial. Those who started out poorly were likely to stay relatively poor and those who started out strong were likely to remain top performers. This effect was apparent at the level of a single trial (in fact, the first trial), making it possible to use raw response time to predict later levels of success.

A Common Mechanism for Perceptual Reversals in Motion-Induced Blindness, the Troxler Effect, and Perceptual Filling-In.

Several striking visual phenomena involve a physically present stimulus that alternates between being perceived and being "invisible." For example, motion-induced blindness, the Troxler effect, and perceptual filling-in all consist of subjective alternations where an item repeatedly changes from being seen to unseen. In the present study, we explored whether these three specific visual phenomena share any commonalities in their alternation rates and patterns to better understand the mechanisms of each. Data from 69 individuals revealed moderate to strong correlations across the three phenomena for the number of perceptual disappearances and the accumulated duration of the disappearances. Importantly, these effects were not correlated with eye movement patterns (saccades) assessed through eye tracking, differences in motion sensitivity as indexed by dot coherence and speed perception thresholds, or simple reaction time abilities. Principal component analyses revealed a single component that explained 67% of the variance for the number of perceptual reversals and 60% for the accumulated duration of the disappearances. The temporal dynamics of illusory disappearances was also compared for each phenomenon, and normalized durations of disappearances were well fit by a gamma distribution with similar shape parameters for each phenomenon, suggesting that they may be driven by a single oscillatory mechanism.

Improvement in visual search with practice: mapping learning-related changes in neurocognitive stages of processing.

Practice can improve performance on visual search tasks; the neural mechanisms underlying such improvements, however, are not clear. Response time typically shortens with practice, but which components of the stimulus-response processing chain facilitate this behavioral change? Improved search performance could result from enhancements in various cognitive processing stages, including (1) sensory processing, (2) attentional allocation, (3) target discrimination, (4) motor-response preparation, and/or (5) response execution. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) as human participants completed a five-day visual-search protocol in which they reported the orientation of a color popout target within an array of ellipses. We assessed changes in behavioral performance and in ERP components associated with various stages of processing. After practice, response time decreased in all participants (while accuracy remained consistent), and electrophysiological measures revealed modulation of several ERP components. First, amplitudes of the early sensory-evoked N1 component at 150 ms increased bilaterally, indicating enhanced visual sensory processing of the array. Second, the negative-polarity posterior-contralateral component (N2pc, 170-250 ms) was earlier and larger, demonstrating enhanced attentional orienting. Third, the amplitude of the sustained posterior contralateral negativity component (SPCN, 300-400 ms) decreased, indicating facilitated target discrimination. Finally, faster motor-response preparation and execution were observed after practice, as indicated by latency changes in both the stimulus-locked and response-locked lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs). These electrophysiological results delineate the functional plasticity in key mechanisms underlying visual search with high temporal resolution and illustrate how practice influences various cognitive and neural processing stages leading to enhanced behavioral performance.

Cognitive Training Can Reduce Civilian Casualties in a Simulated Shooting Environment.

Shooting a firearm involves a complex series of cognitive abilities. For example, locating an item or a person of interest requires visual search, and firing the weapon (or withholding a trigger squeeze) involves response execution (or inhibition). The present study used a simulated shooting environment to establish a relationship between a particular cognitive ability and a critical shooting error-response inhibition and firing on civilians, respectively. Individual-difference measures demonstrated, perhaps counterintuitively, that simulated civilian casualties were not related to motor impulsivity (i.e., an itchy trigger finger) but rather to an individual's cognitive ability to withhold an already initiated response (i.e., an itchy brain). Furthermore, active-response-inhibition training reduced simulated civilian casualties, which revealed a causal relationship. This study therefore illustrates the potential of using cognitive training to possibly improve shooting performance, which might ultimately provide insight for military and law-enforcement personnel.

The ultra-rare-item effect: visual search for exceedingly rare items is highly susceptible to error.

Accuracy is paramount in radiology and security screening, yet many factors undermine success. Target prevalence is a particularly worrisome factor, as targets are rarely present (e.g., the cancer rate in mammography is ~0.5%), and low target prevalence has been linked to increased search errors. More troubling is the fact that specific target types can have extraordinarily low frequency rates (e.g., architectural distortions in mammography-a specific marker of potential cancer-appear in fewer than 0.05% of cases). By assessing search performance across millions of trials from the Airport Scanner smartphone application, we demonstrated that the detection of ultra-rare items was disturbingly poor. A logarithmic relationship between target detection and target frequency (adjusted R (2) = .92) revealed that ultra-rare items had catastrophically low detection rates relative to targets with higher frequencies. Extraordinarily low search performance for these extraordinarily rare targets-what we term the ultra-rare-item effect-is troubling given that radiological and security-screening searches are primarily ultra-rare-item searches.

Self-induced attentional blink: a cause of errors in multiple-target search.

Satisfaction of search (which we refer to as subsequent search misses)-a decrease in accuracy at detecting a second target after a first target has been found in a visual search-underlies real-world search errors (e.g., tumors may be missed in an X-ray if another tumor already has been found), but little is known about this phenomenon's cognitive underpinnings. In the present study, we examined subsequent search misses in terms of another, more extensively studied phenomenon: the attentional blink, a decrease in accuracy when a second target appears 200 to 500 ms after a first target is detected in a temporal stream. Participants searched for T-shaped targets among L-shaped distractors in a spatial visual search, and despite large methodological differences between self-paced spatial visual searches and attentional blink tasks, an attentional-blink-like effect accounted for subsequent-search-miss errors. This finding provides evidence that accuracy is negatively affected shortly after a first target is fixated in a self-paced, self-guided visual search.

Face symmetry assessment abilities: Clinical implications for diagnosing asymmetry.

INTRODUCTION: An accurate assessment of face symmetry is necessary for the development of a dentofacial diagnosis in orthodontics, and an understanding of individual differences in perception of face symmetry between patients and providers is needed to facilitate successful treatment. METHODS: Orthodontists, general dentists, and control participants completed a series of tasks to assess symmetry. Judgments were made on pairs of upright faces (similar to the longitudinal assessment of photographic patient records), inverted faces, and dot patterns. Participants completed questionnaires regarding clinical practice, education level, and self-confidence ratings for symmetry assessment abilities. RESULTS: Orthodontists showed expertise compared with controls (P <0.001), whereas dentists showed no advantage over controls. Orthodontists performed better than dentists, however, in only the most difficult face symmetry judgments (P = 0.006). For both orthodontists and dentists, accuracy increased significantly when assessing symmetry in upright vs inverted faces (t = 3.7, P = 0.001; t = 2.7, P = 0.02, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Orthodontists showed expertise in assessing face symmetry compared with both laypersons and general dentists, and they were more accurate when judging upright than inverted faces. When using accurate longitudinal photographic records to assess changing face symmetry, orthodontists are likely to be incorrect in less than 15% of cases, suggesting that assistance from some additional technology is infrequently needed for diagnosis.

Standard experimental paradigm designs and data exclusion practices in cognitive psychology can inadvertently introduce systematic "shadow" biases in participant samples.

Standard cognitive psychology research practices can introduce inadvertent sampling biases that reduce the reliability and generalizability of the findings. Researchers commonly acknowledge and understand that any given study sample is not perfectly generalizable, especially when implementing typical experimental constraints (e.g., limiting recruitment to specific age ranges or to individuals with normal color vision). However, less obvious systematic sampling constraints, referred to here as "shadow" biases, can be unintentionally introduced and can easily go unnoticed. For example, many standard cognitive psychology study designs involve lengthy and tedious experiments with simple, repetitive stimuli. Such testing environments may 1) be aversive to some would-be participants (e.g., those high in certain neurodivergent symptoms) who may self-select not to enroll in such studies, or 2) contribute to participant attrition, both of which reduce the sample's representativeness. Likewise, standard performance-based data exclusion efforts (e.g., minimum accuracy or response time) or attention checks can systematically remove data from participants from subsets of the population (e.g., those low in conscientiousness). This commentary focuses on the theoretical and practical issues behind these non-obvious and often unacknowledged "shadow" biases, offers a simple illustration with real data as a proof of concept of how applying attention checks can systematically skew latent/hidden variables in the included population, and then discusses the broader implications with suggestions for how to manage and reduce, or at a minimum acknowledge, the problem.

Dynamics of population response to changes of motion direction in primary visual cortex.

The visual system is thought to represent the direction of moving objects in the relative activity of large populations of cortical neurons that are broadly tuned to the direction of stimulus motion, but how changes in the direction of a moving stimulus are represented in the population response remains poorly understood. Here we take advantage of the orderly mapping of direction selectivity in ferret primary visual cortex (V1) to explore how abrupt changes in the direction of a moving stimulus are encoded in population activity using voltage-sensitive dye imaging. For stimuli moving in a constant direction, the peak of the V1 population response accurately represented the direction of stimulus motion, but following abrupt changes in motion direction, the peak transiently departed from the direction of stimulus motion in a fashion that varied with the direction offset angle and was well predicted from the response to the component directions. We conclude that cortical dynamics and population coding mechanisms combine to place constraints on the accuracy with which abrupt changes in direction of motion can be represented by cortical circuits.

A bayesian optimal foraging model of human visual search.

Real-world visual searches often contain a variable and unknown number of targets. Such searches present difficult metacognitive challenges, as searchers must decide when to stop looking for additional targets, which results in high miss rates in multiple-target searches. In the study reported here, we quantified human strategies in multiple-target search via an ecological optimal foraging model and investigated whether searchers adapt their strategies to complex target-distribution statistics. Separate groups of individuals searched displays with the number of targets per trial sampled from different geometric distributions but with the same overall target prevalence. As predicted by optimal foraging theory, results showed that individuals searched longer when they expected more targets to be present and adjusted their expectations on-line during each search by taking into account the higher-order, across-trial target distributions. However, compared with modeled ideal observers, participants systematically responded as if the target distribution were more uniform than it was, which suggests that training could improve multiple-target search performance.

Links between multisensory processing and autism.

Autism spectrum disorder is typically associated with social deficits and is often specifically linked to difficulty with processing faces and other socially relevant stimuli. Emerging research has suggested that children with autism might also have deficits in basic perceptual abilities including multisensory processing (e.g., simultaneously processing visual and auditory inputs). The current study examined the relationship between multisensory temporal processing (assessed via a simultaneity judgment task wherein participants were to report whether a visual stimulus and an auditory stimulus occurred at the same time or at different times) and self-reported symptoms of autism (assessed via the Autism Spectrum Quotient questionnaire). Data from over 100 healthy adults revealed a relationship between these two factors as multisensory timing perception correlated with symptoms of autism. Specifically, a stronger bias to perceive auditory stimuli occurring before visual stimuli as simultaneous was associated with greater levels of autistic symptoms. Additional data and analyses confirm that this relationship is specific to multisensory processing and symptoms of autism. These results provide insight into the nature of multisensory processing while also revealing a continuum over which perceptual abilities correlate with symptoms of autism and that this continuum is not just specific to clinical populations but is present within the general population.

Conscientiousness protects visual search performance from the impact of fatigue.

Visual search-looking for targets among distractors-underlies many critical professions (e.g., radiology, aviation security) that demand optimal performance. As such, it is important to identify, understand, and ameliorate negative factors such as fatigue-mental and/or physical tiredness that leads to diminished function. One way to reduce the detrimental effects is to minimize fatigue itself (e.g., scheduled breaks, adjusting pre-shift behaviors), but this is not always possible or sufficient. The current study explored whether some individuals are less susceptible to the impact of fatigue than others; specifically, if conscientiousness, the ability to control impulses and plan, moderates fatigue's impact. Participants (N = 374) self-reported their energy (i.e., the inverse of fatigue) and conscientiousness levels and completed a search task. Self-report measures were gathered prior to completing the search task as part of a large set of surveys so that participants could not anticipate any particular research question. Preregistered linear mixed-effect analyses revealed main effects of energy level (lower state energy related to lower accuracy) and conscientiousness (more trait conscientiousness related to higher accuracy), and, critically, a significant interaction between energy level and conscientiousness. A follow-up analysis, that was designed to illustrate the nature of the primary result, divided participants into above- vs. below-median conscientiousness groups and revealed a significant negative relationship between energy level and accuracy for the below median, but not above-median, group. The results raise intriguing operational possibilities for visual search professions, with the most direct implication being the incorporation of conscientiousness measures to personnel selection processes.

Increases in symptoms associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder among university students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

OBJECTIVE: The long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on college students' mental health remains unknown. The current study explored self-reported Obsessive-Compulsive symptomatology among college student cohorts from pre-, peak-, and later-pandemic time points. PARTICIPANTS: Undergraduate college students (N = 524) who volunteered for course credit. METHODS: Self-report responses on the Dimensional Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (DOCS), which includes subscales for contamination, unacceptable thoughts, harm responsibility, and symmetry, were collected from November 29, 2016 through April 27, 2021 and assessed for differences between the pre-, peak-, and later-pandemic cohorts. RESULTS: Peak-pandemic responders reported higher symptomatology for contamination and unacceptable thoughts compared to pre-pandemic responders (and for pre- vs. later-pandemic for contamination), with no significant effects for symmetry or harm responsibility. CONCLUSIONS: Although the longer-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on students remains unknown, a greater shift in college mental health services from prevention to assessing and addressing more immediate challenges may be necessary.

A precise quantification of how prior experience informs current behavior.

Human behavior does not exist in a bubble-it is influenced by countless forces, including each individual's current goals, preexisting cognitive biases, and prior experience. The current project leveraged a massive behavioral data set to provide a data-driven quantification of the relationship between prior experience and current behavior. Data from two different behavioral tasks (a categorization task and a visual search task) demonstrated that prior history had a precise, systematic, and meaningful influence on subsequent performance. Specifically, the greater the evidence for (or against) all aspects of the current trial, the more (or less) efficient behavior was on that trial. The robust influence of prior experience was present for even distracting and likely unattended information. The ubiquity and consistency of the effect for features both related and unrelated to stimulus presence suggests a domain-general mechanism that increases the efficiency of behavior in contexts that match prior experience. These findings are theoretically important for understanding behavioral adaptation, experimentally powerful for directly addressing effects of previous trials when designing and analyzing research projects, and potentially useful for optimizing behavior in various applied contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Anticipatory anxiety hinders detection of a second target in dual-target search.

Professional visual searches (e.g., baggage screenings, military searches, radiological examinations) are often conducted in high-pressure environments and require focus on multiple visual targets. Yet laboratory studies of visual search tend to be conducted in emotionally neutral settings with only one possible target per display. In the experiment reported here, we looked to better emulate high-pressure search conditions by presenting searchers with arrays that contained between zero and two targets while inducing anticipatory anxiety via a threat-of-shock paradigm. Under conditions of anticipatory anxiety, dual-target performance was negatively affected, but single-target performance and time on task were unaffected. These results suggest that multiple-target searches may be a more sensitive instrument to measure the effect of environmental factors on visual cognition than single-target searches are. Further, the effect of anticipatory anxiety was modulated by individual differences in state anxiety levels of participants prior to the experiment. These results have implications for both the laboratory study of visual search and the management and assessment of professional searchers.

Great expectations: minor differences in initial instructions have a major impact on visual search in the absence of feedback.

Professions such as radiology and aviation security screening that rely on visual search-the act of looking for targets among distractors-often cannot provide operators immediate feedback, which can create situations where performance may be largely driven by the searchers' own expectations. For example, if searchers do not expect relatively hard-to-spot targets to be present in a given search, they may find easy-to-spot targets but systematically quit searching before finding more difficult ones. Without feedback, searchers can create self-fulfilling prophecies where they incorrectly reinforce initial biases (e.g., first assuming and then, perhaps wrongly, concluding hard-to-spot targets are rare). In the current study, two groups of searchers completed an identical visual search task but with just a single difference in their initial task instructions before the experiment started; those in the "high-expectation" condition were told that each trial could have one or two targets present (i.e., correctly implying no target-absent trials) and those in the "low-expectation" condition were told that each trial would have up to two targets (i.e., incorrectly implying there could be target-absent trials). Compared to the high-expectation group, the low-expectation group had a lower hit rate, lower false alarm rate and quit trials more quickly, consistent with a lower quitting threshold (i.e., performing less exhaustive searches) and a potentially higher target-present decision criterion. The expectation effect was present from the start and remained across the experiment-despite exposure to the same true distribution of targets, the groups' performances remained divergent, primarily driven by the different subjective experiences caused by each groups' self-fulfilling prophecies. The effects were limited to the single-targets trials, which provides insights into the mechanisms affected by the initial expectations set by the instructions. In sum, initial expectations can have dramatic influences-searchers who do not expect to find a target, are less likely to find a target as they are more likely to quit searching earlier.