Using Speed and Accuracy and the Simon Effect to Explore the Output Form of Inhibition of Return.

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to slower responses to targets presented at previously cued locations. Contrasting target discrimination performance over various eye movement conditions has shown the level of activation of the reflexive oculomotor system determines the nature of the effect. Notably, an inhibitory effect of a cue nearer to the input end of the processing continuum is observed when the reflexive oculomotor system is actively suppressed, and an inhibitory effect nearer the output end of the processing continuum is observed when the reflexive oculomotor system is actively engaged.

A Randomized Trial of Behavioral Nudges Delivered Through Text Messages to Increase Influenza Vaccination Among Patients With an Upcoming Primary Care Visit.

Purpose: To evaluate if nudges delivered by text message prior to an upcoming primary care visit can increase influenza vaccination rates.

Design: Randomized, controlled trial.

Setting: Two health systems in the Northeastern US between September 2020 and March 2021.

Eliminating the Low-Prevalence Effect in Visual Search With a Remarkably Simple Strategy.

The low-prevalence effect in visual search occurs when rare targets are missed at a disproportionately high rate. This effect has enormous significance for health and public safety and has proven resistant to intervention. In three experiments (s = 41, 40, and 44 adults), we documented a dramatic reduction of the effect using a simple cognitive strategy requiring no training.

Spatio-temporal properties of oculomotor activation by multiple, simultaneous peripheral stimuli.

Oculomotor research shows that eye movements are primed toward the midpoint of an array of visual stimuli, such that an eye movement to a visual target is executed most rapidly when it appears near the midpoint of an earlier array. At longer intervals between the prime and target, this facilitatory effect can reverse to become inhibitory - such that eye movements are slower when made toward the midpoint - but the source of this inhibition is unclear. One of our prior studies suggests a global source: target proximity to the midpoint determines inhibition, consistent with the notion that oculomotor activation is responsible for the effect and the original definition of inhibition of return.

A megastudy of text-based nudges encouraging patients to get vaccinated at an upcoming doctor's appointment.

Many Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment ( = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findings suggest that text messages sent prior to a primary care visit can boost vaccination rates by an average of 5%.

When do response-related episodic retrieval effects co-occur with inhibition of return?

At some point, spatial priming effects more faithfully reflect response selection processes than they do attentional orienting or sensory processes. Findings from the spatial cueing literature suggest that two factors may be critical: (1) the amount of identity processing that is required in order to respond correctly (feature-based response hypothesis), and (2) the amount of spatial processing that is required in order to respond correctly (space-based response hypothesis). To test the first hypothesis, we manipulated whether observers made single keypress detection or two-choice localization responses to serially presented stimuli in peripheral vision and whether stimulus identity information processing was necessary before responding.

Does feature-based attention play a role in the episodic retrieval of event files?

In stimulus identification tasks, stimulus and response, and location and response information, is thought to become integrated into a common event representation following a response. Evidence for this feature integration comes from paradigms requiring keypress responses to pairs of sequentially presented stimuli. In such paradigms, there is a robust cost when a target event only partially matches the preceding event representation.

Detection versus discrimination: The limits of binding accounts in action control.

Actions can be investigated by using sequential priming tasks, in which participants respond to prime and probe targets (sometimes accompanied by distractors). Facilitation and interference from prime to probe are measured by repeating, changing, or partially repeating features or responses between prime and probe. According to the action control literature, feature-feature or feature-response bindings are universal and apply for all actions.

Visual working memory load does not eliminate visuomotor repetition effects.

When we respond to a stimulus, our ability to quickly execute this response depends on how combinations of stimulus and response features match to previous combinations of stimulus and response features. Some kind of memory representations must be underlying these visuomotor repetition effects. In this paper, we tested the hypothesis that visual working memory stores the stimulus information that gives rise to these effects.

Is attention really biased toward the last target location in visual search? The role of focal attention and stimulus-response translation rules.

There is considerable confusion in the visual attention literature as to whether shifts of attention are biased against or in favor of previously attended regions. Studies requiring target localization have shown a performance cost when the target location randomly repeats instead of changes, whereas studies requiring arbitrary keypress responses to target identities have shown a benefit. These studies differ in the amount of attention required to the target and in the stimulus-response translation rules.

Hidden from view: Statistical learning exposes latent attentional capture.

Contingent-capture cueing paradigms have long shown that salient visual stimuli-both abrupt onsets and color singleton cues-fail to reliably capture attention if they do not resemble the search target. There may, however, be latent attentional capture in these situations, based on recent evidence that abrupt-onset cues can capture attention in difficult, but not easy, search displays (Gaspelin, Ruthruff, & Lien in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42, 1104-1120, 2016). To test this notion, we hypothesized that it should be possible to expose any latent capture generated by cues by means of statistical learning.

The Relationship Between Spatial Attention and Eye Movements.

The nature of the relationship between spatial attention and eye movements has been the subject of intense debate for more than 40 years. Two ideas have dominated this debate. First is the idea that spatial attention shares common neural mechanisms with eye movement programming, characterizing attention as an eye movement that has been prepared but not executed.

Examining the Role of Attention and Sensory Stimulation in the Attentional Repulsion Effect.

It has been suggested that visual attention warps space, such that stimuli appearing near its locus are perceived as farther away than they actually are. This is known as the attentional repulsion effect (ARE). Recent data challenge the role of attention as the sole factor responsible for the ARE, suggesting instead that the ARE is, at least in part, a product of low level sensory interactions between a peripheral orienting cue and the Vernier target stimulus used to measure the effect.

Is attention really biased toward the last target location in visual search? Attention, response rules, distractors, and eye movements.

The visual search and target-target cueing literatures have reached opposite conclusions about whether a shift of attention is biased toward or away from, respectively, previously attended target locations. In this article, we aimed to figure out why. The main differences between the two experimental approaches concern (1) the stimulus-response translation rules ("what" identification keypresses vs.

Does the relation between the control of attention and second language proficiency generalize from India to Canada?

Over the last decades, the extralinguistic benefits of bilingualism have been intensively debated. The current study was aimed at clarifying whether bilingualism speeds attentional disengagement. Reflecting faster disengagement, Mishra, Hilchey, Singh, and Klein (2012) observed an earlier onset of inhibition of return (IOR) for high than for low-proficient bilinguals.

Testing the role of response repetition in spatial priming in visual search.

In common "attention" tasks, which require stimulus-identity processing prior to the formation of a speeded key-press response, spatial priming effects depend on response repetition. Typically, the repetition of a stimulus location is advantageous when the prior response repeats, but disadvantageous or inconsequential when the prior response changes. This link between responding and space makes it difficult to draw inferences about attentional bias from two-choice key-press tasks.

Feature integration in basic detection and localization tasks: Insights from the attentional orienting literature.

Once presumed to be intimately related, feature integration and the consequences of attentional orienting are now often studied separately. Yet the paradigms used to study each can be highly similar; participants respond to a stimulus, which is then followed by a second stimulus, matching or mismatching the first on some feature(s). Given the similarities between the methods, it seems likely that these fields each could gain insights regarding their own work by looking at the other.

Out with the new, in with the old: Exogenous orienting to locations with physically constant stimulation.

Dominant methods of investigating exogenous orienting presume that attention is captured most effectively at locations containing new events. This is evidenced by the ubiquitous use of transient stimuli as cues in the literature on exogenous orienting. In the present study, we showed that attention can be oriented exogenously toward a location containing a completely unchanging stimulus by modifying Posner's landmark exogenous spatial-cueing paradigm.

Dissociating Orienting Biases From Integration Effects With Eye Movements.

Despite decades of research, the conditions under which shifts of attention to prior target locations are facilitated or inhibited remain unknown. This ambiguity is a product of the popular feature discrimination task, in which attentional bias is commonly inferred from the efficiency by which a stimulus feature is discriminated after its location has been repeated or changed. Problematically, these tasks lead to integration effects; effects of target-location repetition appear to depend entirely on whether the target feature or response also repeats, allowing for several possible inferences about orienting bias.

A TMS Investigation on the Role of Lateral Occipital Complex and Caudal Intraparietal Sulcus in the Perception of Object Form and Orientation.

We used TMS to assess the causal roles of the lateral occipital (LO) and caudal intraparietal sulcus (cIPS) areas in the perceptual discrimination of object features. All participants underwent fMRI to localize these areas using a protocol in which they passively viewed images of objects that varied in both form and orientation. fMRI identified six significant brain regions: LO, cIPS, and the fusiform gyrus, bilaterally.

Intervening response events between identification targets do not always turn repetition benefits into repetition costs.

When there is a relatively long interval between two successive stimuli that must be detected or localized, there are robust processing costs when the stimuli appear at the same location. However, when two successive visual stimuli that must be identified appear at the same location, there are robust same location costs only when the two stimuli differ in their responses; otherwise same location benefits are observed. Two separate frameworks that inhibited attentional orienting and episodic integration, respectively, have been proposed to account for these patterns.

Much ado about nothing: Capturing attention toward locations without new perceptual events.

Popular frameworks of attention propose that visual orienting occurs through a combination of bottom-up (stimulus-driven) and top-down (goal-directed) processes. Much of the basic research on these processes adheres paradigmatically to experimental methods that introduce salient but task-irrelevant stimuli (objects or transients) to the visual environment to determine whether attention is captured to their locations. This common practice of changing or adding a stimulus to a location to determine whether it captures attention reflects a notion that locations at which new features or stimuli spontaneously appear are prioritized above all else.

Placeholders dissociate two forms of inhibition of return.

Decades of research using Posner's classic spatial cueing paradigm has uncovered at least two forms of inhibition of return (IOR) in the aftermath of an exogenous, peripheral orienting cue. One prominent dissociation concerns the role of covert and overt orienting in generating IOR effects that relate to perception- and action-oriented processes, respectively. Another prominent dissociation concerns the role of covert and overt orienting in generating IOR effects that depend on object- and space-based representation, respectively.

Peripheral stimuli generate different forms of inhibition of return when participants make prosaccades versus antisaccades to them.

Inhibition of return (IOR) is usually viewed as an inhibitory aftermath of visual orienting typically seen in the form of slower responses to targets presented in a previously oriented to location. As shown by Taylor and Klein (2000. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 26, 1639-1656), the nature of the inhibitory effects resulting from an uninformative cue seem to be contingent on the activation state of the oculomotor system.

When is inhibition of return input- or output-based? It depends on how you look at it.

Two important diagnostics have been used to infer whether the effect of inhibition of return, when preceded by a saccade, is primarily upon input (i.e., attentional/perceptual level) or output (i.