People can reliably detect action changes and goal changes during naturalistic perception.

As a part of ongoing perception, the human cognitive system segments others' activities into discrete episodes (event segmentation). Although prior research has shown that this process is likely related to changes in an actor's actions and goals, it has not yet been determined whether untrained observers can reliably identify action and goal changes as naturalistic activities unfold, or whether the changes they identify are tied to visual features of the activity (e.g., the beginnings and ends of object interactions). This study addressed these questions by examining untrained participants' identification of action changes, goal changes, and event boundaries while watching videos of everyday activities that were presented in both first-person and third-person perspectives. We found that untrained observers can identify goal changes and action changes consistently, and these changes are not explained by visual change and the onsets or offsets of contact with objects. Moreover, the action and goal changes identified by untrained observers were associated with event boundaries, even after accounting for objective visual features of the videos. These findings suggest that people can identify action and goal changes consistently and with high agreement, that they do so by using sensory information flexibly, and that the action and goal changes they identify may contribute to event segmentation.

Nonlinear changes in pupillary attentional orienting responses across the lifespan.

The cognitive aging process is not necessarily linear. Central task-evoked pupillary responses, representing a brainstem-pupil relationship, may vary across the lifespan. Thus we examined, in 75 adults ranging in age from 19 to 86, whether task-evoked pupillary responses to an attention task may serve in as an index of cognitive aging. This is because the locus coeruleus (LC), located in the brainstem, is not only among the earliest sites of degeneration in pathological aging, but also supports both attentional and pupillary behaviors. We assessed brief, task-evoked phasic attentional orienting to behaviorally relevant and irrelevant auditory tones, stimuli known specifically to recruit the LC in the brainstem and evoke pupillary responses. Due to potential nonlinear changes across the lifespan, we used a novel data-driven analysis on 6 dynamic pupillary behaviors on 10% of the data to reveal cut off points that best characterized the three age bands: young (19-41 years old), middle aged (42-68 years old), and older adults (69 + years old). Follow-up analyses on independent data, the remaining 90%, revealed age-related changes such as monotonic decreases in tonic pupillary diameter and dynamic range, along with curvilinear phasic pupillary responses to the behaviorally relevant target events, increasing in the middle-aged group and then decreasing in the older group. Additionally, the older group showed decreased differentiation of pupillary responses between target and distractor events. This pattern is consistent with potential compensatory LC activity in midlife that is diminished in old age, resulting in decreased adaptive gain. Beyond regulating responses to light, pupillary dynamics reveal a nonlinear capacity for neurally mediated gain across the lifespan, thus providing evidence in support of the LC adaptive gain hypothesis.

The attentional boost effect in free recall dynamics.

With the attentional boost effect (ABE), responding to a briefly presented target in a detection task enhances the encoding of other items presented at the same time. However, the effects of target detection on context memory for the event in which the stimulus appeared remain unclear. Here, we present findings from verbal free recall and recognition experiments that test the effects of target detection during encoding on temporal and relational aspects of context memory. Consistent with prior demonstrations of limited effects of target detection on context memory, in Experiment 1 there was no evidence that target detection influenced the likelihood of transitioning to items that were presented at similar times during encoding, or that were in the same encoding condition. These null effects were replicated in a second experiment, which added an old/new recognition and relational memory test. These results indicate that target detection during encoding has minimal effects on the formation of temporal associations between words in memory.

Attention-dependent coupling with forebrain and brainstem neuromodulatory nuclei changes across the lifespan.

Attentional states continuously reflect the predictability and uncertainty in one's environment having important consequences for learning and memory. Beyond well known cortical contributions, rapid shifts in attention are hypothesized to also originate from deep nuclei, such as the basal forebrain (BF) and locus coeruleus (LC) neuromodulatory systems. These systems are also the first to change with aging. Here we characterized the interplay between these systems and their regulation of afferent targets - the hippocampus (HPC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) - across the lifespan. To examine the role of attentional salience on task-dependent functional connectivity, we used a target-distractor go/no go task presented during functional MRI. In younger adults, BF coupling with the HPC, and LC coupling with the PCC, increased with behavioral relevance (targets vs distractors). Although the strength and presence of significant regional coupling changed in middle age, the most striking change in network connectivity was in old age, such that in older adults BF and LC coupling with their cortical afferents was largely absent and replaced by stronger interconnectivity between LC-BF nuclei. Overall rapid changes in attention related to behavioral relevance revealed distinct roles of subcortical neuromodulatory systems. The pronounced changes in functional network architecture across the lifespan suggest a decrease in these distinct roles, with deafferentation of cholinergic and noradrenergic systems associated with a shift towards mutual support during attention guided to external stimuli.

Omnipresence of the sensorimotor-association axis topography in the human connectome.

Low-dimensional representations are increasingly used to study meaningful organizational principles within the human brain. Most notably, the sensorimotor-association axis consistently explains the most variance in the human connectome as its so-called principal gradient, suggesting that it represents a fundamental organizational principle. While recent work indicates these low dimensional representations are relatively robust, they are limited by modeling only certain aspects of the functional connectivity structure. To date, the majority of studies have restricted these approaches to the strongest connections in the brain, treating weaker or negative connections as noise despite evidence of meaningful structure among them. The present work examines connectivity gradients of the human connectome across a full range of connectivity strengths and explores the implications for outcomes of individual differences, identifying potential dependencies on thresholds and opportunities to improve prediction tasks. Interestingly, the sensorimotor-association axis emerged as the principal gradient of the human connectome across the entire range of connectivity levels. Moreover, the principal gradient of connections at intermediate strengths encoded individual differences, better followed individual-specific anatomical features, and was also more predictive of intelligence. Taken together, our results add to evidence of the sensorimotor-association axis as a fundamental principle of the brain's functional organization, since it is evident even in the connectivity structure of more lenient connectivity thresholds. These more loosely coupled connections further appear to contain valuable and potentially important information that could be used to improve our understanding of individual differences, diagnosis, and the prediction of treatment outcomes.

Measuring event segmentation: An investigation into the stability of event boundary agreement across groups.

People spontaneously divide everyday experience into smaller units (event segmentation). To measure event segmentation, studies typically ask participants to explicitly mark the boundaries between events as they watch a movie (segmentation task). Their data may then be used to infer how others are likely to segment the same movie. However, significant variability in performance across individuals could undermine the ability to generalize across groups, especially as more research moves online. To address this concern, we used several widely employed and novel measures to quantify segmentation agreement across different sized groups (n = 2-32) using data collected on different platforms and movie types (in-lab & commercial film vs. online & everyday activities). All measures captured nonrandom and video-specific boundaries, but with notable between-sample variability. Samples of 6-18 participants were required to reliably detect video-driven segmentation behavior within a single sample. As sample size increased, agreement values improved and eventually stabilized at comparable sample sizes for in-lab & commercial film data and online & everyday activities data. Stabilization occurred at smaller sample sizes when measures reflected (1) agreement between two groups versus agreement between an individual and group, and (2) boundary identification between small (fine-grained) rather than large (coarse-grained) events. These analyses inform the tailoring of sample sizes based on the comparison of interest, materials, and data collection platform. In addition to demonstrating the reliability of online and in-lab segmentation performance at moderate sample sizes, this study supports the use of segmentation data to infer when events are likely to be segmented.

Grounding the Attentional Boost Effect in Events and the Efficient Brain.

Attention and memory for everyday experiences vary over time, wherein some moments are better attended and subsequently better remembered than others. These effects have been demonstrated in naturalistic viewing tasks with complex and relatively uncontrolled stimuli, as well as in more controlled laboratory tasks with simpler stimuli. For example, in the attentional boost effect (ABE), participants perform two tasks at once: memorizing a series of briefly presented stimuli (e.g., pictures of outdoor scenes) for a later memory test, and responding to other concurrently presented cues that meet pre-defined criteria (e.g., participants press a button for a blue target square and do nothing for a red distractor square). However, rather than increasing dual-task interference, attending to a target cue boosts, rather than impairs, subsequent memory for concurrently presented information. In this review we describe current data on the extent and limitations of the attentional boost effect and whether it may be related to activity in the locus coeruleus neuromodulatory system. We suggest that insight into the mechanisms that produce the attentional boost effect may be found in recent advances in the locus coeruleus literature and from understanding of how the neurocognitive system handles stability and change in everyday events. We consequently propose updates to an early account of the attentional boost effect, the dual-task interaction model, to better ground it in what is currently known about event cognition and the role that the LC plays in regulating brain states.

"Guidance of spatial attention by incidental learning and endogenous cuing": Retraction.

Reports the retraction of "Guidance of spatial attention by incidental learning and endogenous cuing" by Yuhong V. Jiang, Khena M. Swallow and Gail M. Rosenbaum (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2013[Feb], Vol 39[1], 285-297). The retraction is at the request of the authors. There was an unintentional error in the MATLAB experimental script used for Experiment 5 that caused one experimental condition to be incorrectly recorded in the data files. The authors confirmed that the MATLAB scripts used for Experiments 1 and 2 did not contain any errors and the findings and conclusions remain valid. However, for Experiments 3 and 4, the programming error led to two issues: (a) one variable was incorrectly written to the data files, and (b) the actual number of trials per condition during the training phase was unbalanced. To ensure that the scientific record is adequately corrected, the authors have uploaded additional information, including the MATLAB scripts for all experiments, the reanalysis of the data from Experiments 3, 4, and 5, and the validation of Experiments 1 and 2, to this OSF repository: https://osf.io/k79j4/?view_only=2220d62d0bb643f9b4ca53 e7a6da872f. The first author of the paper, who programmed the MATLAB scripts, takes full responsibility for the error. The authors sincerely regret this error and apologize for its effects on the editors, reviewers, and the broader scientific community. All authors of the original article joined in the request for the retraction. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2012-09470-001). Our visual system is highly sensitive to regularities in the environment. Locations that were important in one's previous experience are often prioritized during search, even though observers may not be aware of the learning. In this study we characterized the guidance of spatial attention by incidental learning of a target's spatial probability, and examined the interaction between endogenous cuing and probability cuing. Participants searched for a target (T) among distractors (Ls). The target was more often located in one region of the screen than in others. We found that search reaction time (RT) was faster when the target appeared in the high-frequency region rather than the low-frequency regions. This difference increased when there were more items on the display, suggesting that probability cuing guides spatial attention. Additional data indicated that on their own, probability cuing and endogenous cuing (e.g., a central arrow that predicted a target's location) were similarly effective at guiding attention. However, when both cues were presented at once, probability cuing was largely eliminated. Thus, although both incidental learning and endogenous cuing can effectively guide attention, endogenous cuing takes precedence over incidental learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Auditory Target Detection Enhances Visual Processing and Hippocampal Functional Connectivity.

Though dividing one's attention between two input streams typically impairs performance, detecting a behaviorally relevant stimulus can sometimes enhance the encoding of unrelated information presented at the same time. Previous research has shown that selection of this kind boosts visual cortical activity and memory for concurrent items. An important unanswered question is whether such effects are reflected in processing quality and functional connectivity in visual regions and in the hippocampus. In this fMRI study, participants were asked to memorize a stream of naturalistic images and press a button only when they heard a predefined target tone (400 or 1,200 Hz, counterbalanced). Images could be presented with a target tone, with a distractor tone, or without a tone. Auditory target detection increased activity throughout the ventral visual cortex but lowered it in the hippocampus. Enhancements in functional connectivity between the ventral visual cortex and the hippocampus were also observed following auditory targets. Multi-voxel pattern classification of image category was more accurate on target tone trials than on distractor and no tone trials in the fusiform gyrus and parahippocampal gyrus. This effect was stronger in visual cortical clusters whose activity was more correlated with the hippocampus on target tone than on distractor tone trials. In agreement with accounts suggesting that subcortical noradrenergic influences play a role in the attentional boost effect, auditory target detection also caused an increase in locus coeruleus activity and phasic pupil responses. These findings outline a network of cortical and subcortical regions that are involved in the selection and processing of information presented at behaviorally relevant moments.

Estimates of locus coeruleus function with functional magnetic resonance imaging are influenced by localization approaches and the use of multi-echo data.

The locus coeruleus (LC) plays a central role in regulating human cognition, arousal, and autonomic states. Efforts to characterize the LC's function in humans using functional magnetic resonance imaging have been hampered by its small size and location near a large source of noise, the fourth ventricle. We tested whether the ability to characterize LC function is improved by employing neuromelanin-T1 weighted images (nmT1) for LC localization and multi-echo functional magnetic resonance imaging (ME-fMRI) for estimating intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC). Analyses indicated that, relative to a probabilistic atlas, utilizing nmT1 images to individually localize the LC increases the specificity of seed time series and clusters in the iFC maps. When combined with independent components analysis (ME-ICA), ME-fMRI data provided significant improvements in the temporal signal to noise ratio and DVARS relative to denoised single echo data (1E-fMRI). The effects of acquiring nmT1 images and ME-fMRI data did not appear to only reflect increases in power: iFC maps for each approach overlapped only moderately. This is consistent with findings that ME-fMRI offers substantial advantages over 1E-fMRI acquisition and denoising. It also suggests that individually identifying LC with nmT1 scans is likely to reduce the influence of other nearby brainstem regions on estimates of LC function.

Culture influences how people divide continuous sensory experience into events.

Everyday experience is divided into meaningful events as a part of human perception. Current accounts of this process, known as event segmentation, focus on how characteristics of the experience (e.g., situation changes) influence segmentation. However, characteristics of the viewers themselves have been largely neglected. We test whether one such viewer characteristic, their cultural background, impacts online event segmentation. Culture could impact event segmentation (1) by emphasizing different aspects of experiences as being important for comprehension, memory, and communication, and (2) by providing different exemplars of how everyday activities are performed, which objects are likely to be used, and how scenes are laid out. Indian and US viewers (N = 152) identified events in everyday activities (e.g., making coffee) recorded in Indian and US settings. Consistent with their cultural preference for analytical processing, US viewers segmented the activities into more events than did Indian viewers. Furthermore, event boundaries identified by US viewers were more strongly associated with visual changes, whereas boundaries identified by Indian viewers were more strongly associated with goal changes. There was no evidence that familiarity with an activity impacted segmentation. Thus, culture impacts event perception by altering the types of information people prioritize when dividing experience into meaningful events.

Attention and cardiac phase boost judgments of trust.

Fluctuations in mental and bodily states have both been shown to be associated with negative affective experience. Here we examined how momentary fluctuations in attentional and cardiac states combine to regulate the perception of positive social value. Faces varying in trustworthiness were presented during a go/no-go letter target discrimination task synchronized with systolic or diastolic cardiac phase. Go trials lead to an attentional boosting of perceived trust on high trust and ambiguous neutral faces, suggesting attention both boosted existing and generated positive social value. Cardiac phase during face presentation interacted with attentional boosting of trust, enhancing high trust faces specifically during relaxed diastolic cardiac states. Confidence judgments revealed that attentional trust boosting, and its cardiac modulation, did not reflect altered perceptual or response fluency. These results provide evidence for how moment-to moment fluctuations in top-down mental and bottom-up bodily inputs combine to enhance a priori and generate de novo positive social value.

Target detection increases pupil diameter and enhances memory for background scenes during multi-tasking.

Attending to targets in a detection task can facilitate memory for concurrently presented information, a phenomenon known as the attentional boost effect. One account of the attentional boost suggests that it reflects the temporal selection of behaviorally relevant moments, broadly facilitating the processing of information encountered at these times. Because pupil diameter increases when orienting to behaviorally relevant events and is positively correlated with increases in gain and activity in the locus coeruleus (a purported neurophysiological mechanism for temporal selection), we tested whether the attentional boost effect is accompanied by an increase in pupil diameter. Participants memorized a series of individually presented scenes. Whenever a scene appeared, a high or low pitched tone was played, and participants counted (and later reported) the number of tones in the pre-specified, target pitch. Target detection enhanced later memory for concurrently presented scenes. It was accompanied by a larger pupil response than was distractor rejection, and this effect was more pronounced for subsequently remembered rather than forgotten scenes. Thus, conditions that produce the attentional boost effect may also elicit phasic changes in neural gain and locus coeruleus activity.

The role of value in the attentional boost effect.

Focusing attention on one item typically interferes with the ability to process other information. Yet, target detection can both facilitate memory for items paired with the target (the attentional boost effect) and increase the perceived value of those items (cued approach). Because long-term memory is better for valuable items than for neutral items, we asked whether the attentional boost effect is due to changes in the perceived value of items that are paired with targets. In three experiments, participants memorised a series of briefly presented images that depicted valuable (e.g., food) or neutral (e.g., children's toys) items. Whenever an item appeared, a square flashed in its centre. Participants pressed a button if the square was a target colour but not if it was a distractor colour. Consistent with previous research, target-paired items were remembered better than distractor-paired items and were rated as more valuable. Importantly, if memory for target-paired items is enhanced because they increased in perceived value, then valuable items should have been better remembered than neutral items. However, we found no evidence that value enhanced memory for the items in this task. Thus, it is unlikely that the attentional boost effect is due to changes in perceived value.

Attending to behaviorally relevant moments enhances incidental relational memory.

Memory for the items one has recently encountered is sometimes enhanced in divided attention tasks: Attending to behaviorally relevant items, such as a target in a detection task, boosts memory for unrelated background items (e.g., scenes or words). However, a central feature of episodic memory is memory for the spatiotemporal relationship between items and other elements of an event (relational memory), not just the item itself. Three experiments examined whether attending to a behaviorally relevant target-item boosts memory for the relationship between that item, its features, and a background scene. Participants memorized briefly presented scenes. At the same time, they pressed a button if a second unrelated item (a figure or face) was a particular target color (Experiments 1 and 2) or target gender (Experiment 3) rather than a distractor color or gender. Target and distractor items also varied in task-irrelevant features (shape, location, or facial identity). If attending to behaviorally relevant events influences relational memory, then participants should be better able to report both target-defining and irrelevant features of items that appeared with target-paired scenes rather than distractor-paired scenes. This was the case in all experiments: memory was enhanced for the target-paired scenes as well as the association between a scene and features of the paired target-item. Attending to behaviorally relevant moments therefore has broader effects on memory encoding than previously thought. In addition to boosting memory for unrelated background items, attending to targets facilitates relational memory in these tasks.

The role of perspective in event segmentation.

People divide their ongoing experience into meaningful events. This process, event segmentation, is strongly associated with visual input: when visual features change, people are more likely to segment. However, the nature of this relationship is unclear. Segmentation could be bound to specific visual features, such as actor posture. Or, it could be based on changes in the activity that are correlated with visual features. This study distinguished between these two possibilities by examining whether segmentation varies across first- and third-person perspectives. In two experiments, observers identified meaningful events in videos of actors performing everyday activities, such as eating breakfast or doing laundry. Each activity was simultaneously recorded from a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective. These videos presented identical activities but differed in their visual features. If segmentation is tightly bound to visual features then observers should identify different events in first- and third-person videos. In addition, the relationship between segmentation and visual features should remain unchanged. Neither prediction was supported. Though participants sometimes identified more events in first-person videos, the events they identified were mostly indistinguishable from those identified for third-person videos. In addition, the relationship between the video's visual features and segmentation changed across perspectives, further demonstrating a partial dissociation between segmentation and visual input. Event segmentation appears to be robust to large variations in sensory information as long as the content remains the same. Segmentation mechanisms appear to flexibly use sensory information to identify the structure of the underlying activity.

How memory is tested influences what is measured: Reply to Wyble and Chen (2017).

In this response to Wyble and Chen's (2017) commentary on attribute amnesia, we hope to achieve several goals. First, we clarify how our view diverges from that described by Wyble and Chen. We argue that because the surprise memory test is disruptive, it is an insensitive tool for measuring the persistence of recently attended target attributes in memory. Second, we identify points of agreement between our view and that of Wyble and Chen. Like them, we believe that the strength of a mental representation is a critical factor in determining whether the representation persists long enough to be used in a surprise recognition task. We also agree that consolidation is one means of strengthening this representation. Finally, we suggest questions that should be addressed to clarify the factors that determine whether attended information can be reported in a surprise memory test. (PsycINFO Database Record

Memory for recently accessed visual attributes.

Recent reports have suggested that the attended features of an item may be rapidly forgotten once they are no longer relevant for an ongoing task (attribute amnesia). This finding relies on a surprise memory procedure that places high demands on declarative memory. We used intertrial priming to examine whether the representation of an item's identity is lost completely once it becomes task irrelevant. If so, then the identity of a target on one trial should not influence performance on the next trial. In 3 experiments, we replicated the finding that a target's identity is poorly recognized in a surprise memory test. However, we also observed location and identity repetition priming across consecutive trials. These data suggest that, although explicit recognition on a surprise memory test may be impaired, some information about a particular target's identity can be retained after it is no longer needed for a task. (PsycINFO Database Record

Task specificity of attention training: the case of probability cuing.

Statistical regularities in our environment enhance perception and modulate the allocation of spatial attention. Surprisingly little is known about how learning-induced changes in spatial attention transfer across tasks. In this study, we investigated whether a spatial attentional bias learned in one task transfers to another. Most of the experiments began with a training phase in which a search target was more likely to be located in one quadrant of the screen than in the other quadrants. An attentional bias toward the high-probability quadrant developed during training (probability cuing). In a subsequent, testing phase, the target's location distribution became random. In addition, the training and testing phases were based on different tasks. Probability cuing did not transfer between visual search and a foraging-like task. However, it did transfer between various types of visual search tasks that differed in stimuli and difficulty. These data suggest that different visual search tasks share a common and transferrable learned attentional bias. However, this bias is not shared by high-level, decision-making tasks such as foraging.

Temporal yoking in continuous multitasking.

Continuous tasks such as baggage screening often involve selective gating of sensory information when "targets" are detected. Previous research has shown that temporal selection of behaviorally relevant information triggers changes in perception, learning, and memory. However, it is unclear whether temporal selection has broad effects on concurrent tasks. To address this question, we asked participants to view a stream of faces and encoded faces of a particular gender for a later memory test. At the same time, they listened to a sequence of tones, pressing a button for specific pitched tones. We manipulated the timing of temporal selection such that target faces and target tones could be unrelated, perfectly correlated, or anticorrelated. Temporal selection was successful when the temporally coinciding stimuli were congruent (e.g., both were targets), but not when they were incongruent (i.e., only 1 was a target). This pattern suggests that attentional selection for separate tasks is yoked in time-when the attentional gate opens for 1 task it also opens for the other. Temporal yoking is a unique form of dual-task interaction.