Protocol to evaluate the effectiveness of a virtual-reality-based behavioral intervention in enhancing sensory responses to real-world warning.

Habituation to signals that warn of a potential danger in high-risk work environments is a critical causal factor of workplace accidents. Such habituation is hard to measure in a real-world setting, and no existing intervention can effectively curb it. Here, we present a protocol to enhance workers' sensory responses to frequently encountered warnings at workplaces using a virtual-reality-based behavioral intervention.

Attribute amnesia as a product of experience-dependent encoding.

Attribute amnesia, a phenomenon in which participants fail to report a just-attended attribute in a surprise test, reflects the importance of expectation in determining memory for attended information. To investigate how expectations arise in the context of attribute amnesia, the present study examined whether and how different response histories, independently of task instruction, can shape expectation, thereby driving or eliminating attribute amnesia. Participants were assigned to three groups and completed variations of the attribute amnesia task, where they were initially instructed to encode both target location and identity.

Encoding history enhances working memory encoding: Evidence from attribute amnesia.

Accumulating evidence demonstrates that selection history influences the allocation of attention. However, it is unclear how working memory (WM), which is tightly connected to attention, is influenced by selection history. The aim of present study was to investigate the influence of encoding history on WM encoding.

Virtual accident curb risk habituation in workers by restoring sensory responses to real-world warning.

In high-risk work environments, workers become habituated to hazards they frequently encounter, subsequently underestimating risk and engaging in unsafe behaviors. This phenomenon has been termed "risk habituation" and identified as a vital root cause of fatalities and injuries at workplaces. Providing an effective intervention that curbs workers' risk habituation is critical in preventing occupational injuries and fatalities.

Expecting the unexpected: Violation of expectation shifts strategies toward information exploration.

As our environment is frequently changing, it is common that our expectations are violated by unexpected stimuli or events, which leaves us uncertain about which pieces of information will be useful in the future. It is unclear how an expectation violation affects the subsequent control settings for processing of information. The current study directly addressed this issue by employing a double-surprise-trial paradigm based on the attribute amnesia task (Chen & Wyble, 2015a).