Top-down imagery overrides the influence of selection history effects.

The present study investigated whether color imagery could override the representations of the prevalent selection history effect termed Priming of Pop-out (PoP), which is constituted by faster responding when the target color is repeated rather than switched across trials of color singleton search. Participants imagined a color in the interval between trials of a color singleton search task that could be the same as or different to the previous target color, and they were to rate the vividness of these representations following each imagery event. It was revealed that when highly vivid imagery was reported, the PoP effect was attenuated relative to less vivid forms of it (and absent in two out of three experiments), and that color imagery eliminated the build-up of priming following consecutive target color repeats. Overall, the present findings suggest the representations of the selection history system can be overridden by top-down imagery.

Selective attention effects on recognition: the roles of list context and perceptual difficulty.

Two recent studies reported superior recognition memory for items that were incongruent targets than for items that were congruent targets in a prior incidental study phase (Krebs et al. in Cereb Cortex (New York, NY) 25(3):833-843, 2015; Rosner et al. in Psychol Res 79(3):411-424, 2015). The present study examined this effect further by addressing two issues. First, we examined whether this effect is sensitive to the list context in which congruent and incongruent items are presented. In Experiment 1, this issue was addressed by manipulating the relative proportions of congruent and incongruent trials in the study phase. In Experiments 2A and 2B, the same issue was examined by contrasting randomly intermixed and blocked manipulations of congruency. The results of these experiments, as well as a trial-to-trial sequence analysis, demonstrate that the recognition advantage for incongruent over congruent items is robust and remarkably insensitive to list context. Second, we examined recognition of incongruent and congruent items relative to a single word baseline condition. Incongruent (Experiment 3A) and congruent (Experiment 3B) items were both better recognized than single word items, though this effect was substantially stronger for incongruent items. These results suggest that perceptual processing difficulty, rather than interference caused by different target and distractor identities on its own, contributes to the enhanced recognition of incongruent items. Together, the results demonstrate that processes that are sensitive to perceptual processing difficulty of items but largely insensitive to list context produce heightened recognition sensitivity for incongruent targets.

Strategic visual imagery and automatic priming effects in pop-out visual search.

Priming of Pop-out (PoP) is defined by faster responses in singleton search when the target repeats across trials than when it switches. In a recent study, it was shown that the PoP effect can be reversed using visual imagery (Cochrane, Nwabuike, Thomson, & Milliken, 2018). The goal of the current study was to pinpoint the procedural constraints necessary to observe the imagery-induced reversal of PoP. Across four experiments the reversal of the PoP effect (i) depended critically on the response-stimulus interval between trials, (ii) was remarkably stable across long experimental sessions, (iii) was observed within trial-pairs when participants engaged in visual imagery, but not between trial-pairs when participants did not, and (iv) appeared to be more robust with self-paced trial-pairs than with a long continuous run of trials. Together, these results offer strong confirmation of the idea that self-generated visual imagery can produce robust reversals of the PoP effect.

Perceptual similarity induces overinvestment in an attentional blink task.

The overinvestment account of the attentional blink (AB) posits that the AB results from the allocation of more resources than necessary to encode a first target (T1), which in turn lowers the resources available to encode a second target (T2) shortly thereafter. Across two experiments, we examined whether resource allocation to T1, and thus overinvestment that results in an AB effect, might be limited by perceptual mechanisms that evaluate the need for encoding resources. The key result observed in both experiments was that a relatively easy to encode T1 can nonetheless result in an AB when it is perceptually similar to a more difficult to encode T1. The importance of experimental context as an influence on the allocation, or overinvestment, of attentional resources to T1 is highlighted by these findings.

A cow on the prairie vs. a cow on the street: long-term consequences of semantic conflict on episodic encoding.

Long-term effects of cognitive conflict on performance are not as well understood as immediate effects. We used a change detection task to explore long-term consequences of cognitive conflict by manipulating the congruity between a changing object and a background scene. According to conflict-based accounts of memory formation, incongruent trials (e.g., a cow on the street), in spite of hindering immediate performance, should promote stronger encoding than congruent trials (e.g., a cow on a prairie). Surprisingly, across three experiments we show that semantic incongruity actually impairs remembering of the information presented during scene processing. This set of results is incompatible with the frequently accepted hypothesis of conflict-triggered learning. Rather, we discuss the present data and other studies previously reported in the literature in the light of two much older hypotheses of memory formation: the desirable difficulty and the levels of processing principles.

Recollection and familiarity for words and faces: a study comparing Remember-Know judgements and the Process Dissociation Procedure.

Measures of recollection and familiarity often differ depending on the paradigm utilised. Remember-Know (R-K) and Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP) methods have been commonly used but rarely compared within a single study. In the current experiments, R-K and PDP were compared by examining the effect of attention at study and time to respond at test on recollection and familiarity using the same experimental procedures for each paradigm. We also included faces in addition to words to test the generality of the findings often obtained using words. The results from the R-K paradigm revealed that recollection and familiarity were similarly affected by attention at study and time to respond at test. However, in the case of PDP, the measures of recollection and familiarity showed a different pattern of results. The effects observed for recollection were similar to those obtained with the R-K method, whereas familiarity was affected by time to respond but not by attention at study. These results are discussed in relation to the controlled-automatic processing distinction and the contribution of each paradigm to research on recognition memory.

Contextual control over selective attention: evidence from a two-target method.

Selective attention is generally studied with conflict tasks, using response time as the dependent measure. Here, we study the impact of selective attention to a first target, T1, presented simultaneously with a distractor, on the accuracy of subsequent encoding of a second target item, T2. This procedure produces an "attentional blink" (AB) effect much like that reported in other studies, and allowed us to study the influence of context on cognitive control with a novel method. In particular, we examined whether preparation to attend selectively to T1 had an impact on the selective encoding of T1 that would translate to report of T2. Preparation to attend selectively was manipulated by varying whether difficult selective attention T1 trials were presented in the context of other difficult selective attention T1 trials. The results revealed strong context effects of this nature, with smaller AB effects when difficult selective attention T1 trials were embedded in a context with many, rather than few, other difficult selective attention T1 trials. Further, the results suggest that both the trial-to-trial local context and the block-wide global context modulate performance in this task.

Selective attention and recognition: effects of congruency on episodic learning.

Recent research on cognitive control has focused on the learning consequences of high selective attention demands in selective attention tasks (e.g., Botvinick, Cognit Affect Behav Neurosci 7(4):356-366, 2007; Verguts and Notebaert, Psychol Rev 115(2):518-525, 2008). The current study extends these ideas by examining the influence of selective attention demands on remembering. In Experiment 1, participants read aloud the red word in a pair of red and green spatially interleaved words. Half of the items were congruent (the interleaved words had the same identity), and the other half were incongruent (the interleaved words had different identities). Following the naming phase, participants completed a surprise recognition memory test. In this test phase, recognition memory was better for incongruent than for congruent items. In Experiment 2, context was only partially reinstated at test, and again recognition memory was better for incongruent than for congruent items. In Experiment 3, all of the items contained two different words, but in one condition the words were presented close together and interleaved, while in the other condition the two words were spatially separated. Recognition memory was better for the interleaved than for the separated items. This result rules out an interpretation of the congruency effects on recognition in Experiments 1 and 2 that hinges on stronger relational encoding for items that have two different words. Together, the results support the view that selective attention demands for incongruent items lead to encoding that improves recognition.

Control of spatial orienting: context-specific proportion cued effects in an exogenous spatial cueing task.

Cognitive control refers to the ability to adjust strategy use based on the demands of a current context or task. Recent research using attentional filtering tasks has shown that cognitive control can adapt rapidly and automatically in accord with learning that is specific to particular tasks, items, and contexts (Crump, Gong, & Milliken, 2006; Fernandez-Duque & Knight, 2008; Jacoby, Lindsay, & Hessels, 2003). However, the role of context-specific control has not been investigated in detail in spatial orienting tasks. In a series of three experiments, the proportion of validly cued trials in an exogenous spatial cueing task was manipulated for one context but not for another context, with the two contexts intermixed randomly across trials. The results revealed that spatial/temporal contextual cues in conjunction, but not individually, produced context-specific control over spatial orienting.

Re-examining the role of context in implicit sequence learning.

Implicit sequence learning typically develops gradually, is often expressed quite rigidly, and is heavily reliant on contextual features. Recently we reported results pointing to the role of context-specific processes in the acquisition and expression of implicit sequence knowledge (D'Angelo, Milliken, Jiménez, & Lupiáñez, 2013). Here we examined further the role of context in learning of first-order conditional sequences, and whether context also plays a role in learning second-order conditional structures. Across five experiments we show that the role of context in first-order conditional sequences may not be as clear as we had previously reported, while at the same time we find evidence for the role of context in learning second-order conditional sequences. Together the results suggest that temporal context may be sufficient to learn complementary first-order conditional sequences, but that additional contextual information is necessary to concurrently learn higher-order sequential structures.

A novel demonstration of preparation in pop-out search.

There is an ongoing debate among visual attention researchers about whether top-down processes contribute to pop-out search. In the present study, we describe a new method to orthogonally manipulate top-down preparation and feature priming in a pop-out search task. On each trial, participants viewed a single-item (randomly blue or orange) followed by a pop-out search display (randomly blue target with orange distractors, or vice versa). Preparation was induced by instructing participants to respond to the single-item if it was a particular colour and to ignore it otherwise-but to respond to the odd-coloured target in all following pop-out search displays. This method allowed us to examine whether top-down preparation for the single-item influenced subsequent pop-out search. Our results revealed a large effect of preparation for the single-item on subsequent search response times. We discuss this result in relation to the interplay between top-down control and selection history effects in pop-out visual search. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Event-related potentials as brain correlates of item specific proportion congruent effects.

The item-specific proportion congruency (ISPC) effect is consistent with the idea that control processes can be applied rapidly in accord with previously experienced conflict for a particular category. An alternative account of this effect is that it reflects item-specific learning processes unrelated to control at the level of the category. The accounts predict the same behaviour but differ in terms of electrophysiological predictions. Two experiments examined the ISPC effect with a particular focus on neural correlates that might reveal whether, and how early in processing, high and low proportion congruent items are treated as distinct classes of stimuli. For both tasks, the proportion congruency category was distinguished prior to the congruence of the specific stimulus, as early as 100 ms post-stimulus onset for the global/local identification task (Experiment 1) and 150 ms for the Stroop task (Experiment 2). The results support an on-line control account of ISPC effects.

Implementing flexibility in automaticity: evidence from context-specific implicit sequence learning.

Attention is often dichotomized into controlled vs. automatic processing, where controlled processing is slow, flexible, and intentional, and automatic processing is fast, inflexible, and unintentional. In contrast to this strict dichotomy, there is mounting evidence for context-specific processes that are engaged rapidly yet are also flexible. In the present study we extend this idea to the domain of implicit learning to examine whether flexibility in automatic processes can be implemented through the reliance on contextual features. Across three experiments we show that participants can learn implicitly two complementary sequences that are associated with distinct contexts, and that transfer of learning when the two contexts are randomly intermixed depends on the distinctiveness of the two contexts. Our results point to the role of context-specific processes in the acquisition and expression of implicit sequence knowledge, and also suggest that episodic details can be represented in sequence knowledge.

Revisiting the time course of inter-trial feature priming in singleton search.

Current theories of the locus of inter-trial priming effects in efficient visual search posit an early perceptual component that reflects the short-term influence of a memory trace for low-level stimulus attributes. Despite the fact that this memory trace is hypothesized to be short term, and should therefore have a diminishing influence on performance over time, there has been relatively little study of the effect of time alone on singleton priming effects. The present series of experiments addresses this issue by systematically examining the effect of time on the priming of pop-out (PoP) effect. In Experiment 1, we show that the PoP effect does indeed diminish with increases in the RSI between trials, and does so in accord with a power-law function. In Experiment 2, we show that temporal discriminability of trial n - 1 from the trial that precedes it does not contribute to PoP effects. The results of Experiment 3 revealed two key results: (1) the PoP effect survives an equivalent number of intervening trials across very different RSI conditions; and (2) the cumulative target repetition benefit does depend on the RSI between trials. Together, the results favor neither a simple passive decay nor a strong episodic retrieval account of the PoP effect.

Learning what to expect: context-specific control over intertrial priming effects in singleton search.

The present study explored the degree to which repetition effects in color pop-out search from trial n - 1 to trial n are subject to the attentional control settings of the observer. Intertrial priming effects were compared between two contexts that differed in terms of the utility of immediate prior experience for current performance; in one context, the target was likely to repeat, and in the other context, the target was likely to alternate from one trial to the next. Across two experiments, priming of pop-out (PoP) effects (Malkjovic & Nakayama; Memory & Cognition 22:657-672, 1994) were modulated in accord with the probability of target color repetition in a given trial context. Importantly, this modulation persisted when trial history preceding trial n - 1 was controlled for. Furthermore, this control over PoP seems not to derive from explicit strategies and is not an artifact of randomly occurring strings of same-target trials. We argue that priming effects in singleton search from trial n - 1 to trial n are subject to a form of implicit top-down control.

Top-down then automatic: Instructions can continue to influence visual search when no longer actively implemented.

The present study investigated the automaticity of top-down instructions in visual search when the instruction was no longer actively implemented. To do so, we exploited the Priming of Pop-out (PoP) effect, a selection history phenomenon that reflects faster responses when the target and distractor colors are repeated than switched across trials of singleton search. We then had participants perform a color singleton search task where they implemented the instruction of imagining the opposite color of the previous target, which put the target colors underlying PoP and the imagery instruction in opposition. To assess automaticity, on some trials participants were instructed to stop implementing the imagery instruction. When the imagery instruction was implemented, responses were faster when the target and distractor colors switched (i.e., imagery congruent) than repeated (i.e., imagery incongruent) across search displays - a pattern of results opposite to the PoP effect. When participants were to not implement this instruction, the PoP effect was absent, indicating the imagery instruction had a lingering influence on visual search. This remained true even when participants reported successfully not implementing the instruction, and only when the imagery abandonment instruction was supplanted by a different top-down task was the lingering influence removed such that the PoP effect returned. Overall, the present study demonstrates that top-down instructions can continue to influence visual search despite the will of the observer.

Imagined object files: Visual imagery produces partial repetition costs where perception does not.

The present study explored whether object (or event) files can be formed that integrate color imagery and perceptual location features. To assess this issue, a cue-target procedure was used whereby color imagery was cued to be generated at a particular location in space, which was then followed by a perceptual color discrimination task. Partial repetition costs (PRCs) were then measured by varying the overlap of the color and location features of the cue and target to evaluate whether an object/event file was formed. Robust PRCs were observed when imagery was generated at a location, supporting the idea that imagery and perception can be incorporated into a common event file. It was also revealed that the PRC effects for perceptual color cues were tenuous-they did not reach significance in the present study. Overall, the present study indicates that imagery can produce stronger binding effects than perception, offering important insights into the role that active engagement plays in the formation of object/event files.

Item-specific control of attention capture: An eye movement study.

Measures of attentional capture are sensitive to attentional control settings. Recent research suggests that such control settings can be linked associatively to specific items. Rapid item-specific retrieval of these control settings can then modulate measures of attentional capture. However, the processes that produce this item-specific control of attentional capture are unclear. The current study addressed this issue by examining eye-movement patterns associated with the item-specific proportion congruency effect (ISPC). Participants searched for a shape singleton target in search displays that also contained a colour singleton-the colour singleton was either the same item as the shape singleton (congruent trials) or a different item (incongruent trials). The relative proportions of congruent and incongruent trials were manipulated separately for two distinct item types that were randomly intermixed. Response times (RTs) were faster on congruent than incongruent trials, and this congruency effect was larger for high-proportion congruent (HPC) than low-proportion congruent (LPC) items. Eye movement data revealed a higher proportion of saccades towards the distractor and longer dwell times on the distractor in the HPC condition. These results suggest that item-specific associative learning can influence the strength of representation of the task goal (e.g., find the odd shape), a form of selection history effect in visual search.

Contingency blindness: location-identity binding mismatches obscure awareness of spatial contingencies and produce profound interference in visual working memory.

The purpose of the present study was to highlight the role of location-identity binding mismatches in obscuring explicit awareness of a strong contingency. In a spatial-priming procedure, we introduced a high likelihood of location-repeat trials. Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b demonstrated that participants' explicit awareness of this contingency was heavily influenced by the local match in location-identity bindings. In Experiment 3, we sought to determine why location-identity binding mismatches produce such low levels of contingency awareness. Our results suggest that binding mismatches can interfere substantially with visual-memory performance. We attribute the low levels of contingency awareness to participants' inability to remember the critical location-identity binding in the prime on a trial-to-trial basis. These results imply a close interplay between object files and visual working memory.

It hurts more than it helps: Cuing T1 with imagery can impair T2 identification in an attentional blink task.

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate whether cuing a first target with color imagery could influence second target identification using the two-target attentional blink procedure of MacLellan, Shore, and Milliken (2015, Psychological Research, 79, 556-569.). This method asks participants to identify a first target word interleaved with a distractor word and a second target word that follows the first target after a variable stimulus onset asynchrony. Prior to each trial of the two-target procedure, participants were cued to generate color imagery that was congruent with the color of the first target word, the color of the distractor word, the color of neither the first target or distractor words (Experiment 2), or to withhold generating color imagery (Experiment 3). The results revealed that identification of the second target was impaired when the cue was congruent with the distractor word, and equivalent when the cue was congruent with the first target word, relative to when color imagery was withheld. These results suggest that the attentional resources needed to identify the first target were not reduced by a match between the color of imagery and the first target, but a match between the color of imagery and the distractor increased the attentional resources needed to identify the first target.