Profound individual differences in contextualized emotion perception.

Emotion perception is a fundamental aspect of our lives because others' emotions may provide important information about their reactions, attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Following the seminal work of Ekman, much of the research on emotion perception has focused on facial expressions. Recent evidence suggests, however, that facial expressions may be more ambiguous than previously assumed and that context also plays an important role in deciphering the emotional states of others.

An energizing role for motivation in information-seeking during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of understanding and managing information seeking behavior. Information-seeking in humans is often viewed as irrational rather than utility maximizing. Here, we hypothesized that this apparent disconnect between utility and information-seeking is due to a latent third variable, motivation.

Minority salience and the overestimation of individuals from minority groups in perception and memory.

Our cognitive system is tuned toward spotting the uncommon and unexpected. We propose that individuals coming from minority groups are, by definition, just that—uncommon and often unexpected. Consequently, they are psychologically salient in perception, memory, and visual awareness.

Ancient visual channels have a causal role in arithmetic calculations.

Humans exhibit complex arithmetic skills, often attributed to our exceptionally large neocortex. However, the past decade has provided ample evidence that the functional domain of the subcortex extends well beyond basic functions. Using a sensitive behavioral method, for the first time, we explored the contributions of lower-order visual monocular channels to symbolic arithmetic operations, addition and subtraction.

Regression to the Mean Does Not Explain Away Nonconscious Processing.

In studies that use subliminal presentations, participants may become aware of stimuli that are intended to remain subliminal. A common solution to this problem is to analyze the results of the group of participants for whom the stimuli remained subliminal. A recent article (Shanks, 2017) argued that this method leads to a regression to the mean artifact, which may account for many of the observed effects.

From non-conscious processing to conscious events: a minimalist approach.

The minimalist approach that we develop here is a framework that allows to appreciate how non-conscious processing and conscious contents shape human cognition, broadly defined. It is composed of three simple principles. First, cognitive processes are inherently non-conscious, while their inputs and (interim) outputs may be consciously experienced.

Disentangling perceptual awareness from nonconscious processing in rhesus monkeys ().

Scholars have long debated whether animals, which display impressive intelligent behaviors, are consciously aware or not. Yet, because many complex human behaviors and high-level functions can be performed without conscious awareness, it was long considered impossible to untangle whether animals are aware or just conditionally or nonconsciously behaving. Here, we developed an empirical approach to address this question.

Did you see it? Robust individual differences in the speed with which meaningful visual stimuli break suppression.

Perceptual conscious experiences result from non-conscious processes that precede them. We document a new characteristic of the cognitive system: the speed with which visual meaningful stimuli are prioritized to consciousness over competing noise in visual masking paradigms. In ten experiments (N = 399) we find that an individual's non-conscious visual prioritization speed (NVPS) is ubiquitous across a wide variety of stimuli, and generalizes across visual masks, suppression tasks, and time.

Predictions from masked motion with and without obstacles.

Predicting the future is essential for organisms like Homo sapiens, who live in a dynamic and ever-changing world. Previous research has established that conscious stimuli can lead to non-conscious predictions. Here we examine whether masked stimuli can also induce such predictions.

Getting to the heart of it: Multi-method exploration of nonconscious prioritization processes.

Understanding the determinants of consciousness is crucial for theories that see it as functionally adaptive, and for explaining how consciousness affects higher-level cognition. The invention of continuous flash suppression (CFS), a long-duration suppression technique, resulted in a proliferation of research into the process of prioritization for consciousness. We developed a new technique, repeated masked suppression (RMS), that facilitates the measurement of long suppression times, but relies on different visual principles.

Political depression? A big-data, multimethod investigation of Americans' emotional response to the Trump presidency.

Previous studies suggested that the 2016 presidential elections gave rise to pathological levels of election-related distress in liberal Americans; however, it has also been suggested that the public discourse and the professional discourse have increasingly overgeneralized concepts of trauma and psychopathology. In light of this, in the current research, we utilized an array of big data measures and asked whether a political loss in a participatory democracy can indeed lead to psychopathology. We observed that liberals report being more depressed when asked directly about the effects of the election; however, more indirect measures show a short-lived or nonexistent effect.

Evidence for trial-by-trial dynamic adjustment of task control in unmedicated adults with OCD.

According to the conflict monitoring theory, executive control requires two separable processes: conflict-monitoring and conflict-resolution. Deficits in executive control have been observed in adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, it is not yet clear whether these deficits can be attributed to deficits in conflict-monitoring, in conflict-resolution, or in both.

A novel perceptual trait: gaze predilection for faces during visual exploration.

Humans are social animals and typically tend to seek social interactions. In our daily life we constantly move our gaze to collect visual information which often includes social information, such as others' emotions and intentions. Recent studies began to explore how individuals vary in their gaze behavior.

Causal processes in psychology are heterogeneous.

All experimenters know that human and animal subjects do not respond uniformly to experimental treatments. Yet theories and findings in experimental psychology either ignore this causal effect heterogeneity or treat it as uninteresting error. This is the case even when data are available to examine effect heterogeneity directly, in within-subjects designs where experimental effects can be examined subject by subject.

When emotions run high: A critical role for context in the unfolding of dynamic, real-life facial affect.

Although positive and negative affect are assumed to be highly distinct, recent work has shown that facial valence of positive and negative situations may be highly confusable, especially when the emotions are intense. However, previous work has relied exclusively on static images, portraying a single peak frame of the emotional display. Dynamic expressions, on the other hand, convey a far broader representation of the emotional reaction, but are they diagnostic of the situational valence? Participants ( = 245) watched videos portraying reactions to real-life highly positive situations and evaluated the affective valence of the target.

Implicit motivation improves executive functions of older adults.

It is widely accepted that while controlled processes (e.g., working memory and executive functions) decline with age, implicit (automatic) processes are not affected by age.

The inherently contextualized nature of facial emotion perception.

According to mainstream views of emotion perception, facial expressions are powerful signals conveying specific emotional states. This approach, which endorsed the use of stereotypical-posed faces as stimuli, has typically ignored the role of context in emotion perception. We argue that this methodological tradition is flawed.

Self-regulation via neural simulation.

Can taking the perspective of other people modify our own affective responses to stimuli? To address this question, we examined the neurobiological mechanisms supporting the ability to take another person's perspective and thereby emotionally experience the world as they would. We measured participants' neural activity as they attempted to predict the emotional responses of two individuals that differed in terms of their proneness to experience negative affect. Results showed that behavioral and neural signatures of negative affect (amygdala activity and a distributed multivoxel pattern reflecting affective negativity) simulated the presumed affective state of the target person.

Enhanced discriminability for nonbiological motion violating the two-thirds power law.

The two-thirds power law describes the relationship between velocity and curvature in human motor movements. Interestingly, this motor law also affects visual motion perception, in which stimuli moving according to the two-thirds power law are perceived to have a constant velocity compared to stimuli actually moving at constant velocity. Thus, visual motion adhering to biological motion principles causes a kinematic illusion of smooth and velocity-invariant motion.

Social task switching: On the automatic social engagement of executive functions.

Humans are quintessentially social, yet much of cognitive psychology has focused on the individual, in individual settings. The literature on joint action is one of the most prominent exceptions. Joint-action research studies the sociality of our mental representations by examining how the tasks of other people around us affect our own task performance.

Speeded naming or naming speed? The automatic effect of object speed on performance.

We test the hypothesis that naming an object depicted in a picture and reading aloud an object's name are affected by the object's speed. We contend that the mental representations of everyday objects and situations include their speed, and that the latter influences behavior in instantaneous and systematic ways. An important corollary is that high-speed objects are named faster than low-speed objects, although object speed is irrelevant to the naming task at hand.

Positive consequences of conflict on decision making: when a conflict mindset facilitates choice.

Much research has shown that conflict is aversive and leads to increased choice deferral. In contrast, we have proposed that conflict can be beneficial. Specifically, exposure to nonconscious goal conflict can activate a mindset (a set of cognitive procedures) that facilitates the systematic processing of information without triggering the associated costs, such as negative affect and stress.