Semantic meaning enhances feature-binding but not quantity or precision of locations in visual working memory.

Recent studies showed that real-world items are better remembered in visual working memory (VWM) than visually similar stimuli that are stripped of their semantic meaning. However, the exact nature of this advantage remains unclear. We used meaningful and meaningless stimuli in a location-reproduction VWM task. Employing a mixture-modeling analysis, we examined whether semantic meaning enables more item locations to be remembered, whether it improves the precision of the locations stored in memory, or whether it improves binding between the specific items and their locations. Participants were presented with streams of four (Experiments 1 & 2) or six (Experiment 3) real-world items, or their scrambled, meaningless counterparts. Each item was presented at a unique location, and the task was to reproduce one item's location. Overall, location memory was consistently better for real-world items compared with their scrambled counterparts. Furthermore, the results revealed that participants were less likely to make swap errors for the meaningful items, but there was no effect of conceptual meaning on the guess rate or the precision of the report. In line with previous findings, these results indicate that conceptual meaning enhances VWM for arbitrary stimulus properties such as item location, and this improvement is primarily due to a more efficient identity-location binding rather than an increase in the quantity or quality (precision) of the locations held in memory.

Massive visual long-term memory is largely dependent on meaning.

Previous research demonstrated a massive capacity of visual long-term memory (VLTM) for meaningful images. However, the capacity and limits of a "pure" VLTM that is independent of conceptual information still need to be determined. In the encoding phase of three experiments, participants viewed hundreds of images depicting real-world objects, along with visually similar images that were stripped of their semantic meaning. VLTM was evaluated using a four-alternative-forced-choice test including old and new images and their counterpart mirror transformations. The results revealed superior memory for meaningful than for meaningless stimuli and importantly, there was no hint of a massive VLTM for the meaningless items. Furthermore, when examining memory recognition of visual properties per-se (i.e., original/mirror state), memory was overall poor, and practically negligible for the meaningless items. Taken together, our findings suggest that meaning is critical for massive VLTM and for the ability to store visual properties.

To Grasp the World at a Glance: The Role of Attention in Visual and Semantic Associative Processing.

Associative relations among words, concepts and percepts are the core building blocks of high-level cognition. When viewing the world 'at a glance', the associative relations between objects in a scene, or between an object and its visual background, are extracted rapidly. The extent to which such relational processing requires attentional capacity, however, has been heavily disputed over the years. In the present manuscript, I review studies investigating scene-object and object-object associative processing. I then present a series of studies in which I assessed the necessity of spatial attention to various types of visual-semantic relations within a scene. Importantly, in all studies, the spatial and temporal aspects of visual attention were tightly controlled in an attempt to minimize unintentional attention shifts from 'attended' to 'unattended' regions. Pairs of stimuli-either objects, scenes or a scene and an object-were briefly presented on each trial, while participants were asked to detect a pre-defined target category (e.g., an animal, a nonsense shape). Response times (RTs) to the target detection task were registered when visual attention spanned both stimuli in a pair vs. when attention was focused on only one of two stimuli. Among non-prioritized stimuli that were not defined as to-be-detected targets, findings consistently demonstrated rapid associative processing when stimuli were fully attended, i.e., shorter RTs to associated than unassociated pairs. Focusing attention on a single stimulus only, however, largely impaired this relational processing. Notably, prioritized targets continued to affect performance even when positioned at an unattended location, and their associative relations with the attended items were well processed and analyzed. Our findings portray an important dissociation between unattended task-irrelevant and task-relevant items: while the former require spatial attentional resources in order to be linked to stimuli positioned inside the attentional focus, the latter may influence high-level recognition and associative processes via feature-based attentional mechanisms that are largely independent of spatial attention.

The asymmetric mixed-category advantage in visual working memory: An attentional, not perceptual (face-specific) account.

The mixed-category advantage in visual working memory refers to improved memory for an image in a display containing two different categories relative to a display containing only one category (Cohen et al., 2014). Jiang, Remington, et al. (2016) found that this advantage characterizes mainly faces and suggested that face-only displays suffer from enhanced interference due to the unique configural nature of faces. Faces, however, possess social and emotional significance that may bias attention toward them in mixed-category displays at the expense of their counterpart category. Consequently, the counterpart category may suffer from little/no advantage or even an inversed effect. Using a change-detection task, we showed that a category that demonstrated a mixed-category disadvantage when paired with faces demonstrated a mixed-category advantage when paired with other nonfacial categories. Furthermore, manipulating the likelihood of testing a specific category (i.e., changing its task relevance) in mixed-category trials altered its advantaged/disadvantaged status, suggesting that the effect may be mediated by attention. Finally, to control for perceptual exposure factors, a sequential presentation experimental version was conducted. Whereas faces showed a typical mixed-category advantage, this pattern was again modulated (yielding an advantage for a nonfacial category) when inserting a task-relevance manipulation. Taken together, our findings support a central resource allocation account, according to which the asymmetric mixed-category effect likely stems from an attentional bias to one of the two categories. This attentional bias is not necessarily spatial in its nature, and it presumably affects processing stages subsequent to the initial perceptual encoding phase in working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Vision at a glance: The role of attention in processing object-to-object categorical relations.

When viewing a scene at a glance, the visual and categorical relations between objects in the scene are extracted rapidly. In the present study, the involvement of spatial attention in the processing of such relations was investigated. Participants performed a category detection task (e.g., "is there an animal") on briefly flashed object pairs. In one condition, visual attention spanned both stimuli, and in another, attention was focused on a single object while its counterpart object served as a task-irrelevant distractor. The results showed that when participants attended to both objects, a categorical relation effect was obtained (Exp. 1). Namely, latencies were shorter to objects from the same category than to those from different superordinate categories (e.g., clothes, vehicles), even if categories were not prioritized by the task demands. Focusing attention on only one of two stimuli, however, largely eliminated this effect (Exp. 2). Some relational processing was seen when categories were narrowed to the basic level and were highly distinct from each other (Exp. 3), implying that categorical relational processing necessitates attention, unless the unattended input is highly predictable. Critically, when a prioritized (to-be-detected) object category, positioned in a distractor's location, differed from an attended object, a robust distraction effect was consistently observed, regardless of category homogeneity and/or of response conflict factors (Exp. 4). This finding suggests that object relations that involve stimuli that are highly relevant to the task settings may survive attentional deprivation at the distractor location. The involvement of spatial attention in object-to-object categorical processing is most critical in situations that include wide categories that are irrelevant to one's current goals.

Misrecollection prevents older adults from benefitting from semantic relatedness of the memoranda in associative memory.

Memory for episodic associations declines in aging, ostensibly due to decreased recollection abilities. Accordingly, associative unitization - the encoding of associated items as one integrated entity - may potentially attenuate age-related associative deficits by enabling familiarity-based retrieval, which is relatively preserved in aging. To test this hypothesis, we induced bottom-up unitization by manipulating semantic relatedness between memoranda. Twenty-four young and 24 older adults studied pairs of object pictures that were either semantically related or unrelated. Participants subsequently discriminated between intact, recombined and new pairs. We found that semantic relatedness increased the contributions of both familiarity and recollection in young adults, but did not improve older adults' performance. Instead, they showed associative deficits, driven by increased recollection-based false recognition. This may reflect a "misrecollection" phenomenon, in which older adults make more false alarms to recombined pairs with particularly high confidence, due to poorer retrieval monitoring regarding semantically-related associative probes.

Age effects on associative memory for novel picture pairings.

Normal aging is usually accompanied by greater memory decline for associations than for single items. Though associative memory is generally supported by recollection, it has been suggested that familiarity can also contribute to associative memory when stimuli can be unitized and encoded as a single entity. Given that familiarity remains intact during healthy aging, this may be one route to reducing age-related associative deficits. The current study investigated age-related differences in associative memory under conditions that were expected to differentially promote unitization, in this case by manipulating the spatial arrangement of two semantically unrelated objects positioned relative to each other in either spatially implausible or plausible orientations. Event-related potential (ERP) correlates of item and associative memory were recorded whilst younger and older adults were required to discriminate between old, recombined and new pairs of objects. These ERP correlates of item and associative memory did not vary with plausibility, whereas behavioral measures revealed that both associative and item memory were greater for spatially plausible than implausible pair arrangements. Contrary to predictions, older adults were less able to take advantage of this memory benefit than younger participants. Potential reasons for this are considered, and these are informed by those lines of evidence which indicate older participants were less sensitive to the bottom-up spatial manipulation employed here. It is recommended that future strategies for redressing age-related associative deficits should take account of the aging brain's increasing reliance on pre-existing semantic associations.

Counting distance: Effects of egocentric distance on numerical perception.

Numerical value is long known to be associated with a variety of magnitude representations, such as size, time and space. The present study focused on the interactive relations of numerical magnitude with a spatial factor which is dominant in everyday vision and is often overlooked, namely, egocentric distance, or depth. We hypothesized that digits denoting large magnitudes are associated with large perceived distances, and vice versa. While the relations of numerical value and size have been long documented, effects of egocentric distance on numeral perception have been scarcely investigated, presumably due to the difficulty to disentangle size and depth factors within three-dimensional visual displays. The current study aimed to assess the potential linkage between egocentric distance and number magnitude, while neutralizing any perceived and/or physical size parameters of target digits. In Experiment 1, participants conducted a numeral size-classification task ('bigger or smaller than 5'), to which they responded with a near-to-body or a far-from-body key. Results revealed shorter responses for small than for large numbers when responded with a key positioned close to the body, and for large than small numbers when responded with a key positioned far from the body (regardless of hand-key mapping). Experiment 2 used verbal stimuli denoting near/remote concepts as irrelevant primes to target digits, further demonstrating a priming effect of conceived distance on numerical value processing. Collectively, our results suggest that distance magnitudes are associatively linked to numerical magnitudes and may affect digit processing independently of the effects of visual size.

The necessity of visual attention to scene categorization: Dissociating "task-relevant" and "task-irrelevant" scene distractors.

The extent to which scenes are categorized and understood in the absence of attention has been the focus of a continuous debate over the last decade. Most studies investigating this question have used experimental paradigms in which participants explicitly searched for a certain scene category, or alternatively, scenes were task-irrelevant yet their identity was explicitly reported by participants. Although the first type of studies may have overestimated unattended scene processing, the latter type of studies may have underestimated scene processing due to the reliance on subjective response criteria and on working memory capacity limits. The present research examined scene processing by using an implicit, online behavioral measure which assessed the influence of both task-relevant (i.e., to-be-detected) and task-irrelevant distractor scenes on behavior. The effect of scene categorization was compared when scenes were fully attended (Experiment 1) versus when they were positioned in an unattended location and served as relevant/irrelevant distractors (Experiments 2 and 3). Our results demonstrated that in contrast to attended scenes, unattended distractor scenes which were not part of one's task-set were not automatically categorized and did not exert influence on performance. Critically, however, the very same scene distractors affected behavior when they contained a to-be-detected category, suggesting a qualitative dissociation between task-relevant and task-irrelevant distractors. Our study provides a systematic examination of scene distractor processing outside the focus of visual attention and a framework that may reconcile previous conflicting evidence. (PsycINFO Database Record

The evolvement of discrete representations from continuous stimulus properties: A possible overarching principle of cognition.

Leibovich et al. propose that non-symbolic numerosity abilities develop from the processing of more basic, continuous magnitudes such as size, area, and density. Here I review similar arguments arising in the visual perception field and further propose that the evolvement of discrete representations from continuous stimulus properties may be a fundamental characteristic of cognitive development.

Conceptual size representation in ventral visual cortex.

Recent findings suggest that visual objects may be mapped along the ventral occipitotemporal cortex according to their real-world size (Konkle and Oliva, 2012). It has been argued that such mapping does not reflect an abstract, conceptual size representation, but rather the visual or functional properties associated with small versus big real-world objects. To determine whether a more abstract conceptual size representation may affect visual cortical activation we used meaningless geometrical shapes, devoid of semantic or functional associations, which were associated with specific size representations by virtue of extensive training. Following training, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning while performing a conceptual size comparison task on the geometrical shapes. In addition, a size comparison task was conducted for numeral digits denoting small and big numbers. A region-of-interest analysis revealed larger blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) responses for conceptually 'big' than for conceptually 'small' shapes, as well as for big versus small numbers, within medial (parahippocampal place area, PPA) and lateral (occipital place area, OPA) place-selective regions. Processing of the 'big' visual shapes further elicited enhanced activation in early visual cortex, possibly reflecting top-down projections from PPA. By using arbitrary shapes and numbers we minimized visual, categorical, or functional influences on fMRI measurement, providing evidence for a possible neural mechanism underlying the representation of abstract conceptual size within the ventral visual stream.

Contextual consistency facilitates long-term memory of perceptual detail in barely seen images.

It is long known that contextual information affects memory for an object's identity (e.g., its basic level category), yet it is unclear whether schematic knowledge additionally enhances memory for the precise visual appearance of an item. Here we investigated memory for visual detail of merely glimpsed objects. Participants viewed pairs of contextually related and unrelated stimuli, presented for an extremely brief duration (24 ms, masked). They then performed a forced-choice memory-recognition test for the precise perceptual appearance of 1 of 2 objects within each pair (i.e., the "memory-target" item). In 3 experiments, we show that memory-target stimuli originally appearing within contextually related pairs are remembered better than targets appearing within unrelated pairs. These effects are obtained whether the target is presented at test with its counterpart pair object (i.e., when reiterating the original context at encoding) or whether the target is presented alone, implying that the contextual consistency effects are mediated predominantly by processes occurring during stimulus encoding, rather than during stimulus retrieval. Furthermore, visual detail encoding is improved whether object relations involve implied action or not, suggesting that, contrary to some prior suggestions, action is not a necessary component for object-to-object associative "grouping" processes. Our findings suggest that during a brief glimpse, but not under long viewing conditions, contextual associations may play a critical role in reducing stimulus competition for attention selection and in facilitating rapid encoding of sensory details. Theoretical implications with respect to classic frame theories are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Retroactive memory interference: a potential countermeasure technique against psychophysiological knowledge detection methods.

The concealed information test is designed to detect concealed knowledge through differential physiological responses elicited by the concealed items. This study was designed to examine the role of retroactive interference (RI) as a potential countermeasure that may weaken memory traces of the concealed items and attenuate the physiological responses elicited by them. A total of 120 participants committed a mock crime and were randomly assigned to either an interference condition, where they learned and retrieved an alternative mock crime, or a control condition. Further, each group was randomly assigned to one of three "time-delay" conditions. The results revealed that both memory for the mock crime details and the skin conductance responses (SCRs) to these details were attenuated under the memory-interference condition. Time of testing affected recall, but had no effect on the SCRs. In addition, the memory-interference manipulation had no effect on the respiration measure. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

Associative recognition processes are modulated by the semantic unitizability of memoranda.

Although memory of episodic associations is generally considered to be recollective in nature, it has been suggested that when stimuli are experienced as a unit, familiarity processes might contribute to their subsequent associative recognition. To investigate the effect of semantic relatedness during episodic encoding on the processes of retrieval of associative information, we had participants interactively encode pairs of object pictures, vertically arranged so as to suggest a functional or configural relationship between them. Half the pairs were independently judged to be of related objects (e.g., a lamp over a table) and half of unrelated objects (e.g., a key-ring over an apple). At test, participants discriminated between intact, recombined, and new pairs while event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. In an early ERP marker of retrieval success generally associated with familiarity processes, differences related to associative memory only emerged for related pairs, while differences associated with item memory emerged for both related and unrelated pairs. In contrast, in a later ERP effect associated with recollection, differences related to associative memory emerged for both related and unrelated pairs. These findings may indicate that retrieval of episodic associations formed between two semantically related visual stimuli can be supported by familiarity-related processes.

Psychophysiological detection of concealed information shared by groups: an empirical study of the searching CIT.

This study focused on the application of the Concealed Information Test (CIT) to situations in which the crime-related information is shared by a group of suspects but is not available to the investigators (a method known as the "searching CIT," or SCIT). Twenty-two groups, each comprising 4 to 7 participants (115 in total), planned 1 of 2 mock crimes (kidnapping or bank robbery). While planning the crime, each group decided on 5 crime-related critical items (e.g., the city in which the bank was located). Each critical item was chosen from a predefined set of 4 alternatives. At a second stage, the SCIT was administered individually and each participant was tested on the 2 crimes-the actual planned crime, in which the participant was "guilty," and the unplanned crime, in which the participant was "innocent." Two algorithms, adopted from Breska, Ben-Shakhar, and Gronau (2012), were applied to detect the critical items and to differentiate between "guilty" and "innocent" participants. Findings revealed that differentiation efficiency based on electrodermal and respiration measures was identical to that obtained with the standard CIT when applied to large groups, but lower, although significantly greater than chance, when applied to differentiate between small groups.

Contextual integration of visual objects necessitates attention.

Objects that form a contextually coherent percept are grasped more rapidly and efficiently than objects that are contextually inconsistent with each other. The extent to which such clustering processes depend on visual attention is largely unknown. The present research examined the necessity of attention for object-to-object contextual integration processes during a brief visual glimpse. Participants performed an object classification task on associated object pairs that were presented for a short duration (59 ms). Objects were positioned either in expected relative locations (e.g., a desk lamp on a desk) or in unexpected relative locations (e.g., a desk lamp under a desk). When both stimuli were relevant to task requirements, latencies to spatially consistent object pairs were significantly shorter than those to spatially inconsistent pairs (Experiment 1). These contextual effects disappeared, however, when spatial attention was drawn to one of the two object stimuli while its counterpart object appeared outside the main focus of attention, serving as a task-irrelevant distractor (Experiment 2). Attentional modulation of contextual integration processes was shown to be independent of distractor recognition per se (Experiment 3). Finally, the role of goal-directed (endogenous) and spatial (exogenous) attention factors in contextual integration was explored (Experiment 4). Taken together, our findings suggest that contextual associations play an important role in processing multiple-object visual displays. However, regardless of whether objects are associated by active or passive relations, the construction of a coherent contextual representation strongly relies on the availability of attentional capacity. Possible implications for theories of scene and object recognition are discussed.

Size before numbers: conceptual size primes numerical value.

The present work examined the influence of conceptual object size on numerical processing. In two experiments, pictures of conceptually large or small animals of equal retinal size served as prime stimuli appearing before numerically big or small integer targets. Participants were instructed to perform an unbiased parity judgment task on the target integers. When the prime's conceptual size was congruent with the target's numerical value, participants' reaction time was faster than when the two were incongruent with each other. This influence of conceptual object size on numerical value perception suggests that both types of magnitudes share similar mental representations. Our results are in accord with recent theories (e.g., Cantlon, Platt, & Brannon, 2009; Henik, Leibovich, Naparstek, Diesendruck, & Rubinsten, 2012) that emphasize the evolutionary importance of evaluation and perception of sizes to the development of the numerical system.

Algorithms for detecting concealed knowledge among groups when the critical information is unavailable.

We examined whether the Concealed Information Test (CIT) may be used when the critical details are unavailable to investigators (the Searching CIT [SCIT]). This use may have important applications in criminal investigations (e.g., finding the location of a murder weapon) and in security-related threats (e.g., detecting individuals and groups suspected in planning a terror attack). Two classes of algorithms designed to detect the critical items and classify individuals in the SCIT were examined. The 1st class was based on averaging responses across subjects to identify critical items and on averaging responses across the identified critical items to identify knowledgeable subjects. The 2nd class used clustering methods based on the correlations between the response profiles of all subject pairs. We applied a principal component analysis to decompose the correlation matrix into its principal components and defined the detection score as the coefficient of each subject on the component that explained the largest portion of the variance. Reanalysis of 3 data sets from previous CIT studies demonstrated that in most cases the efficiency of differentiation between knowledgeable and unknowledgeable subjects in the SCIT (indexed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) approached that of the standard CIT for both algorithms. We also examined the robustness of our results to variations in the number of knowledgeable and unknowledgeable subjects in the sample. This analysis demonstrated that the performance of our algorithms is relatively robust to changes in the number of individuals examined in each group, provided that at least 2 (but desirably 5 or more) knowledgeable examinees are included.

Distractor interference in focused attention tasks is not mediated by attention capture.

Distractor stimuli possessing information that is relevant for a task (henceforth, task-relevant distractors) often interfere with task performance. The interference by task-relevant distractors is observed even when distractors are positioned outside the main attentional focus. We investigated whether such interference is due to an attention capture by the distractors. Participants responded to a target colour while ignoring word distractors positioned within (Experiment 1) or outside (Experiments 2 and 3) the attentional focus. The words carried task-relevant information in their colour and personally significant information in their content. Because personally significant information affects performance only when positioned in an attended region, it was used as a marker for the locus of the attentional focus. As expected, when distractors were attended, both task-relevant and personally significant information affected performance. However, when distractors were unattended, only task-relevant information caused interference, suggesting that attention did not shift to the distractors' location. We discuss possible accounts for interference effects in focused-attention tasks.

Integrated contextual representation for objects' identities and their locations.

Visual context plays a prominent role in everyday perception. Contextual information can facilitate recognition of objects within scenes by providing predictions about objects that are most likely to appear in a specific setting, along with the locations that are most likely to contain objects in the scene. Is such identity-related ("semantic") and location-related ("spatial") contextual knowledge represented separately or jointly as a bound representation? We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) priming experiment whereby semantic and spatial contextual relations between prime and target object pictures were independently manipulated. This method allowed us to determine whether the two contextual factors affect object recognition with or without interacting, supporting a unified versus independent representations, respectively. Results revealed a Semantic x Spatial interaction in reaction times for target object recognition. Namely, significant semantic priming was obtained when targets were positioned in expected (congruent), but not in unexpected (incongruent), locations. fMRI results showed corresponding interactive effects in brain regions associated with semantic processing (inferior prefrontal cortex), visual contextual processing (parahippocampal cortex), and object-related processing (lateral occipital complex). In addition, activation in fronto-parietal areas suggests that attention and memory-related processes might also contribute to the contextual effects observed. These findings indicate that object recognition benefits from associative representations that integrate information about objects' identities and their locations, and directly modulate activation in object-processing cortical regions. Such context frames are useful in maintaining a coherent and meaningful representation of the visual world, and in providing a platform from which predictions can be generated to facilitate perception and action.