Lost time: Perception of events timeline affected by the COVID pandemic.

The need to remember when a past event occurred, is often an everyday necessity. However, placing events in a timeline is seldom accurate and although to some extent modulated by event saliency, on average we are less accurate in remembering a timeline for events happening in the distant past compared to more recent events. 277 participants took part in an online study during May 2022 in which they were asked to state the year in which a number of events took place.

Phasic Alertness and Multisensory Integration Contribute to Visual Awareness of Weak Visual Targets in Audio-Visual Stimulation under Continuous Flash Suppression.

Multisensory stimulation is associated with behavioural benefits, including faster processing speed, higher detection accuracy, and increased subjective awareness. These effects are most likely explained by multisensory integration, alertness, or a combination of the two. To examine changes in subjective awareness under multisensory stimulation, we conducted three experiments in which we used Continuous Flash Suppression to mask subthreshold visual targets for healthy observers.

More or less of me and you: self-relevance augments the effects of item probability on stimulus prioritization.

Self-relevance exerts a powerful influence on information processing. Compared to material associated with other people, personally meaningful stimuli are prioritized during decision-making. Further exploring the character of this effect, here we considered the extent to which stimulus enhancement is impacted by the frequency of self-relevant versus friend-relevant material.

Increased Visual Sensitivity and Occipital Activity in Patients With Hemianopia Following Vision Rehabilitation.

Hemianopia, loss of vision in half of the visual field, results from damage to the visual pathway posterior to the optic chiasm. Despite negative effects on quality of life, few rehabilitation options are currently available. Recently, several long-term training programs have been developed that show visual improvement within the blind field, although little is known of the underlying neural changes.

Conscious awareness modulates processing speed in the redundant signal effect.

Evidence for the influence of unaware signals on behaviour has been reported in both patient groups and healthy observers using the Redundant Signal Effect (RSE). The RSE refers to faster manual reaction times to the onset of multiple simultaneously presented target than those to a single stimulus. These findings are robust and apply to unimodal and multi-modal sensory inputs.

Self-relevance enhances evidence gathering during decision-making.

Despite repeated demonstrations that self-relevant material is prioritized during stimulus appraisal, a number of unresolved issues remain. In particular, it is unclear if self-relevance facilitates task performance when stimuli are encountered under challenging processing conditions. To explore this issue, using a backward masking procedure, here participants were required to report if briefly presented objects (pencils and pens) had previously been assigned to the self or a best friend (i.

Efficacy and predictors of recovery of function after eye movement training in 296 hemianopic patients.

Compensatory approaches to rehabilitation of vision loss as a result of brain injury are aimed at improving the efficacy of eye movements, enabling patients to bring the otherwise unseen stimuli into their sighted field. Eye movement training has shown promise in a large number of studies in small clinical populations. Nevertheless, there remain two problems; standardisation and wide accessibility.

Practice-related changes in eye movement strategy in healthy adults with simulated hemianopia.

The impact of visual field deficits such as hemianopia can be mitigated by eye movements that position the visual image within the intact visual field. Effective eye movement strategies are not observed in all patients, however, and it is not known whether persistent deficits are due to injury or to pre-existing individual differences. Here we examined whether repeated exposure to a search task with rewards for good performance would lead to better eye movement strategies in healthy individuals.

Self-prioritization and perceptual matching: The effects of temporal construal.

Recent research has revealed that self-referential processing enhances perceptual judgments - the so-called self-prioritization effect. The extent and origin of this effect remains unknown, however. Noting the multifaceted nature of the self, here we hypothesized that temporal influences on self-construal (i.

Self-relevance prioritizes access to visual awareness.

As we are cognizant of only a fraction of the available visual inputs at any given time, how is information selected for access to consciousness? In particular, does the personal significance of stimuli influence perceptual selection? Given that self-relevant information is prioritized during various stages of processing, here we hypothesized that self-association may privilege access to awareness under continuous flash suppression (CFS). The results supported this prediction. Compared with geometric shapes referenced to either a friend or stranger, those previously associated with self were prioritized in visual awareness.

Inefficient search strategies in simulated hemianopia.

We investigated whether healthy participants can spontaneously adopt effective eye movement strategies to compensate for information loss similar to that experienced by patients with damage to visual cortex (hemianopia). Visual information in 1 hemifield was removed or degraded while participants searched for an emotional face among neutral faces or a line tilted 45° to the right among lines of varying degree of tilt. A bias to direct saccades toward the sighted field was observed across all 4 experiments.

Use of NeuroEyeCoach™ to Improve Eye Movement Efficacy in Patients with Homonymous Visual Field Loss.

Visual field deficits are common in patients with damaged retinogeniculostriate pathways. The patient's eye movements are often affected leading to inefficient visual search. Systematic eye movement training also called compensatory therapy is needed to allow patients to develop effective coping strategies.

Redundancy gain in binocular rivalry.

A behavioural advantage is found across a wide range of stimuli when two targets are presented in opposite hemifields compared with those targets being presented together in one hemifield, or one target being presented alone. This advantage for responses to multiple targets versus a single target is often termed redundancy gain. Here we report on the findings of two experiments investigating redundancy gain in binocular rivalry.

Pupil response as a predictor of blindsight in hemianopia.

Significantly above-chance detection of stimuli presented within the field defect of patients with postgeniculate lesions is termed "blindsight." It has been proposed that those with blindsight are more likely to benefit from visual rehabilitation by repeated stimulation, leading to increased visual sensitivity within their field defect. Establishing the incidence of blindsight and developing an objective and reliable method for its detection are of great interest.

Eye rivalry and object rivalry in the intact and split-brain.

Both the eye of origin and the images themselves have been found to rival during binocular rivalry. We presented traditional binocular rivalry stimuli (face to one eye, house to the other) and Diaz-Caneja stimuli (half of each image to each eye) centrally to both a split-brain participant and a control group. With traditional rivalry stimuli both the split-brain participant and age-matched controls perceived more coherent percepts (synchronised across the hemifields) than non-synchrony, but our split-brain participant perceived more non-synchrony than our controls.

The continuum of detection and awareness of visual stimuli within the blindfield: from blindsight to the sighted-sight.

Purpose: We investigated systematically the effect of repeated exposure on detection and reported awareness of visual stimuli presented deep within the field defect of 5 hemianopic patients.

Methods: An objective measure of sensitivity (detection in a temporal two-alternative forced-choice paradigm) and subjective reports of awareness were recorded on trial by trial bases. Visual stimulus to be detected was a temporally modulated (10 Hz) circular patch (6° diameter) of vertical grating (1 c/°).

Saccadic latency is modulated by emotional content of spatially filtered face stimuli.

Models of attention and emotion assign a special status to the processing of threat. While evidence for threat-related attentional bias in highly anxious individuals is robust, effects in the normal population are mixed. An important explanation for the absence of threat-related attentional bias in nonanxious individuals may relate to the spatial frequency components of stimuli.

Emotional stimuli capture spatial attention but do not modulate spatial memory.

There is evidence that emotional stimuli capture spatial attention and that visual memory is enhanced for emotional content. Here we examine the relationship between emotional content of stimuli and interactions with spatial memory. To assess spatial memory, a modified version of the Corsi Blocks Task (CBT), utilising emotional stimuli, was employed.

Evidence for perceptual learning with repeated stimulation after partial and total cortical blindness.

Lesions of occipital cortex result in loss of sight in the corresponding regions of visual fields. The traditional view that, apart from some spontaneous recovery in the acute phase, field defects remain permanently and irreversibly blind, has been challenged. In patients with partial field loss, a range of residual visual abilities in the absence of conscious perception (blindsight) has been demonstrated (Weiskrantz, 1986).

Trans-saccadic priming in hemianopia: sighted-field sensitivity is boosted by a blind-field prime.

We experience visual stability despite shifts of the visual array across the retina produced by eye movements. A process known as remapping is thought to keep track of the spatial locations of objects as they move on the retina. We explored remapping in damaged visual cortex by presenting a stimulus in the blind field of two patients with hemianopia.

Binocular rivalry: a window into emotional processing in aging.

Previous binocular rivalry studies with younger adults have shown that emotional stimuli dominate perception over neutral stimuli. Here we investigated the effects of age on patterns of emotional dominance during binocular rivalry. Participants performed a face/house rivalry task where the emotion of the face (happy, angry, neutral) and orientation (upright, inverted) of the face and house stimuli were varied systematically.

The effect of fear in the periphery in binocular rivalry.

The perceived dominance of percepts within a rival pair of images can be influenced by emotional content, with emotional images dominating over neutral images. We investigated this effect in the periphery. Rival gratings and (fearful or neutral) face/house pairs were viewed centrally and with the near edge positioned 1 degrees and 4 degrees from the fixation.

Consciousness of the first order in blindsight.

At suprathreshold levels, detection and awareness of visual stimuli are typically synonymous in nonclinical populations. But following postgeniculate lesions, some patients may perform above chance in forced-choice detection paradigms, while reporting not to see the visual events presented within their blind field. This phenomenon, termed "blindsight," is intriguing because it demonstrates a dissociation between detection and perception.

Attentional bias to brief threat-related faces revealed by saccadic eye movements.

According to theories of emotion and attention, we are predisposed to orient rapidly toward threat. However, previous examination of attentional cueing by threat showed no enhanced capture at brief durations, a finding that may be related to the sensitivity of the manual response measure used. Here we investigated the time course of orienting attention toward fearful faces in the exogenous cueing task.

Improved detection following Neuro-Eye Therapy in patients with post-geniculate brain damage.

Damage to the optic radiation or the occipital cortex results in loss of vision in the contralateral visual field, termed partial cortical blindness or hemianopia. Previously, we have demonstrated that stimulation in the field defect using visual stimuli with optimal properties for blindsight detection can lead to increases in visual sensitivity within the blind field of a group of patients. The present study was aimed to extend the previous work by investigating the effect of positive feedback on recovery of visual sensitivity.