Standard experimental paradigm designs and data exclusion practices in cognitive psychology can inadvertently introduce systematic "shadow" biases in participant samples.

Standard cognitive psychology research practices can introduce inadvertent sampling biases that reduce the reliability and generalizability of the findings. Researchers commonly acknowledge and understand that any given study sample is not perfectly generalizable, especially when implementing typical experimental constraints (e.g., limiting recruitment to specific age ranges or to individuals with normal color vision). However, less obvious systematic sampling constraints, referred to here as "shadow" biases, can be unintentionally introduced and can easily go unnoticed. For example, many standard cognitive psychology study designs involve lengthy and tedious experiments with simple, repetitive stimuli. Such testing environments may 1) be aversive to some would-be participants (e.g., those high in certain neurodivergent symptoms) who may self-select not to enroll in such studies, or 2) contribute to participant attrition, both of which reduce the sample's representativeness. Likewise, standard performance-based data exclusion efforts (e.g., minimum accuracy or response time) or attention checks can systematically remove data from participants from subsets of the population (e.g., those low in conscientiousness). This commentary focuses on the theoretical and practical issues behind these non-obvious and often unacknowledged "shadow" biases, offers a simple illustration with real data as a proof of concept of how applying attention checks can systematically skew latent/hidden variables in the included population, and then discusses the broader implications with suggestions for how to manage and reduce, or at a minimum acknowledge, the problem.

Increases in symptoms associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder among university students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

OBJECTIVE: The long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on college students' mental health remains unknown. The current study explored self-reported Obsessive-Compulsive symptomatology among college student cohorts from pre-, peak-, and later-pandemic time points. PARTICIPANTS: Undergraduate college students (N = 524) who volunteered for course credit. METHODS: Self-report responses on the Dimensional Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (DOCS), which includes subscales for contamination, unacceptable thoughts, harm responsibility, and symmetry, were collected from November 29, 2016 through April 27, 2021 and assessed for differences between the pre-, peak-, and later-pandemic cohorts. RESULTS: Peak-pandemic responders reported higher symptomatology for contamination and unacceptable thoughts compared to pre-pandemic responders (and for pre- vs. later-pandemic for contamination), with no significant effects for symmetry or harm responsibility. CONCLUSIONS: Although the longer-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on students remains unknown, a greater shift in college mental health services from prevention to assessing and addressing more immediate challenges may be necessary.

Conscientiousness protects visual search performance from the impact of fatigue.

Visual search-looking for targets among distractors-underlies many critical professions (e.g., radiology, aviation security) that demand optimal performance. As such, it is important to identify, understand, and ameliorate negative factors such as fatigue-mental and/or physical tiredness that leads to diminished function. One way to reduce the detrimental effects is to minimize fatigue itself (e.g., scheduled breaks, adjusting pre-shift behaviors), but this is not always possible or sufficient. The current study explored whether some individuals are less susceptible to the impact of fatigue than others; specifically, if conscientiousness, the ability to control impulses and plan, moderates fatigue's impact. Participants (N = 374) self-reported their energy (i.e., the inverse of fatigue) and conscientiousness levels and completed a search task. Self-report measures were gathered prior to completing the search task as part of a large set of surveys so that participants could not anticipate any particular research question. Preregistered linear mixed-effect analyses revealed main effects of energy level (lower state energy related to lower accuracy) and conscientiousness (more trait conscientiousness related to higher accuracy), and, critically, a significant interaction between energy level and conscientiousness. A follow-up analysis, that was designed to illustrate the nature of the primary result, divided participants into above- vs. below-median conscientiousness groups and revealed a significant negative relationship between energy level and accuracy for the below median, but not above-median, group. The results raise intriguing operational possibilities for visual search professions, with the most direct implication being the incorporation of conscientiousness measures to personnel selection processes.

A precise quantification of how prior experience informs current behavior.

Human behavior does not exist in a bubble-it is influenced by countless forces, including each individual's current goals, preexisting cognitive biases, and prior experience. The current project leveraged a massive behavioral data set to provide a data-driven quantification of the relationship between prior experience and current behavior. Data from two different behavioral tasks (a categorization task and a visual search task) demonstrated that prior history had a precise, systematic, and meaningful influence on subsequent performance. Specifically, the greater the evidence for (or against) all aspects of the current trial, the more (or less) efficient behavior was on that trial. The robust influence of prior experience was present for even distracting and likely unattended information. The ubiquity and consistency of the effect for features both related and unrelated to stimulus presence suggests a domain-general mechanism that increases the efficiency of behavior in contexts that match prior experience. These findings are theoretically important for understanding behavioral adaptation, experimentally powerful for directly addressing effects of previous trials when designing and analyzing research projects, and potentially useful for optimizing behavior in various applied contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Moving Beyond the Keypress: As Technology Advances, so Should Psychology Response Time Measurements.

Decades of research in cognitive psychology have largely relied on simple key or button presses to quantify human behavior. While many valuable discoveries have been made, a richer response modality may reveal more information regarding the different processes that underlie complex human behavior. This study provides a proof of concept for using a touch-and-swipe response method to separate response time into two components to extract more meaningful behavioral insights. Across several analyses, the two components were consistently shown to be separable, independent measurements of behavior. Furthermore, evaluating these isolated response time components improved inferential power and clarity of behavioral patterns. The touch-and-swipe response method is simple and easy-to-use, and it shows promise for more accurately targeting mechanisms of interest.

Great expectations: minor differences in initial instructions have a major impact on visual search in the absence of feedback.

Professions such as radiology and aviation security screening that rely on visual search-the act of looking for targets among distractors-often cannot provide operators immediate feedback, which can create situations where performance may be largely driven by the searchers' own expectations. For example, if searchers do not expect relatively hard-to-spot targets to be present in a given search, they may find easy-to-spot targets but systematically quit searching before finding more difficult ones. Without feedback, searchers can create self-fulfilling prophecies where they incorrectly reinforce initial biases (e.g., first assuming and then, perhaps wrongly, concluding hard-to-spot targets are rare). In the current study, two groups of searchers completed an identical visual search task but with just a single difference in their initial task instructions before the experiment started; those in the "high-expectation" condition were told that each trial could have one or two targets present (i.e., correctly implying no target-absent trials) and those in the "low-expectation" condition were told that each trial would have up to two targets (i.e., incorrectly implying there could be target-absent trials). Compared to the high-expectation group, the low-expectation group had a lower hit rate, lower false alarm rate and quit trials more quickly, consistent with a lower quitting threshold (i.e., performing less exhaustive searches) and a potentially higher target-present decision criterion. The expectation effect was present from the start and remained across the experiment-despite exposure to the same true distribution of targets, the groups' performances remained divergent, primarily driven by the different subjective experiences caused by each groups' self-fulfilling prophecies. The effects were limited to the single-targets trials, which provides insights into the mechanisms affected by the initial expectations set by the instructions. In sum, initial expectations can have dramatic influences-searchers who do not expect to find a target, are less likely to find a target as they are more likely to quit searching earlier.

Correction to: How to correctly put the "subsequent" in subsequent search miss errors.

The following formatting changes to the figures and table need to be made in order to enhance readability.

How to correctly put the "subsequent" in subsequent search miss errors.

Visual search, finding targets among distractors, is theoretically interesting and practically important as it involves many cognitive abilities and is vital for several critical industries (e.g., radiology, baggage screening). Unfortunately, search is especially error prone when more than one target is present in a display (a phenomenon termed the satisfaction of search effect or the subsequent search miss effect). The general effect is that observers are more likely to miss a second target if a first was already detected. Unpacking the underlying mechanisms requires two key aspects in analysis and design. First, to speak to the "subsequent" nature of the effect, the analyses must compare performance on single-target trials to performance for a second target in dual-target displays after a first has been found. Second, the design must include single-target displays that are matched in difficulty to each dual-target display to enable fair comparisons. However, it is not clear that prior research has met these two standards simultaneously. Work from academic radiology has primarily used designs with well-matched single- and dual-target trials, but most employed analyses that do not focus solely on performance after a first target has been detected. Work from cognitive psychology has generally performed the correct analyses, but relied on unmatched single- and dual-target trials, introducing a confound that could distort the results. In the current paper, we demonstrate the impact of this confound in empirical data and provide a roadmap for proper study design and analyses.

Evaluation of strategies to train visual search performance in professional populations.

Visual search, the act of finding targets amongst distractors, is central to many professions with life-or-death implications including aviation security, radiology, lifeguarding, military, and more. As such, every effort should be taken to improve visual search performance. One potential path to improvement is to ensure that workforces are optimally trained. Broadly, there are three general components to train: (1) specific use of the machinery and user interface (i.e. 'knobology'), (2) target and distractor identification, and (3) search strategy. The current review considers the cognitive psychology aspects of these three components; each is evaluated in light of short-term and long-term training goals, as well as profession-specific constraints.

Mammography to tomosynthesis: examining the differences between two-dimensional and segmented-three-dimensional visual search.

BACKGROUND: Radiological techniques for breast cancer detection are undergoing a massive technological shift-moving from mammography, a process that takes a two-dimensional (2D) image of breast tissue, to tomosynthesis, a technique that creates a segmented-three-dimensional (3D) image. There are distinct benefits of tomosynthesis over mammography with radiologists having fewer false positives and more accurate detections; yet there is a significant and meaningful disadvantage with tomosynthesis in that it takes longer to evaluate each patient. This added time can dramatically impact workflow and have negative attentional and cognitive impacts on interpretation of medical images. To better understand the nature of segmented-3D visual search and the implications for radiology, the current study looked to establish a new testing platform that could reliably examine differences between 2D and segmented-3D search. RESULTS: In Experiment 1, both professionals (radiology residents and certified radiologists) and non-professionals (undergraduate students) were found to have fewer false positives and were more accurate in segmented-3D displays, but at the cost of taking significantly longer in search. Experiment 2 tested a second group of non-professional participants, using a background that more closely resembled a mammogram, and replicated the results of Experiment 1-search was more accurate and there were fewer false alarms in segmented 3D displays but took more time. CONCLUSION: The results of Experiments 1 and 2 matched the performance patterns found in previous radiology studies and in the clinic, suggesting this novel experimental paradigm potentially provides a flexible and cost-effective tool that can be utilized with non-professional populations to inform relevant visual search performance. From an academic perspective, this paradigm holds promise for examining the nature of segmented-3D visual search.

Predicting Airport Screening Officers' Visual Search Competency With a Rapid Assessment.

Objective The study's objective was to assess a new personnel selection and assessment tool for aviation security screeners. A mobile app was modified to create a tool, and the question was whether it could predict professional screeners' on-job performance. Background A variety of professions (airport security, radiology, the military, etc.) rely on visual search performance-being able to detect targets. Given the importance of such professions, it is necessary to maximize performance, and one means to do so is to select individuals who excel at visual search. A critical question is whether it is possible to predict search competency within a professional search environment. Method Professional searchers from the USA Transportation Security Administration (TSA) completed a rapid assessment on a tablet-based X-ray simulator (XRAY Screener, derived from the mobile technology app Airport Scanner; Kedlin Company). The assessment contained 72 trials that were simulated X-ray images of bags. Participants searched for prohibited items and tapped on them with their finger. Results Performance on the assessment significantly related to on-job performance measures for the TSA officers such that those who were better XRAY Screener performers were both more accurate and faster at the actual airport checkpoint. Conclusion XRAY Screener successfully predicted on-job performance for professional aviation security officers. While questions remain about the underlying cognitive mechanisms, this quick assessment was found to significantly predict on-job success for a task that relies on visual search performance. Application It may be possible to quickly assess an individual's visual search competency, which could help organizations select new hires and assess their current workforce.

Visual Search: You Are Who You Are (+ A Learning Curve).

Not everyone is equally well suited for every endeavor-individuals differ in their strengths and weaknesses, which makes some people better at performing some tasks than others. As such, it might be possible to predict individuals' peak competence (i.e., ultimate level of success) on a given task based on their early performance in that task. The current study leveraged "big data" from the mobile game, Airport Scanner (Kedlin Company), to assess the possibility of predicting individuals' ultimate visual search competency using the minimum possible unit of data: response time on a single visual search trial. Those who started out poorly were likely to stay relatively poor and those who started out strong were likely to remain top performers. This effect was apparent at the level of a single trial (in fact, the first trial), making it possible to use raw response time to predict later levels of success.

An individual differences approach to multiple-target visual search errors: How search errors relate to different characteristics of attention.

A persistent problem in visual search is that searchers are more likely to miss a target if they have already found another in the same display. This phenomenon, the Subsequent Search Miss (SSM) effect, has remained despite being a known issue for decades. Increasingly, evidence supports a resource depletion account of SSM errors-a previously detected target consumes attentional resources leaving fewer resources available for the processing of a second target. However, "attention" is broadly defined and is composed of many different characteristics, leaving considerable uncertainty about how attention affects second-target detection. The goal of the current study was to identify which attentional characteristics (i.e., selection, limited capacity, modulation, and vigilance) related to second-target misses. The current study compared second-target misses to an attentional blink task and a vigilance task, which both have established measures that were used to operationally define each of four attentional characteristics. Second-target misses in the multiple-target search were correlated with (1) a measure of the time it took for the second target to recovery from the blink in the attentional blink task (i.e., modulation), and (2) target sensitivity (d') in the vigilance task (i.e., vigilance). Participants with longer recovery and poorer vigilance had more second-target misses in the multiple-target visual search task. The results add further support to a resource depletion account of SSM errors and highlight that worse modulation and poor vigilance reflect a deficit in attentional resources that can account for SSM errors.

A Common Mechanism for Perceptual Reversals in Motion-Induced Blindness, the Troxler Effect, and Perceptual Filling-In.

Several striking visual phenomena involve a physically present stimulus that alternates between being perceived and being "invisible." For example, motion-induced blindness, the Troxler effect, and perceptual filling-in all consist of subjective alternations where an item repeatedly changes from being seen to unseen. In the present study, we explored whether these three specific visual phenomena share any commonalities in their alternation rates and patterns to better understand the mechanisms of each. Data from 69 individuals revealed moderate to strong correlations across the three phenomena for the number of perceptual disappearances and the accumulated duration of the disappearances. Importantly, these effects were not correlated with eye movement patterns (saccades) assessed through eye tracking, differences in motion sensitivity as indexed by dot coherence and speed perception thresholds, or simple reaction time abilities. Principal component analyses revealed a single component that explained 67% of the variance for the number of perceptual reversals and 60% for the accumulated duration of the disappearances. The temporal dynamics of illusory disappearances was also compared for each phenomenon, and normalized durations of disappearances were well fit by a gamma distribution with similar shape parameters for each phenomenon, suggesting that they may be driven by a single oscillatory mechanism.

Sensorimotor Learning in a Computerized Athletic Training Battery.

Sensorimotor abilities are crucial for performance in athletic, military, and other occupational activities, and there is great interest in understanding learning in these skills. Here, behavioral performance was measured over three days as twenty-seven participants practiced multiple sessions on the Nike SPARQ Sensory Station (Nike, Inc., Beaverton, Oregon), a computerized visual and motor assessment battery. Wrist-worn actigraphy was recorded to monitor sleep-wake cycles. Significant learning was observed in tasks with high visuomotor control demands but not in tasks of visual sensitivity. Learning was primarily linear, with up to 60% improvement, but did not relate to sleep quality in this normal-sleeping population. These results demonstrate differences in the rate and capacity for learning across perceptual and motor domains, indicating potential targets for sensorimotor training interventions.

Fear generalization gradients in visuospatial attention.

Fear learning can be adaptively advantageous, but only if the learning is integrated with higher-order cognitive processes that impact goal-directed behaviors. Recent work has demonstrated generalization (i.e., transfer) of conditioned fear across perceptual dimensions and conceptual categories, but it is not clear how fear generalization influences other cognitive processes. The current study investigated how associative fear learning impacts higher-order visuospatial attention, specifically in terms of attentional bias toward generalized threats (i.e., the heightened assessment of potentially dangerous stimuli). We combined discriminative fear conditioning of color stimuli with a subsequent visual search task, in which targets and distractors were presented inside colored circles that varied in perceptual similarity to the fear-conditioned color. Skin conductance responses validated the fear-conditioning manipulation. Search response times indicated that attention was preferentially deployed not just to the specific fear-conditioned color, but also to similar colors that were never paired with the aversive shock. Furthermore, this attentional bias decreased continuously and symmetrically from the fear-conditioned value along the color spectrum, indicating a generalization gradient based on perceptual similarity. These results support functional accounts of fear learning that promote broad, defensive generalization of attentional bias toward threat. (PsycINFO Database Record

Targets Need Their Own Personal Space: Effects of Clutter on Multiple-Target Search Accuracy.

Visual search is an essential task for many lifesaving professions; airport security personnel search baggage X-ray images for dangerous items and radiologists examine radiographs for tumors. Accuracy is critical for such searches; however, there are potentially negative influences that can affect performance; for example, the displays can be cluttered and can contain multiple targets. Previous research has demonstrated that clutter can hurt search performance and a second target is less likely to be detected in a multiple-target search after a first target has been found, which raises a concern-how does clutter affect multiple-target search performance? The current study explored clutter in a multiple-target search paradigm, where there could be one or two targets present, and targets appeared in varying levels of clutter. There was a significant interaction between clutter and target number: Increasing levels of clutter did not affect single-target detection but did reduce detection of a second target. Multiple-target search accuracy is known to be sensitive to contextual influences, and the current results reveal a specific effect wherein clutter disproportionally affected multiple-target search accuracy. These results suggest that the detection and processing of a first target might enhance the masking effects of clutter around a second target.

Mo' money, mo' problems: Monetary motivation can exacerbate the attentional blink.

The attentional blink (AB) is a compelling psychological phenomenon wherein observers are less likely to identify a second target (T2) when it appears approximately 200 ms after a first target (T1) in a rapidly presented stream of items. The present investigation examined how monetary motivation could impact the AB when participants were differentially motivated to identify T1 versus T2. Participants completed one of three conditions where the only difference across conditions was a motivational manipulation: a standard AB task (control condition), a motivated condition with T1 worth double the points of T2, or a motivated condition with T1 worth half the points of T2 (points in the motivated conditions were linked to a possible monetary bonus). Motivation had an expected influence on overall performance as both motivated conditions had higher overall T1 accuracy relative to the control condition. More specific to the question at hand, the AB was exacerbated (ie T2 performance was worse shortly after T1) when T1 was worth more than T2. This finding suggests that participants overallocated attentional resources to T1 processing at the expense of T2 processing, and it supports current theories of the AB.