Attenuation of spatial bias with target template variation.

This study investigated the impact of target template variation or consistency on attentional bias in location probability learning. Participants conducted a visual search task to find a heterogeneous shape among a homogeneous set of distractors. The target and distractor shapes were either fixed throughout the experiment (target-consistent group) or unpredictably varied on each trial (target-variant group). The target was often presented in one possible search region, unbeknownst to the participants. When the target template was consistent throughout the biased visual search, spatial attention was persistently biased toward the frequent target location. However, when the target template was inconsistent and varied during the biased search, the spatial bias was attenuated so that attention was less prioritized to a frequent target location. The results suggest that the alternative use of target templates may interfere with the emergence of a persistent spatial bias. The regularity-based spatial bias depends on the number of attentional shifts to the frequent target location, but also on search-relevant contexts.

Spatial Attention in Visual Working Memory Strengthens Feature-Location Binding.

There is a debate about whether working memory (WM) representations are individual features or bound objects. While spatial attention is reported to play a significant role in feature binding, little is known about the role of spatial attention in WM. To address this gap, the current study required participants to maintain multiple items in their WM and employed a memory-driven attention capture paradigm. Spatial attention in WM was manipulated by presenting an exogenous cue at one of the locations that memory items had occupied. The effects of spatial attention on attention guidance in visual search (Experiment 1) and memory performance (Experiments 1 and 2) were explored. The results show that WM-driven attention guidance did not vary based on whether the search features came from the same object in WM; instead, it depended on the number of features, regardless of their source object. In memory tasks, the cued object outperformed the uncued object. Specifically, the test item was better rejected when the features were mis-bound in the cued location than in the uncued location. These findings suggest that memory-driven attention guidance is feature-based, and spatial attention in WM helps bind features into object structures based on location.

Emotion Perception Rules Abide by Cultural Display Rules.

The current study compared emotion perception in two cultures where display rules for emotion expression deviate. In Experiment 1, participants from America and Korea played a repeated prisoner's dilemma game with a counterpart, who was, in actuality, a programmed defector. Emotion expressions were exchanged via emoticons at the end of every round. After winning more points by defecting, the counterpart sent either a matching emoticon (a joyful face) or a mismatching emoticon (a regretful face). The results showed that Americans in the matching condition were more likely to defect, or to punish, compared to those in the mismatching condition, suggesting that more weight was given to their counterpart's joyful expression. This difference was smaller for Koreans, suggesting a higher disregard for the outward expression. In a second, supplementary experiment, we found that Korean participants were more likely to cooperate in the mismatching or regretful condition, when they thought their counterpart was a Westerner. Overall, our data suggest that emotion perception rules abide by the display rules of one's culture but are also influenced by the counterpart's culture.

Eye-specific attentional bias driven by selection history.

Attention helps in selection among competing stimuli, but attentional selection also biases subsequent information processing as a prior experience. Previous studies have demonstrated that intertrial repetition of target features or locations facilitates perceptual processing as selection history guides attention. In the current study, we found that eye selection history in binocular rivalry induces eye-specific attentional bias. In four experiments, participants responded to the target presented at one of the locations on either eye. The results showed that the target was detected faster when presented to the same eye as in the previous trial under binocular rivalry. However, the effect of eye repetition was not observed when the interocular conflict was reduced by presenting stimuli to only one eye on each trial. Our result indicates that eye selection history can affect eye dominance during binocular rivalry as attention amplifies selected information among competing inputs. These findings suggest that prior experience of attentional deployment modulates subsequent information processing owing to the residual effect of attentional amplification.

Habit-like attentional bias is unlike goal-driven attentional bias against spatial updating.

Statistical knowledge of a target's location may benefit visual search, and rapidly understanding the changes in regularity would increase the adaptability in visual search situations where fast and accurate performance is required. The current study tested the sources of statistical knowledge-explicitly-given instruction or experience-driven learning-and whether they affect the speed and location spatial attention is guided. Participants performed a visual search task with a statistical regularity to bias one quadrant ("old-rich" condition) in the training phase, followed by another quadrant ("new-rich" condition) in the switching phase. The "instruction" group was explicitly instructed on the regularity, whereas the "no-instruction" group was not. It was expected that the instruction group would rely on goal-driven attention (using regularities with explicit top-down knowledge), and the no-instruction group would rely on habit-like attention (learning regularities through repetitive experiences) in visual search. Compared with the no-instruction group, the instruction group readjusted spatial attention following the regularity switch more rapidly. The instruction group showed greater attentional bias toward the new-rich quadrant than the old-rich quadrant; however, the no-instruction group showed a similar extent of attentional bias to two rich quadrants. The current study suggests that the source of statistical knowledge can affect attentional allocation. Moreover, habit-like attention, a different type of attentional source than goal-driven attention, is relatively implicit and inflexible.

Implicit learning of a response-contingent task.

In previous research, relative response speed was revealed to have been used as a predictive cue to guide attention to a target location, in a phenomenon known as "cueing by response." In this study, we explored whether responses can implicitly induce the use of cognitive control, especially in selecting and implementing task-sets. Participants were trained to perform tasks corresponding to different task cues during the training phase. Unbeknownst to participants, the response-contingent group's response to the previous trial determined task type in the subsequent trial, while that of the random group was randomly determined. When the task cue was removed in the testing phase, the percentage of correctly selected response-contingent tasks of the response-contingent group was at a greater level than the chance and the random group, implying that cueing by response can activate appropriate task-sets. The perceptual stimuli did not modulate the task cueing by response, and the response was directly associated with the task. Thus, the results show that top-down control can be carried out even without conscious awareness, using response as a novel type of cue.

Flexibility and stability of habit learning depend on temporal signal variation.

The visual system can learn statistical regularities and form search habits that guide attention to a region where a target frequently appears. Although regularities in the real world can change over time, little is known about how such changes affect habit learning. Using a location probability learning task, we demonstrated that a constant target location probability resulted in a long-term habit-like attentional bias to the target-frequent location. However, when the target probability changed over time in any pattern, the same amount of learning induced only a short-term bias and disrupted the formation of long-term search habits. Moreover, although temporal changes in regularity during initial learning interfered with the acquisition of a search habit, they did not modulate the already consolidated bias. These results suggest that the stability and flexibility of habitual attention learning depend on when and how the statistical regularities in the environment change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Simple action planning can affect attentional allocation in subsequent visual search.

Previous research has shown that mental representations of actions can influence performance on relevant tasks or dimensions even when there is no overt execution of the action. In this study, we examined whether cognitive processes prior to the physical execution of an action can elicit attentional bias towards irrelevant tasks or dimensions of that action. Participants performed two independent tasks-an action task and a search task-where they were instructed to plan an action and execute the action following the visual search task. We found that the same features of the object were prioritized in the subsequent search task when participants had planned an action response on the object in comparison to when they had not. This effect occurred even when the feature was irrelevant to the tasks or required action. Furthermore, the effect of action planning without physical response was found to be comparable to the effect of physical response. These results suggest that planning of a simple action can induce attentional bias to irrelevant features of objects even without physical action.

Context affects implicit learning of spatial bias depending on task relevance.

Recent studies on the probability cueing effect have shown that a spatial bias emerges toward a location where a target frequently appears. In the present study, we explored whether such spatial bias can be flexibly shifted when the target-frequent location changes depending on the given context. In four consecutive experiments, participants performed a visual search task within two distinct contexts that predicted the visual quadrant that was more likely to contain a target. We found that spatial attention was equally biased toward two target-frequent quadrants, regardless of context (context-independent spatial bias), when the context information was not mandatory for accurate visual search. Conversely, when the context became critical for the visual search task, the spatial bias shifted significantly more to the target-frequent quadrant predicted by the given context (context-specific spatial bias). These results show that the task relevance of context determines whether probabilistic knowledge can be learned flexibly in a context-specific manner.

Independent operation of implicit working memory under cognitive load.

Implicit working memory (WM) has been known to operate non-consciously and unintentionally. The current study investigated whether implicit WM is a discrete mechanism from explicit WM in terms of cognitive resource. To induce cognitive resource competition, we used a conjunction search task (Experiment 1) and imposed spatial WM load (Experiment 2a and 2b). Each trial was composed of a set of five consecutive search displays. The location of the first four displays appeared as per pre-determined patterns, but the fifth display could follow the same pattern or not. If implicit WM can extract the moving pattern of stimuli, response times for the fifth target would be faster when it followed the pattern compared to when it did not. Our results showed implicit WM can operate when participants are searching for the conjunction target and even while maintaining spatial WM information. These results suggest that implicit WM is independent from explicit spatial WM.

Gamma-Band Activities in Mouse Frontal and Visual Cortex Induced by Coherent Dot Motion.

A key question within systems neuroscience is to understand how the brain encodes spatially and temporally distributed local features and binds these together into one perceptual representation. Previous works in animal and human have shown that changes in neural synchrony occur during the perceptual processing and these changes are distinguished by the emergence of gamma-band oscillations (GBO, 30-80 Hz, centered at 40 Hz). Here, we used the mouse electroencephalogram to investigate how different cortical areas play roles in perceptual processing by assessing their GBO patterns during the visual presentation of coherently/incoherently moving random-dot kinematogram and static dots display. Our results revealed that GBO in the visual cortex were strongly modulated by the moving dots regardless of the existence of a global dot coherence, whereas GBO in frontal cortex were modulated by coherence of the motion. Moreover, concurrent GBO across the multiple cortical area occur more frequently for coherently moving dots. Taken together, these findings of GBO in the mouse frontal and visual cortex are related to the perceptual binding of local features into a globally-coherent representation, suggesting the dynamic interplay across the local/distributed networks of GBO in the global processing of optic flow.

Teaching and Practicing Caring in the Classroom: Students' Responses to a Self-Awareness Intervention in Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing.

The purpose of this study was to test the assumption that caring could be taught by nurse educators in the classroom environment and that learning to be self-aware in a mindful state would facilitate students to listen more closely to their inner spirit, which would affect caring behaviors. A convenience sample of 238 students in the Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing course in a baccalaureate program was obtained from 2007 to 2011. At the beginning of each class and throughout the semester, self-awareness was explained to the students, a reflection statement was read, and students were asked to take two minutes of quiet time, with their eyes closed. At the end of each semester, an author-composed Self-Awareness Questionnaire and Measurement Scale was administered to consenting students to assess whether self-awareness led to caring behaviors. Students' responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Findings were positive and supported the assumption that self-awareness and silence positively affected caring behaviors in nursing students in their psychiatric nursing rotation.

Implicit learning of a speed-contingent target feature.

Previous human implicit learning studies have mostly investigated implicit associations between two consecutive stimuli or between a stimulus and the subsequent response (e.g., Cleeremans, Destrebecqz, & Boyer, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2(10), 406-416, 1998). In the present study, participants' response speed was used as a cue to predict an upcoming target feature. We called this new type of cueing, "cueing-by-response" (CBR). We investigated whether CBR could be learned implicitly. Participants performed two tasks: participants quickly responded to a target in the simple detection task and determined the orientation of a new target in the consecutive visual search task. We applied a contingency that the target location in the visual search task was determined by the participant's response speed in the preceding simple detection task. The results demonstrated that participants learned the contingency without conscious awareness; they searched for the target more efficiently in the visual search task as the experiment progressed. But when the target appeared in a random location, this efficiency disappeared. Moreover, the experimental group exhibited faster response speeds to the target in the visual search task compared with the control groups, which had no contingency. These results suggest that individuals may use the relative speed of their own response as a predictive cue to guide spatial attention toward upcoming target locations, and CBR can be implicitly learned.

Do the contents of working memory capture attention? Yes, but cognitive control matters.

There has been a controversy on whether working memory can guide attentional selection. Some researchers have reported that the contents of working memory guide attention automatically in visual search (D. Soto, D. Heinke, G. W. Humphreys, & M. J. Blanco, 2005). On the other hand, G.F. Woodman and S. J. Luck (2007) reported that they could not find any evidence of attentional capture by working memory. In the present study, we tried to find an integrative explanation for the different sets of results. We report evidence for attentional capture by working memory, but this effect was eliminated when search was perceptually demanding or the onset of the search was delayed long enough for cognitive control of search to be implemented under particular conditions. We suggest that perceptual difficulty and the time course of cognitive control as important factors that determine when information in working memory influences attention.

Experience-dependent changes in the topography of visual crowding.

The present work examined discrimination accuracy for targets that were presented either alone in the visual field (clean displays) or embedded within a dense array of letter distractors (crowded displays). The strength of visual crowding varied strongly across the four quadrants of the visual field. Furthermore, this spatial bias in crowding was strongly influenced by the observers' prior experience with specific distractor stimuli. Observers who were monolingual readers of English experienced amplified crowding in the upper-left quadrant, while subjects with primary reading skills in Korean, Chinese, or Japanese tended towards worse target discrimination in the lower visual field. This interaction with language experience was eliminated when non-alphanumeric stimuli were employed as distractors, suggesting that prior reading experience induced a stimulus-specific change in the topography of visual crowding from English letters.

Spatial working memory load impairs signal enhancement, but not attentional orienting.

The present study examined the effect of spatial working memory load on the attentional cuing effect. It is well-known that spatial working memory and spatial attention functionally overlap or share a common resource. Given this functional overlapping, it is possible that spatial working memory would also interact with the attentional cuing effect. Considering the distinction between channel selection and channel enhancement by attention (Prinzmetal, McCool, & Park, 2005), we expected that the interaction between spatial working memory and the cuing effect would differ with attentional processing type. Two experiments conducted with the spatial cuing paradigm showed that the magnitude of the cuing effect as measured by reaction time, reflecting channel selection, was uninfluenced by spatial working memory load. In contrast, spatial working memory load reduced the cuing effect as measured by accuracy, reflecting channel enhancement. These results suggest that spatial working memory load impairs signal enhancement by attention and does not influence attentional orienting per se. The interaction between spatial working memory and visual perception is also discussed.

Spatiotemporal object continuity in human ventral visual cortex.

Coherent visual experience requires that objects be represented as the same persisting individuals over time and motion. Cognitive science research has identified a powerful principle that guides such processing: Objects must trace continuous paths through space and time. Little is known, however, about how neural representations of objects, typically defined by visual features, are influenced by spatiotemporal continuity. Here, we report the consequences of spatiotemporally continuous vs. discontinuous motion on perceptual representations in human ventral visual cortex. In experiments using both dynamic occlusion and apparent motion, face-selective cortical regions exhibited significantly less activation when faces were repeated in continuous vs. discontinuous trajectories, suggesting that discontinuity caused featurally identical objects to be represented as different individuals. These results indicate that spatiotemporal continuity modulates neural representations of object identity, influencing judgments of object persistence even in the most staunchly "featural" areas of ventral visual cortex.

Concurrent working memory load can facilitate selective attention: evidence for specialized load.

Load theory predicts that concurrent working memory load impairs selective attention and increases distractor interference (N. Lavie, A. Hirst, J. W. de Fockert, & E. Viding). Here, the authors present new evidence that the type of concurrent working memory load determines whether load impairs selective attention or not. Working memory load was paired with a same/different matching task that required focusing on targets while ignoring distractors. When working memory items shared the same limited-capacity processing mechanisms with targets in the matching task, distractor interference increased. However, when working memory items shared processing with distractors in the matching task, distractor interference decreased, facilitating target selection. A specialized load account is proposed to describe the dissociable effects of working memory load on selective processing depending on whether the load overlaps with targets or with distractors.

Concurrent working memory load can reduce distraction.

People have difficulty performing two tasks at once. For example, maintaining items in working memory (WM) makes people more distractible. However, different types of WM load may have different effects on attentional selection depending on whether WM load overlaps with mechanisms involved in target or distractor processing. Three experiments examined the effect of concurrent WM load on Stroop tasks, a widely used measure of executive control and inhibition. Stroop interference increased when the type of WM load overlapped with the type of information required for the target task (experiment 1). In striking contrast, Stroop interference decreased when the type of WM load overlapped with distractor processing (experiment 2). Experiment 3 replicated these results in a different Stroop task. Thus, concurrent WM load does not always impair executive control; performance depends on how contents of WM and task-relevant information overlap. The results highlight how dissociable components of WM interact with perception and executive control.