Dissociable rhythmic mechanisms enhance memory for conscious and nonconscious perceptual contents.

Understanding the neural mechanisms of conscious and unconscious experience is a major goal of fundamental and translational neuroscience. Here, we target the early visual cortex with a protocol of noninvasive, high-resolution alternating current stimulation while participants performed a delayed target-probe discrimination task and reveal dissociable mechanisms of mnemonic processing for conscious and unconscious perceptual contents. Entraining ß-rhythms in bilateral visual areas preferentially enhanced short-term memory for seen information, whereas α-entrainment in the same region preferentially enhanced short-term memory for unseen information. The short-term memory improvements were frequency-specific and long-lasting. The results add a mechanistic foundation to existing theories of consciousness, call for revisions to these theories, and contribute to the development of nonpharmacological therapeutics for improving visual cortical processing.

Reward Rapidly Enhances Visual Perception.

Rewards exert a deep influence on our cognition and behavior. Here, we used a paradigm in which reward information was provided at either encoding or retrieval of a brief, masked stimulus to show that reward can also rapidly modulate perceptual encoding of visual information. Experiment 1 (n = 30 adults) showed that participants' response accuracy was enhanced when a to-be-encoded grating signaled high reward relative to low reward, but only when the grating was presented very briefly and participants reported that they were not consciously aware of it. Experiment 2 (n = 29 adults) showed that there was no difference in participants' response accuracy when reward information was instead provided at the stage of retrieval, ruling out an explanation of the reward-modulation effect in terms of differences in motivated retrieval. Taken together, our findings provide behavioral evidence consistent with a rapid reward modulation of visual perception, which may not require consciousness.

More is better: Relative prevalence of multiple targets affects search accuracy.

In real-world searches such as airport baggage screening and radiological examinations, miss errors can be life threatening. Misses increase for additional targets after detecting an initial target, termed "subsequent search misses" (SSMs), and also when targets are more often absent than present, termed the low-prevalence effect. Real-world search tasks often contain more than one target, but the prevalence of these multitarget occasions varies. For example, a cancerous tumor sometimes coexists with a benign tumor and sometimes exists alone. This study aims to investigate how the relative prevalence of multiple targets affects search accuracy. Naive observers searched for all Ts (zero, one, or two) among Ls. In Experiment 1, SSMs occurred in small but not large set sizes, which may be explained by classic capacity limit effects such as the attentional blink and repetition blindness. Experiment 2 showed an interaction between SSMs and the relative prevalence of dual-target trials: Low prevalence of dual-target trials increased SSMs relative to high prevalence dual-target trials. The prevalence of dual-target trials did not affect accuracy on single-target trials. These results may provide a novel avenue for reducing misses by increasing the prevalence of instances with multiple targets. Future efforts should take into account the relative prevalence of multiple targets to effectively reduce life-threatening miss errors.

Approach Coping Mitigates Distress of COVID-19 Isolation for Young Men With Low Well-Being in a Sample of 1,749 Youth From Australia and the USA.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has led to lockdowns across the world with people being separated from their loved ones including partners, family, and friends. Here, using a large sample of 1,749 Australians and Americans, we investigated the impact of COVID-19 isolation on younger populations (13-25 years), and the influence of coping strategies and mental well-being on this impact. Overall, COVID-19 isolation had a more negative impact on adolescence (13-17 years) than young adulthood (18-25 years), but with no difference apparent between men and women, or between Australian and American residents. However, a deeper analysis revealed a gender-specific effect: the type of coping strategies differentially influenced the negative impact of COVID-19 isolation on men with various levels of well-being, an interaction effect not apparent in women. For men with lower levels of mental well-being, COVID-19 isolation appeared to have a less negative impact on them if they used more approach-oriented coping strategies (e.g., actively focusing on the problem). Our results provide cross-sectional evidence for a differential impact on young men at low levels of wellbeing by pandemic isolation. In sum, young men and adolescent boys with lower well-being coped better with COVID-19 isolation when they used more approach coping strategies.

Overt attentional capture by reward-related stimuli overcomes inhibitory suppression.

Salient-but-irrelevant distractors can automatically capture attention and eye-gaze in visual search. However, recent findings have suggested that attention to salient-but-irrelevant stimuli can be suppressed when observers use a specific target template to guide their search (i.e., feature search). A separate line of research has indicated that attentional selection is influenced by factors other than the physical salience of a stimulus and the observer's goals. For instance, pairing a stimulus with reward has been shown to increase the extent to which it captures attention and gaze (as though it has become more physically salient), even when such capture has negative consequences for the observer. Here we used eye-tracking with a rewarded visual search task to investigate whether capture by reward can be suppressed in the same way as capture by physical salience. When participants were encouraged to use feature search, attention to a distractor paired with relatively small reward was suppressed. However, under the same conditions attention was captured by a distractor paired with large reward, even when such capture resulted in reward omission. These findings suggest that reward-related stimuli are given special priority within the visual attention system over and above physically salient stimuli, and have implications for our understanding of real-world biases to reward-related stimuli, such as those seen in addiction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).