Unconscious prioritization for face-to-face people.

One central question in the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness is regarding the scope of human consciousness. There is a lively debate as to whether high-level information integration is necessarily dependent on consciousness. This study presents a new form of unconscious integration based on the facingness between two individuals. Using a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm, Experiments 1-3 found that two facing human heads got a privilege in breaking into awareness compared to nonfacing pairs. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that the breakthrough difference between facing and nonfacing pairs could not be attributed to low-level or mid-level factors. Experiments 6, 7a, and 7b showed that the unconscious priority of facing pairs was significantly diminished when the holistic processing of the two agents was disrupted. Experiments 8-11 demonstrated that the advantage of facing pairs was only observable for human agents and not for daily objects, directional arrows, or nonhuman animals. These findings have critical implications for better understanding the scope of human consciousness and the origins of social vision. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Microsaccades reflect attention shifts: a mini review of 20 years of microsaccade research.

Microsaccades are small, involuntary eye movements that occur during fixation. Since the 1950s, researchers have conducted extensive research on the role of microsaccades in visual information processing, and found that they also play an important role in human advanced visual cognitive activities. Research over the past 20 years further suggested that there is a close relationship between microsaccades and visual attention, yet lacking a timely review. The current article aims to provide a state-of-the-art review and bring microsaccades studies into the sight of attention research. We firstly introduce basic characteristics about microsaccades, then summarized the empirical evidence supporting the view that microsaccades can reflect both external (perception) and internal (working memory) attention shifts. We finally conclude and highlight three promising avenues for future research.

Flexibility Retained: Unimpaired Updating of Expectations in Schizophrenia.

Flexibly and actively updating expectations based on feedback is crucial for navigating daily life. Previous research has shown that people with schizophrenia (PSZ) have difficulty adjusting their expectations. However, there are studies suggesting otherwise. To explore this further, we used a novel trial-based expectation updating paradigm called attribute amnesia. In the task, the participants needed to report the location of a target stimulus among distractors in pre-surprise trials. In the surprise trial, they were unexpectedly asked to report the identity of the target before reporting its location. Afterward, control trials were conducted whereby the participants were asked the same questions as in the surprise trial. Notably, the surprise trial and control trials were nearly identical, except that the participants expected to be asked about identity information in the control trials but not in the surprise trial. Thus, an improvement in identity reporting accuracy in the control trials in comparison with the surprise trial indicated active updating of expectations. In the current study, a total of 63 PSZ and 60 healthy control subjects (HCS) were enrolled. We found that both the PSZ and the HCS were unable to report information that they had fully attended to (i.e., identity) in the surprise trial. However, both groups showed a significant improvement in reporting identity information even in the first control trial. Critically, there was no significant difference in the magnitude of improvement between the two groups. The current findings indicate that PSZ have the ability to update their expectations as quickly and flexibly as HCS, at least in the context of the current task. The possible factors that might contribute to the discrepancy regarding expectation updating are discussed.

Dual routes of chunking social interaction: Insights from grouping two agent actions in working memory.

Humans have evolved the sophisticated ability to extract social relations embedded in interactive entities. One typical demonstration is a social chunking phenomenon wherein the cognitive system chunks individual actions into a unified episode basing on perceived interactive actions. However, the mechanisms underlying social chunking remain to be elucidated. Most studies have adopted static images and manipulated interactions through agents' facingness (face-to-face vs. back-to-back). Connecting agents via directed contingent actions is crucial in forming real-life social interaction. Hence, we employed dynamic actions as stimuli, separated physical- and communicative-contingency interactive actions, and predicted that domain-general physical regularities and domain-specific social relationships are crucial in social interactions, respectively. We tested this prediction by using an involuntary chunking effect in working memory, wherein two individual actions are involuntarily chunked when containing task-irrelevant interactive information. We found that involuntary chunking occurred for both types of upright interactive actions (Experiments 1, 3, 5, and 6). Inverting actions erased the chunking of communicative- but not physical-contingency actions (Experiments 2, 4, and 5). The facingness of dyads did not participate in chunking physical-contingency actions but was a prerequisite for chunking communicative-contingency actions (Experiments 3 and 6). These results reveal the dual routes of chunking interactive actions. Moreover, they suggest that the chunking mechanisms of dynamic social interaction are distinct from those of static images, highlighting the importance of using dynamic stimuli to explore the mechanisms of social interaction in emerging people-watching interdisciplinarity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Act generously when others do so: Majority influence on young children's sharing behavior.

Children's sharing behavior is profoundly shaped by social norms within their society, and they can learn these norms by directly observing how most others share in their immediate environment. Here we systematically investigated the impact of majority influence on the sharing behavior of young Chinese children through three studies (N = 336, 168 girls). Four- and 6-year-olds were allowed to choose 10 favorite stickers and had an opportunity to engage in anonymous sharing. Before making the sharing decision, children were assigned to one of two conditions: watching a video in which three peers all shared 8 out of 10 stickers (i.e., the majority sharing condition) or making their decisions without watching the video (i.e., the control condition). Results showed that both the 4- and 6-year-old children shared more stickers in the majority sharing condition than in the control condition (Studies 1 & 2). Moreover, the influence of the majority had a stronger effect compared to the influence of a single role model. Children shared more stickers after observing three peers sharing, compared to watching one peer sharing three times (Study 2). Furthermore, children were less likely to copy the majority's non-sharing behavior when it came to giving away stickers without prosocial outcomes, which was particularly evident among 4-year-olds (Study 3). The results reveal that majority influence uniquely shapes children's sharing behavior and that children selectively follow the majority based on whether the behavior exhibits prosocial attributes. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/8qNNhf9754I?si=7YfpaFpcD_IjlXjJ RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Observing a majority of three peers' unanimous generous sharing promoted sharing behavior in both 4- and 6-year-olds. The influence of three peers on children's sharing was stronger than that of one peer sharing three times. Four-year-olds, but not 6-year-olds, did not copy the non-sharing behavior of the majority as it did not lead to prosocial outcomes.

The development of commitment: Attention for intention.

Adhering to a partially defined plan requires an intentional commitment that curbs distracting desires conflicting with the planned course of action, enabling humans to act coherently over time. Two studies (N = 50, 27 girls, ages 5-6, Han Chinese, in Hangzhou, China, 2022.02-2022.03) explored the development of commitment to partial plans in a sequential decision-making task and the underlying cognitive capacity focusing on its correlation to attentional control. Results suggest that only 6-year-olds committed to partial plans (d = .51), and children's commitment ratio was positively correlated with the use of proactive control (r = .40). These findings indicate that intentional commitment does not develop simultaneously with intention understanding, but rather matures gradually with the development of attentional control.

Negative trait inference in behaviorally inhibited children influences their internalizing behaviors.

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is an early-appearing temperamental trait characterized by intense negative affect and withdrawal behaviors to novel and challenging situations. Inhibited children are more likely to display social withdrawal and experience an increased risk for internalizing problems. Trait inference, the way children interpret behaviors and infer the characteristics of others, may be one potential mechanism. The current study examined the individual differences of BI in trait inference using a cross-sectional design (Study 1, Age 4, N = 80, 38 boys, Chinese) and explored the role of trait inference (Age 4) in relation to early BI (Age 2) and later internalizing behaviors (Age 4) using a longitudinal design (Study 2, N = 163, 93 boys). Trait inference was measured by children's personality judgments after watching four pieces of behavioral information of animated actors in two conditions: a high positive information condition and a high negative information condition. We found that high BI children exhibited a more negative trait inference than low BI children did in two studies, except for the trait inference in the high negative information condition of Study 2. Besides, in Study 2, trait inference in the high positive information condition partially mediated the BI-internalizing behavior link, and such mediation effect was moderated by the level of trait inference. These findings highlight the contribution of social information processing in the social adjustment of children with extreme temperament and have implications for prevention and intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Remembering Sets: Capacity Limit and Time Limit of Ensemble Representations in Working Memory.

In a constantly changing visual environment, the ability to extract and store ensemble representations plays a crucial role in efficiently processing and remembering complex visual information. However, how working memory maintains these ensemble representations remains unclear. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the limits and characteristics of ensemble representations in working memory using a change detection paradigm. Participants were presented with multiple sets of circles grouped by spatial proximity and were asked to memorize the mean diameter of the circles in each set. Results showed that working memory could stably maintain mean sizes of approximately two sets for at least four seconds. Moreover, the memory performance of ensembles was not affected by the number of circles within a set, suggesting that individual details were not stored in working memory. These results suggest that the visual system can effectively store ensembles in working memory without preserving detailed individual information.

Attention with or without working memory: mnemonic reselection of attended information.

Attention has been regarded as the 'gatekeeper' controlling what information gets selected into working memory. However, a new perspective has emerged with the discovery of attribute amnesia, a phenomenon revealing that people are frequently unable to report information they have just attended to moments ago. This report failure is thought to stem from a lack of consolidating the attended information into working memory, indicating a dissociation between attention and working memory. Building on these findings, a new concept called memory reselection is proposed to describe a secondary round of selection among the attended information. These discoveries challenge the conventional view of how attention and working memory are related and shed new light onto modeling attention and memory as dissociable processes.

Completeness out of incompleteness: Inferences from regularities in imperfect information ensembles.

Handling imperfect information problems is fundamental to perception, learning, and decision-making. Ensemble perception may partially overcome imperfect information by providing global clues. However, if not all cluster elements are readily accessible, the observations required for computing statistics are incomplete. In this case, these elements' internal correlations (i.e., regularity) could serve as clues to elucidate the missing pieces. We thus investigated spatial regularity's role in ensemble perception under imperfect information situations created using partially occluded stimuli. In two experiments, we manipulated circle size (Experiment 1) and line orientation (Experiment 2) to linearly vary with its location; spatial regularity thus supplied clues for inferring information of the invisible parts. Participants estimated the mean of the targeted feature of the entire cluster, including visible and invisible parts. We observed robust biases toward the overall cluster in the estimations, implying the invisible parts were considered during ensemble perception. We proposed this effect could be understood as assessing evidence from visible parts to construct the missing parts. Experiment 3 employed a periodicity regularity to deter participants from using specific strategies, and consistent results were found. We then developed a generative model, the Regularity-Based Model, to simulate the inference process, which better captured the pattern of human outcomes than the comparative model. These findings indicate the visual system could use high-level structural information to infer scenes with incomplete information, thus producing more accurate ensemble representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Intention beyond desire: Spontaneous intentional commitment regulates conflicting desires.

The human mind is a mosaic composed of multiple selves with conflicting desires. How can coherent actions emerge from such conflicts? Classical desire theory argues that rational action depends on maximizing the expected utilities evaluated by all desires. In contrast, intention theory suggests that humans regulate conflicting desires with an intentional commitment that constrains action planning towards a fixed goal. Here, we designed a series of 2D navigation games in which participants were instructed to navigate to two equally desirable destinations. We focused on the critical moments in navigation to test whether humans spontaneously commit to an intention and take actions that would be qualitatively different from those of a purely desire-driven agent. Across four experiments, we found three distinctive signatures of intentional commitment that only exist in human actions: "goal perseverance" as the persistent pursuit of an original intention despite unexpected drift making the intention suboptimal; "self-binding" as the proactive binding of oneself to a committed future by avoiding a path that could lead to many futures; and "temporal leap" as the commitment to a distant future even before reaching the proximal one. These results suggest that humans spontaneously form an intention with a committed plan to quarantine conflicting desires from actions, supporting intention as a distinctive mental state beyond desire. Additionally, our findings shed light on the possible functions of intention, such as reducing computational load and making one's actions more predictable in the eyes of a third-party observer.

The modulation of expectation violation on attention: Evidence from the spatial cueing effects.

The study sought to investigate whether and how expectation violation can modulate attention using the exogenous spatial cueing paradigm, under the theoretical framework of the Memory Encoding Cost (MEC) model. The MEC proposes that exogenous spatial cueing effects are mainly driven by a combination of two distinct mechanisms: attentional facilitation triggered by the presence of an abrupt cue, and attentional suppression induced by memory encoding of the cue. In current experiments, participants needed to identify a target letter that was sometimes preceded by a peripheral onset cue. Various types of expectation violation were introduced by regulating the probability of cue presentation (Experiments 1 & 5), the probability of cue location (Experiments 2 & 4), and the probability of irrelevant sound presentation (Experiment 3). The results showed that expectation violation could enhance the cueing effect (valid vs. invalid cue) in some cases. More crucially, all experiments consistently observed asymmetrical modulation of expectation violation on the cost (invalid vs. neutral cue) and benefit (valid vs. neutral cue) effects: Expectation violation increased the cost effects while did not modulate or decreased (or even reversed) the benefit effects. Furthermore, Experiment 5 provided direct evidence that violation of expectations could enhance the memory encoding of a cue (e.g., color) and this memory advantage could manifest quickly in the early stages of the experiment. The MEC better explains these findings than some traditional models like the spotlight: Expectation violation can both enhance the attentional facilitation of the cue and memory encoding of irrelevant cue information. These findings suggest that expectation violation has a general adaptive function in modulating the attention selectivity.

Working-Memory-Guided Attention Competes with Exogenous Attention but Not with Endogenous Attention.

Recent research has extensively investigated working memory (WM)-guided attention, which is the phenomenon of attention being directed towards information in the external environment that matches the content stored in WM. While prior studies have focused on the potential influencing factors of WM-guided attention, little is known about the nature of it. This attention system exhibits characteristics of two classical distinct attention systems: exogenous attention and endogenous attention, as it can operate automatically like exogenous attention yet persist for a long time and be modulated by cognitive resources like endogenous attention. Thus, the current study aimed to explore the mechanism of WM-guided attention by testing whether it competed with exogenous attention, endogenous attention, or both. Two experiments were conducted within a classic WM-guided attention paradigm. Experiment 1 included an exogenous cue and revealed an interaction between WM-guided attention and exogenous attention. Experiment 2 replaced the exogenous cue with an endogenous cue and demonstrated that endogenous attention had no impact on WM-guided attention. These findings indicate that WM-guided attention shares mechanisms with exogenous attention to some extent while operating in parallel with endogenous attention.

Generative visual common sense: Testing analysis-by-synthesis on Mondrian-style image.

The well-known Mondrian-style images, aside from being aesthetically amusing, also reflect the core principles of human vision in their viewing experience. First, when we see a Mondrian-style image consisting only of a grid and primary colors, we may automatically interpret its causal history such that it was generated by recursively partitioning a blank scene. Second, the image we observe is open to many possible ways of partitioning, and their probabilities of dominating the interpretation can be captured by a probabilistic distribution. Moreover, the causal interpretation of a Mondrian-style image can emerge almost spontaneously, not being tailored to any specific task. Using Mondrian-style images as a case study, we demonstrate the generative nature of human vision by showing that a Bayesian model based upon an image-generation task can support a wide range of visual tasks with little retraining. Our model, learned from human-synthesized Mondrian-style images, could predict human performance in the perceptual complexity ranking, capture the transmission stability when images were iteratively passed among participants, and pass a visual Turing test. Our results collectively show that human vision is causal such that we interpret an image from the angle of how it was generated. The success of generalization with little retraining suggests that generative vision constitutes a type of common sense that supports a wide range of tasks of different natures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The linear impact of visual working memory load on visual awareness: Evidence from motion-induced blindness.

Despite the close relationship between visual working memory (VWM) and visual awareness, the question of how these two constructs interact with each other is still under debate. The current study aimed to further address this issue by investigating whether and how visual awareness is influenced by VWM load. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to perform a motion-induced blindness (MIB) task while simultaneously memorizing different numbers of items in VWM. The results indicated that the latency of MIB was prolonged gradually as the VWM load increased, revealing a linear trend in the modulation effect of VWM load on visual awareness. Experiments 2 and 3 tested the other potential explanations and validated the initial finding by confirming that VWM load was indeed responsible for the observed effect on visual awareness. These findings have important implications for a better understanding of the relationship between VWM and visual awareness.

Attentional biases and daily game craving dynamics: An ecological momentary assessment study.

Background and aims: Theories posit that the combination of external (e.g. cue exposure) and internal (e.g. attention biases) factors contributes to the development of game craving. Nevertheless, whether different components of attentional biases (namely, engagement bias and disengagement bias) play separate roles on game craving has not been fully elucidated. We aimed to examine the associations between two facets of attentional biases and game craving dynamics under a daily life setting. Methods: Participants (110 regular internet game players) accomplished the modified attentional assessment task in the laboratory, after which they entered a 10-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to collect data on their momentary game craving and occurrence of game-related events at five different time points per day. Results: We found that occurrence of game-related events was significantly associated with increased game craving. Moreover, attentional disengagement bias, instead of engagement bias, bore on the occasional level variations of game craving as moderating variables. Specifically, attentional disengagement bias, not engagement bias, was associated with a greater increase in game craving immediately after encountering a game-related event; however, neither attentional engagement bias nor disengagement bias was associated with the craving maintenance after a relatively long period. Discussion and conclusions: The present study highlights the specific attentional processes involved in game craving dynamics, which could be crucial for designing interventions for attentional bias modification (ABM) in Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) populations.

Is the social chunking of agent actions in working memory resource-demanding?

Retaining social interactions in working memory (WM) for further social activities is vital for a successful social life. Researchers have noted a social chunking phenomenon in WM: WM involuntarily uses the social interaction cues embedded in the individual actions and chunks them as one unit. Our study is the first to examine whether the social chunking in WM is an automatic process, by asking whether social chunking of agent actions in WM is resource-demanding, a key hallmark of automaticity. We achieved this by probing whether retaining agent interactions in WM as a chunk required more attention than retaining actions without interaction. We employed a WM change-detection task with actions containing social interaction cues as memory stimuli, and required participants only memorizing individual actions. As domain-general attention and object-based attention are suggested playing a key role in retaining chunks in WM, a secondary task was inserted in the WM maintenance phase to consume these two types of attention. We reestablished the fact that the social chunking in WM required no voluntary control (Experiments 1 and 2). Critically, we demonstrated substantial evidence that social chunking in WM did not require extra domain-general attention (Experiment 1) or object-based attention (Experiment 2). These findings imply that the social chunking of agent actions in WM is not resource-demanding, supporting an automatic view of social chunking in WM.

Development of information integration in the visual working memory of preschoolers.

Visual working memory (WM) plays a pivotal role in integrating fragments into meaningful units, but no study has addressed how visual WM integration takes place in children. The current study examined whether WM integration emerges once preschoolers master Gestalt cue and can retain two representations in WM (automatic integration hypothesis), or still needs time to mature (maturation-of-integration hypothesis). Four experiments (N = 168, 81 females, 4- to 6-year-olds, Chinese, in Hangzhou, China, from 2016.10 to 2021.11) were conducted. Although 4-year-olds can retain two objects in WM and benefit from Gestalt cues in simultaneous display (Cohen's ds >1.00), they failed when memory arrays were presented sequentially. Meanwhile, 5- and 6-year-olds consistently demonstrated WM integration ability (all Cohen's ds >0.69), supporting the maturation-of-integration hypothesis.

Diverting the focus of attention in working memory through a perceptual task.

Working memory (WM) has a limited capacity; however, this limitation can be mitigated by selecting individual items from the set currently held in WM for prioritization. The selection mechanism underlying this prioritization ability is referred to as the focus of attention (FOA) in WM. Although impressive progress has been achieved in recent years, a fundamental question remains unclear: Do perception and WM share one FOA? In the current study, we investigated the hypothesis that only a perceptual task tapping object-based attention can divert the FOA in WM. We adopted a retro-cue WM paradigm and inserted a perceptual task after the offset of the cue. Critically, we manipulated the type of attention (object-based attention in Experiments 1-3, feature-based attention in Experiment 4, and spatial attention in Experiment 5) consumed by the perceptual task. We found that participants were able to prioritize a retro-cued representation in WM, and the retro-cue benefit on memory accuracy was intact regardless of the perceptual task. Critically, the retro-cue benefit on the response time of WM task was significantly reduced only after an object-based attention perceptual task (Experiments 1, 2, 3a, and 3b), while remaining constant after a feature-based attention (Experiment 4) or spatial attention (Experiment 5) perceptual task. These results suggest that WM and perception share an object-based FOA, and an object-based attention perceptual task can divert the FOA in WM. Meanwhile, the current study further confirms that sustained attention is not necessary for selective maintenance in WM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).