Combining social cues in attention: Looking at gaze, head, and pointing cues.

Social cues bias covert spatial attention. In most previous work the impact of different social cues, such as the gaze, head, and pointing cue, has been investigated using separated cues or making one cue explicitly task relevant in response-interference tasks. In the present study we created a novel cartoon figure in which unpredictive gaze and head and pointing cues could be combined to study their impact on spatial attention.

Food Captures Attention, but Not the Eyes: An Eye-Tracking Study on Mindset and BMI's Impact on Attentional Capture by High-Caloric Visual Food Stimuli.

Obesity is a worldwide pandemic and theories propose that attentional bias (AB) for food triggers craving and overeating, especially for people with obesity. However, empirical evidence is inconsistent, which may be due to methodological diversity and the double-sided nature of high-caloric palatable foods. That is, these foods simultaneously have a high hedonic and a low health value.

Effects of Mindset and Dietary Restraint on Attention Bias for Food and Food Intake.

Evidence for attention bias (AB) for food in restrained eaters is inconsistent. A person's mindset related to food - that is, whether someone focuses on the hedonic or health aspects of food - might be an overlooked influence on AB for food, possibly explaining the inconsistency in the literature. Fluctuations between a hedonic versus a health mindset might be strongest in restrained eaters, who have a conflicted relationship with food.

Does age-related hearing loss deteriorate attentional resources?

Recent work suggests that age-related hearing loss (HL) is a possible risk factor for cognitive decline in older adults. Resulting poor speech recognition negatively impacts cognitive, social and emotional functioning and may relate to dementia. However, little is known about the consequences of hearing loss on other non-linguistic domains of cognition.

An attentional limbo: Saccades become momentarily non-selective in between saliency-driven and relevance-driven selection.

Human vision involves selectively directing the eyes to potential objects of interest. According to most prominent theories, selection is the quantal outcome of an ongoing competition between saliency-driven signals on the one hand, and relevance-driven signals on the other, with both types of signals continuously and concurrently projecting onto a common priority map. Here, we challenge this view.

A failure to learn object shape geometry: Implications for convolutional neural networks as plausible models of biological vision.

Here we examine the plausibility of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as a theoretical framework for understanding biological vision in the context of image classification. Recent work on object recognition in human vision has shown that both global, and local, shape information is computed, and integrated, early during perceptual processing. Our goal was to compare the similarity in how object shape information is processed by CNNs and human observers.

Strategic Distractor Suppression Improves Selective Control in Human Vision.

Our visual environment is complicated, and our cognitive capacity is limited. As a result, we must strategically ignore some stimuli to prioritize others. Common sense suggests that foreknowledge of distractor characteristics, like location or color, might help us ignore these objects.

Eye-movement patterns to social and non-social cues in early deaf adults.

Previous research on covert orienting to the periphery suggested that early profound deaf adults were less susceptible to uninformative gaze-cues, though were equally or more affected by non-social arrow-cues. The aim of this work was to investigate whether spontaneous eye movement behaviour helps explain the reduced impact of the social cue in deaf adults. We tracked the gaze of 25 early profound deaf and 25 age-matched hearing observers performing a peripheral discrimination task with uninformative central cues (gaze vs arrow), stimulus-onset asynchrony (250 vs 750 ms), and cue validity (valid vs invalid) as within-subject factors.

Environmental Learning of Social Cues: Evidence From Enhanced Gaze Cueing in Deaf Children.

The susceptibility to gaze cueing in deaf children aged 7-14 years old (N = 16) was tested using a nonlinguistic task. Participants performed a peripheral shape-discrimination task, whereas uninformative central gaze cues validly or invalidly cued the location of the target. To assess the role of sign language experience and bilingualism in deaf participants, three groups of age-matched hearing children were recruited: bimodal bilinguals (vocal and sign-language, N = 19), unimodal bilinguals (two vocal languages, N = 17), and monolinguals (N = 14).

Predictions as a window into learning: Anticipatory fixation offsets carry more information about environmental statistics than reactive stimulus-responses.

A core question underlying neurobiological and computational models of behavior is how individuals learn environmental statistics and use them to make predictions. Most investigations of this issue have relied on reactive paradigms, in which inferences about predictive processes are derived by modeling responses to stimuli that vary in likelihood. Here we deployed a novel anticipatory oculomotor metric to determine how input statistics impact anticipatory behavior that is decoupled from target-driven-response.

The role of eye movements in manual responses to social and nonsocial cues.

Gaze and arrow cues cause covert attention shifts even when they are uninformative. Nonetheless, it is unclear to what extent oculomotor behavior influences manual responses to social and nonsocial stimuli. In two experiments, we tracked the gaze of participants during the cueing task with nonpredictive gaze and arrow cues.

Spontaneous pre-stimulus oscillatory activity shapes the way we look: A concurrent imaging and eye-movement study.

Previous behavioural studies have accrued evidence that response time plays a critical role in determining whether selection is influenced by stimulus saliency or target template. In the present work, we investigated to what extent the variations in timing and consequent oculomotor controls are influenced by spontaneous variations in pre-stimulus alpha oscillations. We recorded simultaneously brain activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and eye movements while participants performed a visual search task.

Effect of dietary restraint and mood state on attentional processing of food cues.

Background And Objectives: Research linking dietary restraint to attentional bias toward food cues has been equivocal, suggesting that dietary restraint may only influence attentional processing of food in certain contexts. The present study examined whether negative mood strengthens the association between dietary restraint and attention bias for food.

Methods: Healthy female participants were randomized to either a neutral (n = 47) or negative mood (n = 49) induction.

No evidence of task co-representation in a joint Stroop task.

People working together on a task must often represent the goals and salient items of their partner. The aim of the present study was to study the influence of joint task representations in an interference task in which the congruency relies on semantic identity. If task representations are shared between partners in a joint Stroop task (co-representation account), we hypothesized that items in the response set of one partner might influence performance of the other.

Conditional control in visual selection.

Attention and eye movements provide a window into the selective processing of visual information. Evidence suggests that selection is influenced by various factors and is not always under the strategic control of the observer. The aims of this tutorial review are to give a brief introduction to eye movements and attention and to outline the conditions that help determine control.

The impact of salience and visual working memory on the monitoring and control of saccadic behavior: An eye-tracking and EEG study.

In a concurrent eye-tracking and EEG study, we investigated the impact of salience on the monitoring and control of eye movement behavior and the role of visual working memory (VWM) capacity in mediating this effect. Participants made eye movements to a unique line-segment target embedded in a search display also containing a unique distractor. Target and distractor salience was manipulated by varying degree of orientation offset from a homogenous background.

A temporal dependency account of attentional inhibition in oculomotor control.

We used concurrent electroencephalogram (EEG) and eye tracking to investigate the role of covert attentional mechanisms in the control of oculomotor behavior. Human participants made speeded saccades to targets that were presented alongside salient distractors. By subsequently sorting trials based on whether the distractor was strongly represented or suppressed by the visual system - as evident in the accuracy (Exp.

Spatial and non-spatial multisensory cueing in unilateral cochlear implant users.

In the present study we examined the integrity of spatial and non-spatial multisensory cueing (MSC) mechanisms in unilateral CI users. We tested 17 unilateral CI users and 17 age-matched normal hearing (NH) controls in an elevation-discrimination task for visual targets delivered at peripheral locations. Visual targets were presented alone (visual-only condition) or together with abrupt sounds that matched or did not match the location of the visual targets (audio-visual conditions).

The oculomotor salience of flicker, apparent motion and continuous motion in saccade trajectories.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of dynamic distractors on the time-course of oculomotor selection using saccade trajectory deviations. Participants were instructed to make a speeded eye movement (pro-saccade) to a target presented above or below the fixation point while an irrelevant distractor was presented. Four types of distractors were varied within participants: (1) static, (2) flicker, (3) rotating apparent motion and (4) continuous motion.

Testing the idea of privileged awareness of self-relevant information.

Self-relevant information is prioritized in processing. Some have suggested the mechanism driving this advantage is akin to the automatic prioritization of physically salient stimuli in information processing (Humphreys & Sui, 2015). Here we investigate whether self-relevant information is prioritized for awareness under continuous flash suppression (CFS), as has been found for physical salience.

Attentional orienting to social and nonsocial cues in early deaf adults.

In 2 experiments we investigated attentional orienting to nonpredictive social and nonsocial cues in deaf observers. In Experiment 1a, 22 early deaf adults and 23 hearing controls performed a peripheral shape-discrimination task, while uninformative central gaze cues validly and invalidly cued the location of the target. As an adaptation to the lack of audition, we expected deaf adults to show a larger impact of gaze cuing on attentional orienting compared with hearing controls.

Finding the balance between capture and control: Oculomotor selection in early deaf adults.

Previous work investigating the consequence of bilateral deafness on attentional selection suggests that experience-dependent changes in this population may result in increased automatic processing of stimulus-driven visual information (e.g., saliency).

Involuntary attentional capture by task-irrelevant objects that match the search template for category detection in natural scenes.

Theories of visual search postulate that the selection of targets amongst distractors involves matching visual input to a top-down attentional template. Previous work has provided evidence that feature-based attentional templates affect visual processing globally across the visual field. In the present study, we asked whether more naturalistic, category-level attentional templates also modulate visual processing in a spatially global and obligatory way.

The effects of saliency on manual reach trajectories and reach target selection.

Reaching trajectories curve toward salient distractors, reflecting the competing activation of reach plans toward target and distractor stimuli. We investigated whether the relative saliency of target and distractor influenced the curvature of the movement and the selection of the final endpoint of the reach. Participants were asked to reach a bar tilted to the right in a context of gray vertical bars.

Trading off stimulus salience for identity: A cueing approach to disentangle visual selection strategies.

Recent studies show that time plays a primary role in determining whether visual selection is influenced by stimulus salience or guided by observers' intentions. Accordingly, when a response is made seems critically important in defining the outcome of selection. The present study investigates whether observers are able to control the timing of selection and regulate the trade-off between stimulus- and goal-driven influences.