Hemispheric specialization for global and local processing: A direct comparison of linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli.

It is often assumed that the human brain processes the global and local properties of visual stimuli in a lateralized fashion, with a left hemisphere (LH) specialization for local detail, and a right hemisphere (RH) specialization for global form. However, the evidence for such global-local lateralization stems predominantly from studies using linguistic stimuli, the processing of which has shown to be LH lateralized in itself. In addition, some studies have reported a reversal of global-local lateralization when using non-linguistic stimuli. Accordingly, it remains unclear whether global-local lateralization may in fact be stimulus-specific. To address this issue, we asked participants to respond to linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli that were presented in the right and left visual fields, allowing for first access by the LH and RH, respectively. The results showed global-RH and local-LH advantages for both stimulus types, but the global lateralization effect was larger for linguistic stimuli. Furthermore, this pattern of results was found to be robust, as it was observed regardless of two other task manipulations. We conclude that the instantiation and direction of global and local lateralization is not stimulus-specific. However, the magnitude of global,-but not local-, lateralization is dependent on stimulus type.

Training modulates memory-driven capture.

Attention is captured by information matching the contents of working memory. Though many factors modulate the amount of capture, there is surprising resistance to cognitive control. Capture occurs even when participants are instructed either that an item would never be a target or to drop that item from memory. Does the persistence of capture under these conditions reflect a rigidity in capture, or can properly motivated participants learn to completely suppress distractors and/or completely drop items from memory? Surprisingly, no studies have looked at the influence of extensive training of involuntary capture from working memory items. Here, we addressed whether training leads to a reduction or even elimination of memory-driven capture. After memorizing a single object, participants were cued to remember or to forget this object. Subsequently, they were asked to execute a search task. To measure capture, we compared search performances in displays that did and did not contain a distractor matching the earlier memorized object. Participants completed multiple experimental sessions over four days. The results showed that attentional capture by to-be-remembered distractors was reduced, but not eliminated in subsequent sessions compared with the first session. Training did not impact capture by to-be-forgotten objects. The results suggest observable, but limited, cognitive control over memory-driven capture.

Second Chances in Learning: Does a Resit Prospect Lower Study-Time Investments on a First Test?

Previous studies have shown that the prospect of a resit opportunity lowers hypothetical study-time investments for a first exam, as compared to a single-chance exam (i.e., the resit effect). The present paper describes a first experiment in which we aimed to generalize this effect from hypothetical study-time investments to a learning task allowing for the optimization of actual study-time investments while participants studied pairs of pseudowords for a subsequent multiple-choice test, given either a single chance or two chances to pass. Against our expectations, the results of the experiment showed no resit effect for the amount of actual time participants spent studying the materials in the experimental learning task. To better allow for the optimization of study-time investments, the learning task was adapted for a second experiment to include an indication of passing probability. These results, however, also did not show a resit effect. A third experiment addressed whether it was the investment of actual time that led to this absence of a resit effect with the learning task. The results suggested, however, that it was most likely the lack of a priori deliberation that caused this absence of the effect. Taken together with findings from a fourth questionnaire study showing that students seem to take a resit prospect into account by indicating they would have studied more for an exam if the option to resit would not have been available, these findings lead us to argue that a resit prospect may primarily affect advance study-time allocation decisions.

Media multitasking, mind-wandering, and distractibility: A large-scale study.

Previous studies suggest that frequent media multitasking - the simultaneous use of different media at the same time - may be associated with increased susceptibility to internal and external sources of distraction. At the same time, other studies found no evidence for such associations. In the current study, we report the results of a large-scale study (N=261) in which we measured media multitasking with a short media-use questionnaire and measured distraction with a change-detection task that included different numbers of distractors. To determine whether internally generated distraction affected performance, we deployed experience-sampling probes during the change-detection task. The results showed that participants with higher media multitasking scores did not perform worse as distractor set size increased, they did not perform worse in general, and their responses on the experience-sampling probes made clear that they also did not experience more lapses of attention during the task. Critically, these results were robust across different methods of analysis (i.e., Linear Mixed Modeling, Bayes factors, and extreme-groups comparison). At the same time, our use of the short version of the media-use questionnaire might limit the generalizability of our findings. In light of our results, we suggest that future studies should ensure an adequate level of statistical power and implement a more precise measure for media multitasking.

Towards a unified understanding of lateralized vision: A large-scale study investigating principles governing patterns of lateralization using a heterogeneous sample.

While functional lateralization of the human brain has been a widely studied topic in the past decades, few studies to date have gone further than investigating lateralization of single, isolated processes. With the present study, we aimed to arrive at a more unified view by investigating lateralization patterns in face and word processing, and associated lower-level visual processing. We tested a large and heterogeneous participant group, and used a number of tasks that had been shown to produce replicable indices of lateralized processing of visual information of different types and complexity. Following Bayesian statistics, group-level analyses showed the expected right hemisphere (RH) lateralization for face, global form, low spatial frequency processing, and spatial attention, and left hemisphere (LH) lateralization for visual word and local feature processing. Compared to right-handed individuals, lateralization patterns of left-handed and especially those who are RH-dominant for language deviated from this 'typical' pattern. Our results support the notion that face and word processes come to be lateralized to homologue areas of the two hemispheres, under influence of the RH- and LH-specializations in global form, local feature, and low and high spatial frequency processing. As such, we present a more unified understanding of lateralized vision, providing evidence for the input asymmetry and causal complementarity principles of lateralized visual information processing. The absence of correlations between spatial attention and lateralization of the other processes supports the notion of their independent lateralization, conform the statistical complementarity principle.

Unmasking the attentional blink.

When asked to identify 2 visual targets (T1 and T2 for the 1st and 2nd targets, respectively) embedded in a sequence of distractors, observers will often fail to identify T2 when it appears within 200-500 ms of T1--an effect called the attentional blink. Recent work shows that attention does not blink when the task is to encode a sequence of consecutive targets, suggesting that distractor interference plays a causal role in the attentional blink. Here, however, the authors show that an attentional blink occurs even in the absence of distractors, with 2 letter targets separated by a blank interval. In addition, the authors found that the impairment for identification of the 2nd of 2 targets separated by a blank interval is substantially attenuated either when the intertarget interval is filled with additional target items or when the 2nd target is precued by an additional target. These findings show that the root cause of the blink lies in the difficulty of engaging attention twice within a short period of time for 2 temporally discrete target events.

The attentional blink provides episodic distinctiveness: sparing at a cost.

The attentional blink (J. E. Raymond, K. L. Shapiro, & K. M. Arnell, 1992) refers to an apparent gap in perception observed when a second target follows a first within several hundred milliseconds. Theoretical and computational work have provided explanations for early sets of blink data, but more recent data have challenged these accounts by showing that the blink is attenuated when subjects encode strings of stimuli (J. Kawahara, T. Kumada, & V. Di Lollo, 2006; M. R. Nieuwenstein & M. C. Potter, 2006; C. N. Olivers, 2007) or are distracted (C. N. Olivers & S. Nieuwenhuis, 2005) while viewing the rapid serial visual presentation stream. The authors describe the episodic simultaneous type, serial token model, a computational account of encoding visual stimuli into working memory that suggests that the attentional blink is a cognitive strategy rather than a resource limitation. This model is composed of neurobiologically plausible elements and simulates the attentional blink with a competitive attentional mechanism that facilitates the formation of episodically distinct representations within working memory. In addition to addressing the blink, the model addresses the phenomena of repetition blindness and whole report superiority, producing predictions that are supported by experimental work.

Temporal constraints on conscious vision: on the ubiquitous nature of the attentional blink.

The attentional blink (AB) refers to the finding that observers often miss the second of two masked visual targets (T1 and T2, e.g., letters) appearing within 200-500 ms. Although the presence of a T1 mask is thought to be required for this effect, we recently found that an AB deficit can be observed even in the absence of a T1 mask if T2 is shown very briefly and followed by a pattern mask (M. R. Nieuwenstein, M. C. Potter, & J. Theeuwes, 2009). Using such a sensitive T2 task, the present study sought to determine the minimum requirements for eliciting an AB deficit. To this end, we examined if the occurrence of an AB depends on T1 exposure duration, the requirement to perform a task for T1, and awareness of T1. The results showed that an AB deficit occurs regardless of the presentation duration of T1, and regardless of whether there is a T1 task. A boundary condition for the occurrence of an AB was found in conscious awareness of T1. With a near-threshold detection task for T1, attention blinked when T1 was seen, but not when T1 was missed. Accordingly, we conclude that the minimum requirement for an AB deficit is T1 awareness.

Reproducibility of visual-field asymmetries: Nine replication studies investigating lateralization of visual information processing.

Numerous behavioral studies suggest that the processing of various types of visual stimuli and features may be more efficient in either the left or the right visual field. However, not all of these visual-field asymmetries (VFAs) have been observed consistently. Moreover, it is typically unclear whether a failure to observe a particular VFA can be ascribed to certain characteristics of the participants and stimuli, to a lack of statistical power, or to the actual absence of an effect. To increase our understanding of lateralization of visual information processing, we have taken a rigorous methodological and statistical approach to examine the reproducibility of various previously reported VFAs. We did so by performing (near-)exact replications of nine representative previous studies, aiming for sufficient power to detect the effects of interest, and taking into consideration all relevant dependent variables (reaction times and error rates). Following Bayesian analyses -on our data alone as well as on the combined evidence from the original and replication studies- we find precise and reliable evidence that support VFAs in the processing of faces, emotional expressions, global and local information, words, and in the distribution of spatial attention. In contrast, we find less convincing evidence for VFAs in processing of high and low spatial frequencies. Finally, we find no evidence for VFAs in categorical perception of color and shape oddballs, and in the judgments of categorical and coordinate spatial relations. We discuss our results in the light of their implications for theories of visual lateralization.

Top-down control is not lost in the attentional blink: evidence from intact endogenous cueing.

The attentional blink (AB) refers to the finding that performance on the second of two targets (T1 and T2) is impaired when the targets are presented at a target onset asynchrony (TOA) of less than 500 ms. One account of the AB assumes that the processing load of T1 leads to a loss of top-down control over stimulus selection. The present study tested this account by examining whether an endogenous spatial cue that indicates the location of a following T2 can facilitate T2 report even when the cue and T2 occur within the time window of the AB. Results from three experiments showed that endogenous cuing had a significant effect on T2 report, both during and outside of the AB; this cuing effect was modulated by both the cue-target onset asynchrony and by cue validity, while it was invariant to the AB. These results suggest that top-down control over target selection is not lost during the AB.

Correction to: Cognitive control in media multitaskers: Two replication studies and a meta-Analysis.

In the original article, the number of HMMs and LMMs who took part in the first study was reported to have been 13and 10, respectively (p. 2624).

Enhanced recognition of memorable pictures in ultra-fast RSVP.

Long-term recognition memory for some pictures is consistently better than for others (Isola, Xiao, Parikh, Torralba, & Oliva, IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 36(7), 1469-1482, 2014). Here, we investigated whether pictures found to be memorable in a long-term memory test are also perceived more easily when presented in ultra-rapid RSVP. Participants viewed 6 pictures they had never seen before that were presented for 13 to 360 ms per picture in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sequence. In half the trials, one of the pictures was a memorable or a nonmemorable picture and perception of this picture was probed by a visual recognition test at the end of the sequence. Recognition for pictures from the memorable set was higher than for those from the nonmemorable set, and this difference increased with increasing duration. Nonmemorable picture recognition was low initially, did not increase until 120 ms, and never caught up with memorable picture recognition performance. Thus, the long-term memorability of an image is associated with initial perceptibility: A picture that is hard to grasp quickly is hard to remember later.

Controlling the Resit Effect by Means of Investment Depreciation.

In accordance with a rational model of study-time investment, we previously found that the prospect of a resit exam leads to lower investments of fictional study-time for a first exam opportunity in an investment game utilizing simulated exams. In the current study, we investigated whether the depreciation of one's first-exam investment reduces the resit effect. Specifically, we investigated study-time investments for a simulated multiple-choice exam in which 0, 50, or 100% of the initial study-time investment was lost before the resit exam. In accordance with our predictions, we found that the magnitude of the resit effect decreased as investment depreciation increased. This finding suggests that the negative effect of resit exams on study-time investment may be countered by creating conditions under which investment depreciation (i.e. forgetting) is expected to occur, for instance, by increasing the temporal interval between the first attempt and resit exam.

Working memory consolidation: insights from studies on attention and working memory.

Working memory, the system that maintains a limited set of representations for immediate use in cognition, is a central part of human cognition. Three processes have recently been proposed to govern information storage in working memory: consolidation, refreshing, and removal. Here, we discuss in detail the theoretical construct of working memory consolidation, a process critical to the creation of a stable working memory representation. We present a brief overview of the research that indicated the need for a construct such as working memory consolidation and the subsequent research that has helped to define the parameters of the construct. We then move on to explicitly state the points of agreement as to what processes are involved in working memory consolidation.

Cross-task repetition amnesia: Impaired recall of RSVP targets held in memory for a secondary task.

People often fail to select and encode the second of two targets presented within less than 500ms in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), an effect known as the attentional blink. We investigated how report of the two targets is affected when one of them is maintained in working memory for a secondary, memory-search task. The results showed that report of either target was impaired when it was a member of the memory set relative to when it was not. This effect was independent of both the temporal interval separating the RSVP target from the presentation of the memory set and the interval separating the targets. We propose that the deficit in recall occurs because the association between a target and the memory-search task interferes with the formation of a new association between that target and the following RSVP task, with the result that observers may be biased to ascribe the target only to the memory set.

Cognitive control in media multitaskers: Two replication studies and a meta-Analysis.

Ophir, Nass, and Wagner (2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(37), 15583-15587) found that people with high scores on the media-use questionnaire-a questionnaire that measures the proportion of media-usage time during which one uses more than one medium at the same time-show impaired performance on various tests of distractor filtering. Subsequent studies, however, did not all show this association between media multitasking and distractibility, thus casting doubt on the reliability of the initial findings. Here, we report the results of two replication studies and a meta-analysis that included the results from all published studies into the relationship between distractor filtering and media multitasking. Our replication studies included a total of 14 tests that had an average replication power of 0.81. Of these 14 tests, only five yielded a statistically significant effect in the direction of increased distractibility for people with higher scores on the media-use questionnaire, and only two of these effects held in a more conservative Bayesian analysis. Supplementing these outcomes, our meta-analysis on a total of 39 effect sizes yielded a weak but significant association between media multitasking and distractibility that turned nonsignificant after correction for small-study effects. Taken together, these findings lead us to question the existence of an association between media multitasking and distractibility in laboratory tasks of information processing.

Forget Me if You Can: Attentional capture by to-Be-remembered and to-Be-forgotten visual stimuli.

Previous studies on directed forgetting in visual working memory (VWM) have shown that, if people are cued to remember only a subset of the items currently held in VWM, they will completely forget the uncued, no longer relevant items. While this finding is indicative of selective remembering, it remains unclear whether directed forgetting can also occur in the absence of any concurrent to-be-remembered information. In the current study, we addressed this matter by asking participants to memorize a single object that could be followed by a cue to forget or remember this object. Following the cue, we assessed the object's activation in VWM by determining whether a matching distractor would capture attention in a visual search task. The results showed that, compared to a cue to remember, a cue to forget led to a reduced likelihood of attentional capture by a matching distractor. In addition, we found that capture effects by to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten distractors remained stable as the interval between the onset of the cue and the search task increased from 700 ms to 3900 ms. We conclude that, in the absence of any to-be-remembered objects, an instruction to forget an object held in WM leads to a rapid but incomplete deactivation of the representation of that object, thus allowing it to continue to produce a weak biasing effect on attentional selection for several seconds after the instruction to forget.

Digit-color synaesthesia only enhances memory for colors in a specific context: A new method of duration thresholds to measure serial recall.

For digit-color synaesthetes, digits elicit vivid experiences of color that are highly consistent for each individual. The conscious experience of synaesthesia is typically unidirectional: Digits evoke colors but not vice versa. There is an ongoing debate about whether synaesthetes have a memory advantage over non-synaesthetes. One key question in this debate is whether synaesthetes have a general superiority or whether any benefit is specific to a certain type of material. Here, we focus on immediate serial recall and ask digit-color synaesthetes and controls to memorize digit and color sequences. We developed a sensitive staircase method manipulating presentation duration to measure participants' serial recall of both overlearned and novel sequences. Our results show that synaesthetes can activate digit information to enhance serial memory for color sequences. When color sequences corresponded to ascending or descending digit sequences, synaesthetes encoded these sequences at a faster rate than their non-synaesthetes counterparts and faster than non-structured color sequences. However, encoding color sequences is approximately 200 ms slower than encoding digit sequences directly, independent of group and condition, which shows that the translation process is time consuming. These results suggest memory advantages in synaesthesia require a modified dual-coding account, in which secondary (synaesthetically linked) information is useful only if it is more memorable than the primary information to be recalled. Our study further shows that duration thresholds are a sensitive method to measure subtle differences in serial recall performance. (PsycINFO Database Record

Retro-Active Emotion: Do Negative Emotional Stimuli Disrupt Consolidation in Working Memory?

While many studies have shown that a task-irrelevant emotionally arousing stimulus can interfere with the processing of a shortly following target, it remains unclear whether an emotional stimulus can also retro-actively interrupt the ongoing processing of an earlier target. In two experiments, we examined whether the presentation of a negative emotionally arousing picture can disrupt working memory consolidation of a preceding visual target. In both experiments, the effects of negative emotional pictures were compared with the effects of neutral pictures. In Experiment 1, the pictures were entirely task-irrelevant whereas in Experiment 2 the pictures were associated with a 2-alternative forced choice task that required participants to respond to the color of a frame surrounding the pictures. The results showed that the appearance of the pictures did not interfere with target consolidation when the pictures were task-irrelevant, whereas such interference was observed when the pictures were associated with a 2-AFC task. Most importantly, however, the results showed no effects of whether the picture had neutral or emotional content. Implications for further research are discussed.

Top-down controlled, delayed selection in the attentional blink.

In a previous study, it was shown that the attentional blink (AB)--the failure to recall the 2nd of 2 visual targets (T1 and T2) presented within 500 ms in rapid serial visual presentation--is reduced when T2 is preceded by a distractor that shares a feature with T2 (e.g., color; Nieuwenstein, Chun, van der Lubbe & Hooge, 2005). Here, this cuing effect is shown to be contingent on attentional set. For example, a red distractor letter preceding a green digit T2 is an effective cue when the task is to look for red and green digits, but the same red cue is relatively ineffective when the task is to look for only green digits or when the color of T2 is not specified. It is also shown that cuing is not interrupted by a distractor intervening between the cue and T2. These findings provide evidence for a contingent, delayed selection account of the AB.