Reading English-language haiku: An eye-movement study of the 'cut effect'.

The current study, set within the larger enterprise of Neuro-Cognitive Poetics, was designed to examine how readers deal with the 'cut' - a more or less sharp semantic-conceptual break - in normative, three-line English-language haiku poems (ELH). Readers were presented with three-line haiku that consisted of two (seemingly) disparate parts, a (two-line) 'phrase' image and a one-line 'fragment' image, in order to determine how they process the conceptual gap between these images when constructing the poem's meaning - as reflected in their patterns of reading eye movements. In addition to replicating the basic 'cut effect', i.e., the extended fixation dwell time on the fragment line relative to the other lines, the present study examined (a) how this effect is influenced by whether the cut is purely implicit or explicitly marked by punctuation, and (b) whether the effect pattern could be delineated against a control condition of 'uncut', one-image haiku. For 'cut' vs. 'uncut' haiku, the results revealed the distribution of fixations across the poems to be modulated by the position of the cut (after line 1 vs. after line 2), the presence vs. absence of a cut marker, and the semanticconceptual distance between the two images (context-action vs. juxtaposition haiku). These formal-structural and conceptual-semantic properties were associated with systematic changes in how individual poem lines were scanned at first reading and then (selectively) re-sampled in second- and third-pass reading to construct and check global meaning. No such effects were found for one-image (control) haiku. We attribute this pattern to the operation of different meaning resolution processes during the comprehension of two-image haiku, which are invoked by both form- and meaning-related features of the poems.

A theoretical attempt to revive the serial/parallel-search dichotomy.

A core distinction in Anne Treisman's feature-integration theory (FIT) is in that between parallel and serial search. We outline this dichotomy and selectively review the reasons why it has largely been abandoned in the visual-search community-namely, its theoretical dispensability, failure to find reliable yardsticks for differentiating parallel and serial search, and falsification of core predictions. We then go on to introduce a new theoretical framework that, we argue, clears up some of the theoretical confusion by merging FIT with various competing theories. This framework's core feature is the distinction between and characterization of two fundamentally different search modes: one in which attention is guided to a single item via a priority map (priority guidance), and one in which clumps of multiple items are scanned in parallel in a spatially systematic order (clump scanning). Finally, we will elaborate how this new theoretical framework can resolve current controversies in the literature and how it relates to other existing theories. We (somewhat optimistically) believe that the outcome of this theoretical exercise is a unification of theories of visual search that can explain, or at least is consistent with, all phenomena reported in the visual-search literature that have previously been accounted for by various conflicting theories.

Probability cueing of singleton-distractor locations in visual search: Priority-map- versus dimension-based inhibition?

Observers can learn the likely locations of salient distractors in visual search, reducing their potential to cause interference. Although there is agreement that this involves positional suppression of the likely distractor location(s), it is contentious at which stage the suppression operates: the search-guiding priority map, which integrates feature-contrast signals (e.g., generated by a red among green or a diamond among circular items) across dimensions, or the distractor-defining dimension. On the latter, dimension-based account (Sauter, Liesefeld, Zehetleitner, & Müller, 2018), processing of, say, a shape-defined target should be unaffected by distractor suppression when the distractor is defined by color, because in this case only color signals would be suppressed. At odds with this, Wang and Theeuwes (2018a) found slowed processing of the target when it appeared at the likely (vs. an unlikely) distractor location, consistent with priority-map-based suppression. Adopting their paradigm, the present study replicated this target location effect. Crucially, however, changing the paradigm by making the target appear as likely at the frequent as at any of the rare distractor locations and making the distractor/nondistractor color assignment consistent abolished the target location effect, without impacting the reduced interference for distractors at the frequent location. These findings support a flexible locus of spatial distractor suppression-priority-map- or dimension-based-depending on the prominence of distractor cues provided by the paradigm. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Distractor handling via dimension weighting.

Salient-but-irrelevant objects have the potential to distract attention. Objects are salient if they differ from their surround in some feature dimension, such as shape, orientation, or motion. One way to reduce distraction, therefore, is to attenuate all saliency signals from the respective feature dimension. This mechanism, or strategy, which follows from a broader theory of attentional selection termed Dimension-Weighting Account (DWA), is very powerful, as evidenced by the massive distractor interference observed when it is ineligible. However, it also consumes scarce cognitive resources, so that it is not always employed and often complemented by other mechanisms of distractor handling. These alternative mechanisms might be less effective and/or have negative side effects.

Current directions in visual working memory research: An introduction and emerging insights.

Visual working memory (VWM) is a core construct in the cognitive (neuro-)sciences, assumed to serve as a hub for information exchange and thus supporting a multitude of cognitive functions related to processing visual information. Here, we give an introduction into key terms and paradigms and an overview of ongoing debates in the field, to which the articles collected in this Special Issue on 'Current Directions in Visual Working Memory Research' contribute. Our aim is to extract, from this overview, some 'emerging' theoretical insights concerning questions such as the optimal way to examine VWM, which types of mental representations contribute to performance on VWM tasks, and how VWM keeps features from the same object together and apart from features of concurrently maintained objects (the binding problem).

Learning to suppress salient distractors in the target dimension: Region-based inhibition is persistent and transfers to distractors in a nontarget dimension.

It was shown previously that observers can learn to exploit an uneven spatial distribution of singleton distractors to better shield visual search from distractors in the frequent versus the rare region (i.e., distractor location probability cueing; Sauter, Liesefeld, Zehetleitner, & Müller, 2018). However, with distractors defined in the same dimension as the search target, this comes at the cost of impaired detection of targets in the frequent region. In 3 experiments, the present study investigated the learning and unlearning of distractor location probability cueing and the carry-over of cueing effects from same- to different-dimension distractors. All experiments involved a visual search for an orientation-defined singleton target in the presence of either a more salient color-defined (different-dimension) or orientation-defined (same-dimension) distractor singleton, and all were divided into a learning session and a subsequent test session. The present study showed that with same-dimension (but not with different-dimension) distractors, the acquired cueing effect persists over a 24-h break between the training and test session and takes several hundred trials to be unlearned when the distribution is changed to even (50%/50%) in the test session. Furthermore, the target location effect as well as (somewhat less marked) the cueing effect carries over from learning with same-dimension distractors to test with different-dimension distractors. These carry-over effects are in line with the assumption that the learned distractor suppression effects are implemented at different levels in the hierarchical architecture of search guidance: the saliency map with same-dimension distractors versus a dimension-based level below the saliency map with different-dimension distractors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Combining speed and accuracy to control for speed-accuracy trade-offs(?).

In psychological experiments, participants are typically instructed to respond as fast as possible without sacrificing accuracy. How they interpret this instruction and, consequently, which speed-accuracy trade-off they choose might vary between experiments, between participants, and between conditions. Consequently, experimental effects can appear unpredictably in either RTs or error rates (i.e., accuracy). Even more problematic, spurious effects might emerge that are actually due only to differential speed-accuracy trade-offs. An often-suggested solution is the inverse efficiency score (IES; Townsend & Ashby, 1983), which combines speed and accuracy into a single score. Alternatives are the rate-correct score (RCS; Woltz & Was, 2006) and the linear-integrated speed-accuracy score (LISAS; Vandierendonck, 2017, 2018). We report analyses on simulated data generated with the standard diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) showing that IES, RCS, and LISAS put unequal weights on speed and accuracy, depending on the accuracy level, and that these measures are actually very sensitive to speed-accuracy trade-offs. These findings stand in contrast to a fourth alternative, the balanced integration score (BIS; Liesefeld, Fu, & Zimmer, 2015), which was devised to integrate speed and accuracy with equal weights. Although all of the measures maintain "real" effects, only BIS is relatively insensitive to speed-accuracy trade-offs.

Biasing Allocations of Attention via Selective Weighting of Saliency Signals: Behavioral and Neuroimaging Evidence for the Dimension-Weighting Account.

Objects that stand out from the environment tend to be of behavioral relevance, and the visual system is tuned to preferably process these salient objects by allocating focused attention. However, attention is not just passively (bottom-up) driven by stimulus features, but previous experiences and task goals exert strong biases toward attending or actively ignoring salient objects. The core and eponymous assumption of the dimension-weighting account (DWA) is that these top-down biases are not as flexible as one would like them to be; rather, they are subject to dimensional constraints. In particular, DWA assumes that people can often not search for objects that have a particular feature but only for objects that stand out from the environment (i.e., that are salient) in a particular feature dimension. We review behavioral and neuroimaging evidence for such dimensional constraints in three areas: search history, voluntary target enhancement, and distractor handling. The first two have been the focus of research on DWA since its inception and the latter the subject of our more recent research. Additionally, we discuss various challenges to the DWA and its relation to other prominent theories on top-down influences in visual search.

Two good reasons to say 'change!' - ensemble representations as well as item representations impact standard measures of VWM capacity.

Visual working memory (VWM) is a central bottleneck in human information processing. Its capacity is most often measured in terms of how many individual-item representations VWM can hold (k). In the standard task employed to estimate k, an array of highly discriminable colour patches is maintained and, after a short retention interval, compared to a test display (change detection). Recent research has shown that with more complex, structured displays, change-detection performance is, in addition to individual-item representations, supported by ensemble representations formed as a result of spatial subgroupings. Here, by asking participants to additionally localize the change, we reveal indication for an influence of ensemble representations even in the very simple, unstructured displays of the colour-patch change-detection task. Critically, pure-item models from which standard formulae of k are derived do not consider ensemble representations and, therefore, potentially overestimate k. To gauge this overestimation, we develop an item-plus-ensemble model of change detection and change localization. Estimates of k from this new model are about 1 item (~30%) lower than the estimates from traditional pure-item models, even if derived from the same data sets.

Estimating the Timing of Cognitive Operations With MEG/EEG Latency Measures: A Primer, a Brief Tutorial, and an Implementation of Various Methods.

The major advantage of MEG/EEG over other neuroimaging methods is its high temporal resolution. Examining the latency of well-studied components can provide a window into the dynamics of cognitive operations beyond traditional response-time (RT) measurements. While RTs reflect the cumulative duration of all time-consuming cognitive operations involved in a task, component latencies can partition this time into cognitively meaningful sub-steps. Surprisingly, most MEG/EEG studies neglect this advantage and restrict analyses to component amplitudes without considering latencies. The major reasons for this neglect might be that, first, the most easily accessible latency measure (peak latency) is often unreliable and that, second, more complex measures are difficult to conceive, implement, and parametrize. The present article illustrates the key advantages and disadvantages of the three main types of latency-measures (peak latency, onset latency, and percent-area latency), introduces a MATLAB function that extracts all these measures and is compatible with common analysis tools, discusses the most important parameter choices for different research questions and components of interest, and demonstrates its use by various group analyses on one planar gradiometer pair of the publicly available Wakeman and Henson (2015) data. The introduced function can extract from group data not only single-subject latencies, but also grand-average and jackknife latencies. Furthermore, it gives the choice between different approaches to automatically set baselines and anchor points for latency estimation, approaches that were partly developed by me and that capitalize on the informational richness of MEG/EEG data. Although the function comes with a wide range of customization parameters, the default parameters are set so that even beginners get reasonable results. Graphical depictions of latency estimates, baselines, and anchor points overlaid on individual averages further support learning, understanding and trouble-shooting. Once extracted, latency estimates can be submitted to any analysis also available for (averaged) RTs, including tests for mean differences, correlational approaches and cognitive modeling.

Region-based shielding of visual search from salient distractors: Target detection is impaired with same- but not different-dimension distractors.

Shielding visual search against interference from salient distractors becomes more efficient over time for display regions where distractors appear more frequently, rather than only rarely Goschy, Bakos, Müller, & Zehetleitner (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014). We hypothesized that the locus of this learned distractor probability-cueing effect depends on the dimensional relationship of the to-be-inhibited distractor relative to the to-be-attended target. If the distractor and target are defined in different visual dimensions (e.g., a color-defined distractor and orientation-defined target, as in Goschy et al. (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014), distractors may be efficiently suppressed by down-weighting the feature contrast signals in the distractor-defining dimension Zehetleitner, Goschy, & Müller (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 38: 941-957, 2012), with stronger down-weighting being applied to the frequent- than to the rare-distractor region. However, given dimensionally coupled feature contrast signal weighting (cf. Müller J, Heller & Ziegler (Perception & Psychophysics 57:1-17, 1995), this dimension-(down-)weighting strategy would not be effective when the target and the distractors are defined within the same dimension. In this case, suppression may operate differently: by inhibiting the entire frequent-distractor region on the search-guiding master saliency map. The downside of inhibition at this level is that, although it reduces distractor interference in the inhibited (frequent-distractor) region, it also impairs target processing in that region-even when no distractor is actually present in the display. This predicted qualitative difference between same- and different-dimension distractors was confirmed in the present study (with 184 participants), thus furthering our understanding of the functional architecture of search guidance, especially regarding the mechanisms involved in shielding search from the interference of distractors that consistently occur in certain display regions.

Saliency maps for finding changes in visual scenes?

Sudden changes in the environment reliably summon attention. This rapid change detection appears to operate in a similar fashion as pop-out in visual search, the phenomenon that very salient stimuli are directly attended, independently of the number of distracting objects. Pop-out is usually explained by the workings of saliency maps, i.e., map-like representations that code for the conspicuity at each location of the visual field. While past research emphasized similarities between pop-out search and change detection, our study highlights differences between the saliency computations in the two tasks: in contrast to pop-out search, saliency computation in change detection (i) operates independently across different stimulus properties (e.g., color and orientation), and (ii) is little influenced by trial history. These deviations from pop-out search are not due to idiosyncrasies of the stimuli or task design, as evidenced by a replication of standard findings in a comparable visual-search design. To explain these results, we outline a model of change detection involving the computation of feature-difference maps, which explains the known similarities and differences with visual search.

Attentional capture in visual search: Capture and post-capture dynamics revealed by EEG.

Sometimes, salient-but-irrelevant objects (distractors) presented concurrently with a search target cannot be ignored and attention is involuntarily allocated towards the distractor first. Several studies have provided electrophysiological evidence for involuntary misallocations of attention towards a distractor, but much less is known about the mechanisms that are needed to overcome a misallocation and re-allocate attention towards the concurrently presented target. In our study, electrophysiological markers of attentional mechanisms indicate that (i) the distractor captures attention before the target is attended, (ii) a misallocation of attention is terminated actively (instead of attention fading passively), and (iii) the misallocation of attention towards a distractor delays the attention allocation towards the target (rather than just delaying some post-attentive process involved in response selection). This provides the most complete demonstration, to date, of the chain of attentional mechanisms that are evoked when attention is misguided and recovers from capture within a search display.

Parallel attentive processing and pre-attentive guidance.

This commentary focuses on two related, open questions in Hulleman & Olivers' (H&O's) proposal: (1) the nature of the parallel attentive process that determines target presence within, and thus presumably the size of, the functional visual field, and (2) how the pre-attentive guidance mechanism must be conceived to also account for search performance in tasks that afford no reliable target-based guidance.

An appeal against the item's death sentence: Accounting for diagnostic data patterns with an item-based model of visual search.

We show that our item-based model, competitive guided search, accounts for the empirical patterns that Hulleman & Olivers (H&O) invoke against item-based models, and we highlight recently reported diagnostic data that challenge their approach. We advise against "forsaking the item" unless and until a full fixation-based model is shown to be superior to extant item-based models.

Recollection is delayed under changed viewing conditions: A graded effect on the latency of the late posterior component.

Object recognition is a central human ability. In everyday life, the conditions under which objects have to be recognized are usually not perfect. Often, viewing conditions change in between two encounters with an object; typical are changes in illumination or in the object-observer distance. With such changes, object recognition sometimes feels slightly delayed. We examined this phenomenon empirically by measuring the latency of the well-established electrophysiological correlate of recollection, the late posterior component (LPC), in an object-recognition task. Although the cognitive processes underlying successful recognition are well examined, thus far the consequences of changed viewing conditions on the timing of these processes have not been investigated. The ERP technique is well suited for investigating this question, because it allows differentiating between processes contributing to recognition times (in particular, recollection from familiarity as indexed by the FN400 component) and measuring their time course with high temporal precision. In the present study, participants' task was to differentiate previously studied (old) objects from a set of new objects. Viewing conditions for old objects changed slightly, changed strongly, or remained identical between learning and test. We found that the latency of the LPC in response to an old object was delayed whenever viewing conditions changed. Moreover, this delay in LPC latency scaled with the size of the change. These effects were absent for the FN400. This is the first examination of effects of changes in viewing conditions on the latency of recollection and the first dissociation of FN400 and LPC latencies.

Search efficiency as a function of target saliency: The transition from inefficient to efficient search and beyond.

Searching for an object among distracting objects is a common daily task. These searches differ in efficiency. Some are so difficult that each object must be inspected in turn, whereas others are so easy that the target object directly catches the observer's eye. In 4 experiments, the difficulty of searching for an orientation-defined target was parametrically manipulated between blocks of trials via the target-distractor orientation contrast. We observed a smooth transition from inefficient to efficient search with increasing orientation contrast. When contrast was high, search slopes were flat (indicating pop-out); when contrast was low, slopes were steep (indicating serial search). At the transition from inefficient to efficient search, search slopes were flat for target-present trials and steep for target-absent trials within the same orientation-contrast block-suggesting that participants adapted their behavior on target-absent trials to the most difficult, rather than the average, target-present trials of each block. Furthermore, even when search slopes were flat, indicative of pop-out, search continued to become faster with increasing contrast. These observations provide several new constraints for models of visual search and indicate that differences between search tasks that were traditionally considered qualitative in nature might actually be due to purely quantitative differences in target discriminability. (PsycINFO Database Record

Serial vs. parallel models of attention in visual search: accounting for benchmark RT-distributions.

Visual search is central to the investigation of selective visual attention. Classical theories propose that items are identified by serially deploying focal attention to their locations. While this accounts for set-size effects over a continuum of task difficulties, it has been suggested that parallel models can account for such effects equally well. We compared the serial Competitive Guided Search model with a parallel model in their ability to account for RT distributions and error rates from a large visual search data-set featuring three classical search tasks: 1) a spatial configuration search (2 vs. 5); 2) a feature-conjunction search; and 3) a unique feature search (Wolfe, Palmer & Horowitz Vision Research, 50(14), 1304-1311, 2010). In the parallel model, each item is represented by a diffusion to two boundaries (target-present/absent); the search corresponds to a parallel race between these diffusors. The parallel model was highly flexible in that it allowed both for a parametric range of capacity-limitation and for set-size adjustments of identification boundaries. Furthermore, a quit unit allowed for a continuum of search-quitting policies when the target is not found, with "single-item inspection" and exhaustive searches comprising its extremes. The serial model was found to be superior to the parallel model, even before penalizing the parallel model for its increased complexity. We discuss the implications of the results and the need for future studies to resolve the debate.

Attentional enhancement for positive and negative tones at an early stage of auditory processing.

We report an event-related potential (ERP) study based on the hypothesis that valenced (i.e., positive and/or negative) tones are prioritized over neutral ones at an early, perceptual stage of auditory processing. In order to avoid perceptual confounds, we induced valence experimentally during a learning phase by assigning positive, negative, and neutral valences to tone-frequencies in a balanced design. In a subsequent test phase, EEG was recorded while these tones were entirely task-irrelevant. The amplitude of the auditory N1 was increased for valenced compared with neutral tones, indicating enhanced attention. While behavioral results of the learning phase, and both implicit and explicit measures of tone evaluation indicated differentiation between positive and negative valence, there was no such differentiation on the N1 amplitude. Our results suggest that it is the general relevance of the valenced tones that governs early attentional processes.

Intelligence as the efficiency of cue-driven retrieval from secondary memory.

Complex-span (working-memory-capacity) tasks are among the most successful predictors of intelligence. One important contributor to this relationship is the ability to efficiently employ cues for the retrieval from secondary memory. Presumably, intelligent individuals can considerably restrict their memory search sets by using such cues and can thereby improve recall performance. We here test this assumption by experimentally manipulating the validity of retrieval cues. When memoranda are drawn from the same semantic category on two successive trials of a verbal complex-span task, the category is a very strong retrieval cue on its first occurrence (strong-cue trial) but loses some of its validity on its second occurrence (weak-cue trial). If intelligent individuals make better use of semantic categories as retrieval cues, their recall accuracy suffers more from this loss of cue validity. Accordingly, our results show that less variance in intelligence is explained by recall accuracy on weak-cue compared with strong-cue trials.