What sound sources trigger misophonia? Not just chewing and breathing.

OBJECTIVES: Misophonia is a highly prevalent yet understudied condition characterized by aversion toward particular environmental sounds. Oral/nasal sounds (e.g., chewing, breathing) have been the focus of research, but variable experiences warrant an objective investigation. Experiment 1 asked whether human-produced oral/nasal sounds were more aversive than human-produced nonoral/nasal sounds and non-human/nature sounds. Experiment 2 additionally asked whether machine-learning algorithms could predict the presence and severity of misophonia. METHOD: Sounds were presented to individuals with misophonia (Exp.1: N = 48, Exp.2: N = 45) and members of the general population (Exp.1: N = 39, Exp.2: N = 61). Aversiveness ratings to each sound were self-reported. RESULTS: Sounds from all three source categories-not just oral/nasal sounds-were rated as significantly more aversive to individuals with misophonia than controls. Further, modeling all sources classified misophonia with 89% accuracy and significantly predicted misophonia severity (r = 0.75). CONCLUSIONS: Misophonia should be conceptualized as more than an aversion to oral/nasal sounds, which has implications for future diagnostics and experimental consistency moving forward.

Investigating an effort avoidance account of attentional strategy choice.

People often choose suboptimal attentional control strategies during visual search. This has been at least partially attributed to the avoidance of the cognitive effort associated with the optimal strategy, but aspects of the task triggering such avoidance remain unclear. Here, we attempted to measure effort avoidance of an isolated task component to assess whether this component might drive suboptimal behavior. We adopted a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), a task designed to measure people's visual search strategies. To perform optimally, participants must make a numerosity judgment-estimating and comparing two color sets-before they can advantageously search through the less numerous of the two. If participants skip the numerosity judgment step, they can still perform accurately, albeit substantially more slowly. To study whether effort associated with performing the optional numerosity judgment could be an obstacle to optimal performance, we created a variant of the demand selection task to quantify the avoidance of numerosity judgment effort. Results revealed a robust avoidance of the numerosity judgment, offering a potential explanation for why individuals choose suboptimal strategies in the ACVS task. Nevertheless, we did not find a significant relationship between individual numerosity judgment avoidance and ACVS optimality, and we discussed potential reasons for this lack of an observed relationship. Altogether, our results showed that the effort avoidance for specific subcomponents of a visual search task can be probed and linked to overall strategy choices.

Intermixed levels of visual search difficulty produce asymmetric probability learning.

When performing novel tasks, we often apply the rules we have learned from previous, similar tasks. Knowing when to generalize previous knowledge, however, is a complex challenge. In this study, we investigated the properties of learning generalization in a visual search task, focusing on the role of search difficulty. We used a spatial probability learning paradigm in which individuals learn to prioritize their search toward the locations where a target appears more often (i.e., high-probable location) than others (i.e., low-probable location) in a search display. In the first experiment, during a training phase, we intermixed the easy and difficult search trials within blocks, and each was respectively paired with a distinct high-probable location. Then, during a testing phase, we removed the probability manipulation and assessed any generalization of spatial biases to a novel, intermediate difficulty task. Results showed that, as training progressed, the easy search evoked a stronger spatial bias to its high-probable location than the difficult search. Moreover, there was greater generalization of the easy search learning than difficult search learning at test, revealed by a stronger bias toward the former's high-probable location. Two additional experiments ruled out alternatives that learning during difficult search itself is weak and learning during easy search specifically weakens learning of the difficult search. Overall, the results demonstrate that easy search interferes with difficult search learning and generalizability when the two levels of search difficulty are intermixed.

The effect of misophonia on cognitive and social judgments.

Misophonia, a heightened aversion to certain sounds, turns common cognitive and social exercises (e.g., paying attention during a lecture near a pen-clicking classmate, coexisting at the dinner table with a food-chomping relative) into challenging endeavors. How does exposure to triggering sounds impact cognitive and social judgments? We investigated this question in a sample of 65 participants (26 misophonia, 39 control) from the general population. In Phase 1, participants saw faces paired with auditory stimuli while completing a gender judgment task, then reported sound discomfort and identification. In Phase 2, participants saw these same faces with novel ones and reported face likeability and memory. For both oral and non-oral triggers, misophonic participants gave higher discomfort ratings than controls did-especially when identification was correct-and performed slower on the gender judgment. Misophonic participants rated lower likeability than controls did for faces they remembered with high discomfort sounds, and face memory was worse overall for faces originally paired with high discomfort sounds. Altogether, these results suggest that misophonic individuals show impairments on social and cognitive judgments if they must endure discomforting sounds. This experiment helps us better understand the day-to-day impact of misophonia and encourages usage of individualized triggers in future studies.

Joint contributions of preview and task instructions on visual search strategy selection.

People tend to employ suboptimal attention control strategies during visual search. Here we question why people are suboptimal, specifically investigating how knowledge of the optimal strategies and the time available to apply such strategies affect strategy use. We used the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), a task designed to assess attentional control optimality. We used explicit strategy instructions to manipulate explicit strategy knowledge, and we used display previews to manipulate time to apply the strategies. In the first two experiments, the strategy instructions increased optimality. However, the preview manipulation did not significantly boost optimality for participants who did not receive strategy instruction. Finally, in Experiments 3A and 3B, we jointly manipulated preview and instruction with a larger sample size. Preview and instruction both produced significant main effects; furthermore, they interacted significantly, such that the beneficial effect of instructions emerged with greater preview time. Taken together, these results have important implications for understanding the strategic use of attentional control. Individuals with explicit knowledge of the optimal strategy are more likely to exploit relevant information in their visual environment, but only to the extent that they have the time to do so.

Suppression of a salient distractor protects the processing of target features.

We are often bombarded with salient stimuli that capture our attention and distract us from our current goals. Decades of research have shown the robust detrimental impacts of salient distractors on search performance and, of late, in leading to altered feature perception. These feature errors can be quite extreme, and thus, undesirable. In search tasks, salient distractors can be suppressed if they appear more frequently in one location, and this learned spatial suppression can lead to reductions in the cost of distraction as measured by reaction time slowing. Can learned spatial suppression also protect against visual feature errors? To investigate this question, participants were cued to report one of four briefly presented colored squares on a color wheel. On two-thirds of trials, a salient distractor appeared around one of the nontarget squares, appearing more frequently in one location over the course of the experiment. Participants' responses were fit to a model estimating performance parameters and compared across conditions. Our results showed that general performance (guessing and precision) improved when the salient distractor appeared in a likely location relative to elsewhere. Critically, feature swap errors (probability of misreporting the color at the salient distractor's location) were also significantly reduced when the distractor appeared in a likely location, suggesting that learned spatial suppression of a salient distractor helps protect the processing of target features. This study provides evidence that, in addition to helping us avoid salient distractors, suppression likely plays a larger role in helping to prevent distracting information from being encoded.

Terms of debate: Consensus definitions to guide the scientific discourse on visual distraction.

Hypothesis-driven research rests on clearly articulated scientific theories. The building blocks for communicating these theories are scientific terms. Obviously, communication - and thus, scientific progress - is hampered if the meaning of these terms varies idiosyncratically across (sub)fields and even across individual researchers within the same subfield. We have formed an international group of experts representing various theoretical stances with the goal to homogenize the use of the terms that are most relevant to fundamental research on visual distraction in visual search. Our discussions revealed striking heterogeneity and we had to invest much time and effort to increase our mutual understanding of each other's use of central terms, which turned out to be strongly related to our respective theoretical positions. We present the outcomes of these discussions in a glossary and provide some context in several essays. Specifically, we explicate how central terms are used in the distraction literature and consensually sharpen their definitions in order to enable communication across theoretical standpoints. Where applicable, we also explain how the respective constructs can be measured. We believe that this novel type of adversarial collaboration can serve as a model for other fields of psychological research that strive to build a solid groundwork for theorizing and communicating by establishing a common language. For the field of visual distraction, the present paper should facilitate communication across theoretical standpoints and may serve as an introduction and reference text for newcomers.

What do fast response times tell us about attentional control?

The mental experience of attention capture has attracted a great deal of intrigue among researchers seeking to explain the interactions between stimulus-driven and goal-driven attentional control. In recent years, researchers have increasingly begun to analyze cumulative response time (RT) distributions to test modern accounts of the capture phenomenon, particularly accounts claiming that there are changes in susceptibility to distraction as a function of time. In this paper, we raise a criticism of this approach, which centers on a problematic assumption. The assumption is that variability in these distributions is primarily determined by fluctuations in the observer's internal control state (e.g., readiness for the trial). However, it is also the case that faster segments of the distributions are overrepresented by trials that are objectively easy, while slower segments are overrepresented by trials that are objectively difficult. That is, incidental aspects of the trial stimuli influence task performance independently of the observer's internal control state. Here, we demonstrate empirically that contributions of incidental stimulus factors distort cumulative RT distributions in such a way that confounds proper interpretation of experimental data. The results have implications for theoretical accounts of attentional control, and they also raise caution about the assumptions that are sometimes made when analyzing cumulative RT distributions.

Learned spatial suppression is not always proactive.

Learning to ignore distractors is critical for navigating the visual world. Research has suggested that a location frequently containing a salient distractor can be suppressed. How does such suppression work? Previous studies provided evidence for proactive suppression, but methodological limitations preclude firm conclusions. We sought to overcome these limitations with a new search-probe paradigm. On search trials, participants searched for a shape oddball target while a salient color singleton distractor frequently appeared in a high-probability location. On randomly interleaved probe trials, participants discriminated the orientation of a tilted bar presented briefly at one of the search locations, allowing us to index the spatial distribution of attention at the moment the search would have begun. Results on search trials replicated previous findings: reduced attentional capture when a salient distractor appeared in the high-probability location. However, critically, probe discrimination was no different at the high-probability and low-probability locations. We increased the incentive to ignore the high-probability location in Experiment 2 and found, strikingly, that probe discrimination accuracy was greater at the high-probability location. These results suggest that the high-probability location was initially selected before being suppressed, consistent with a reactive mechanism. Overall, the accuracy probe procedure demonstrates that learned spatial suppression is not always proactive, even when response time metrics seem consistent with such an inference. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Neural evidence for non-orofacial triggers in mild misophonia.

Misophonia, an extreme aversion to certain environmental sounds, is a highly prevalent yet understudied condition plaguing roughly 20% of the general population. Although neuroimaging research on misophonia is scant, recent work showing higher resting-state functional connectivity (rs-fMRI) between auditory cortex and orofacial motor cortex in misophonia vs. controls has led researchers to speculate that misophonia is caused by orofacial mirror neurons. Since orofacial motor cortex was defined using rs-fMRI, we attempted to theoretically replicate these findings using orofacial cortex defined by task-based fMRI instead. Further, given our recent work showing that a wide variety of sounds can be triggering (i.e., not just oral/nasal sounds), we investigated whether there is any neural evidence for misophonic aversion to non-orofacial stimuli. Sampling 19 adults with varying misophonia from the community, we collected resting state data and an fMRI task involving phoneme articulation and finger-tapping. We first defined "orofacial" cortex in each participant using rs-fMRI as done previously, producing what we call resting-state regions of interest (rsROIs). Additionally, we functionally defined regions (fROIs) representing "orofacial" or "finger" cortex using phoneme or finger-tapping activation from the fMRI task, respectively. To investigate the motor specificity of connectivity differences, we subdivided the rsROIs and fROIs into separate sensorimotor areas based on their overlap with two common atlases. We then calculated rs-fMRI between each rsROI/fROI and a priori non-sensorimotor ROIs. We found increased connectivity in mild misophonia between rsROIs and both auditory cortex and insula, theoretically replicating previous results, with differences extending across multiple sensorimotor regions. However, the orofacial task-based fROIs did not show this pattern, suggesting the "orofacial" cortex described previously was not capturing true orofacial cortex; in fact, using task-based fMRI evidence, we find no selectivity to orofacial action in these previously described "orofacial" regions. Instead, we observed higher connectivity between finger fROIs and insula in mild misophonia, demonstrating neural evidence for non-orofacial triggers. These results provide support for a neural representation of misophonia beyond merely an orofacial/motor origin, leading to important implications for the conceptualization and treatment of misophonia.

Assessing the generality of strategy optimization across distinct attentional tasks.

Individuals vary substantially in the degree to which they optimize their performance in attentional tasks. How do such individual markers of attentional strategy relate across different tasks? Previous research has failed to observe significant correlations in strategy optimization between distinct visual search tasks (Clarke et al., 2022); suggesting that strategy optimization is not unitary, or determined by a single trait variable. Here we test whether strategy optimization shows some degree of generality, specifically across tasks with similar attentional components. We employed the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS; Irons & Leber, 2018a), a visual search paradigm designed to directly measure attentional control strategy. In 2 studies, we had participants complete the ACVS and a modified, but similar, task with 1 altered attentional component (specifically, the requirement to use feature-based attention and enumeration, respectively). We found positive correlations in strategy optimization between tasks that do versus do not involve feature-based attention (r = .38, p = .0068) and across tasks that do versus do not require enumeration (r = .33, p = .018). These results provide novel evidence for generality of strategy optimization, although the strength of the correlations was weaker than the within-task test-retest reliability of strategy measurements. Thus, while some generality exists, strategy optimization appears to be quite heterogeneous. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Stable individual differences in strategies within, but not between, visual search tasks.

A striking range of individual differences has recently been reported in three different visual search tasks. These differences in performance can be attributed to strategy, that is, the efficiency with which participants control their search to complete the task quickly and accurately. Here, we ask whether an individual's strategy and performance in one search task is correlated with how they perform in the other two. We tested 64 observers and found that even though the test-retest reliability of the tasks was high, an observer's performance and strategy in one task was not predictive of their behaviour in the other two. These results suggest search strategies are stable over time, but context-specific. To understand visual search, we therefore need to account not only for differences between individuals but also how individuals interact with the search task and context.

Neural predictors of within-subject fluctuations in attentional control.

Whether salient objects automatically capture attention has long been the subject of considerable controversy. A possible resolution, investigated in this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, is that observers vacillate between periods when attention capture is robust and when it is minimal. Human observers searched static displays for a target circle among nontarget squares; an irrelevant color singleton distractor appeared on 50% of trials. Behavioral results showed a distraction effect in which response times to distractor-present trials were slower than for distractor-absent trials. fMRI results confirmed that this distraction effect not only fluctuated within experimental sessions, but the momentary degree of distraction could be predicted in advance by pretrial activity in middle frontal gyrus. A second experiment ruled out an alternative account by which participants achieved resistance to capture by trading off search efficiency. Together, these data reveal that observers frequently exert the capacity to resist attentional distraction, although they do not to sustain this capacity for long periods of time.

Neural predictors of moment-to-moment fluctuations in cognitive flexibility.

Cognitive flexibility is a crucial human ability allowing efficient adaptation to changing task challenges. Although a person's degree of flexibility can vary from moment to moment, the conditions regulating such fluctuations are not well understood. Using a task-switching procedure with fMRI, we found several brain regions in which neural activity preceding each trial predicted subsequent cognitive flexibility. Specifically, as pretrial activity increased, performance improved on trials when the task switched but did not improve when the task repeated. Regions from which flexibility could be predicted reliably included the basal ganglia, anterior cingulate cortex, prefrontal cortex, and posterior parietal cortex. Although further analysis revealed similarities across the regions in how flexibility was predicted, results supported the existence of multiple independent sources of prediction. These results reveal distinct neural mechanisms underlying fluctuations in cognitive flexibility.

Visual working memory items drift apart due to active, not passive, maintenance.

How are humans capable of maintaining detailed representations of visual items in memory? When required to make fine discriminations, we sometimes implicitly differentiate memory representations away from each other to reduce interitem confusion. However, this separation of representations can inadvertently lead memories to be recalled as biased away from other memory items, a phenomenon termed repulsion bias. Using a nonretinotopically specific working memory paradigm, we found stronger repulsion bias with longer working memory delays, but only when items were actively maintained. These results suggest that (a) repulsion bias can reflect a mnemonic phenomenon, distinct from perceptually driven observations of repulsion bias; and (b) mnemonic repulsion bias is ongoing during maintenance and dependent on attention to internally maintained memory items. These results support theories of working memory where items are represented interdependently and further reveals contexts where stronger attention to working memory items during maintenance increases repulsion bias between them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Statistical learning as a reference point for memory distortions: Swap and shift errors.

Humans use regularities in the environment to facilitate learning, often without awareness or intent. How might such regularities distort long-term memory? Here, participants studied and reported the colors of objects in a long-term memory paradigm, uninformed that certain colors were sampled more frequently overall. When participants misreported an object's color, these errors were often centered around the average studied color (i.e., "Rich" color), demonstrating swap errors in long-term memory due to imposed statistical regularities. We observed such swap errors regardless of memory load, explicit knowledge, or the distance in color space between the correct color of the tested object and the Rich color. An explicit guessing strategy where participants intentionally made swap errors when uncertain could not fully account for our results. We discuss other potential sources of observed swap errors such as false memory and implicit biased guessing. Although less robust than swap errors, evidence was also observed for subtle shift errors towards or away from the Rich color dependent on the color distance between the correct color and the Rich color. Together, these findings of swap and shift errors provide converging evidence for memory distortion mechanisms induced by a reference point, bridging a gap in the literature between how attention to regularities similarly influences visual working memory and visual long-term memory.

Age-related preservation of top-down control over distraction in visual search.

Visual search studies have demonstrated that older adults can have preserved or even increased top-down control over distraction. However, the results are mixed as to the extent of this age-related preservation. The present experiment assesses group differences in younger and older adults during visual search, with a task featuring two conditions offering varying degrees of top-down control over distraction. After controlling for generalized slowing, the analyses revealed that the age groups were equally capable of utilizing top-down control to minimize distraction. Furthermore, for both age groups, the distraction effect was manifested in a sustained manner across the reaction time distribution.

A methodological toolbox for investigating attentional strategy.

Strategy is a crucial determinant for how attention is controlled. In recent years, researchers have deployed a growing variety of manipulations and dependent measures in service of understanding strategy. This work has revealed a striking degree of diversity and suboptimality in the use of attention, and it prompts the realization that more research on strategy is needed in order to fully understand and explain how attention works. Here, we highlight several approaches to investigate strategy, in what can be considered a 'methodological toolbox' for researchers. These methods can be customized and combined flexibly in what we hope will be a continued expansion of inquiry into this important domain.

The spillover effects of attentional learning on value-based choice.

What role does attention play in decision-making? Prior research has demonstrated a link between visual attention and value-based choice, but the direction of causality is still unclear. Here we aimed to demonstrate that attention has a causal influence on choice. We tested whether spatially biasing attention in a visual search task would produce choice biases in a later choice task. We ran four experiments where the search target was more likely to appear on one "rich" side of the screen. In the subsequent choice tasks, participants were more likely to choose items appearing on the rich side and the average choice bias depended on how well participants learned the regularity in the search task. Additionally, eye-tracking data revealed a first-fixation bias toward the rich side, which in turn influenced choices. Taken together, these results provide novel support for a causal effect of attention on choice.

Attentional capture alters feature perception.

We live in a dynamic, distracting world. When distracting information captures attention, what are the consequences for perception? Previous literature has focused on effects such as reaction time (RT) slowing, accuracy decrements, and oculomotor capture by distractors. In the current study, we asked whether attentional capture by distractors can also more fundamentally alter target feature representations, and if so, whether participants are aware of such errors. Using a continuous report task and novel confidence range report paradigm, we discovered 2 types of feature-binding errors when a distractor was presented along with the target: First, when attention is strongly captured by the distractor, participants commit swapping errors (misreporting the color at the distractor location instead of the target color), which remarkably seem to occur without awareness. Second, when participants successfully resist capture, they tend to exhibit repulsion (perceptual distortion away from the color at the distractor location). Thus, we found that capture not only induces a spatial shift of attention, it also alters feature perception in striking ways. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).