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Sun L, Francis DJ, Nagai Y, Yoshida H. Early development of saliency-driven attention through object manipulation. Acta Psychol (Amst) 2024; 243:104124. [PMID: 38232506 DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104124] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/17/2023] [Revised: 12/30/2023] [Accepted: 01/02/2024] [Indexed: 01/19/2024] Open
Abstract
In the first years of life, infants progressively develop attention selection skills to gather information from visually clustered environments. As young as newborns, infants are sensitive to the distinguished differences in color, orientation, and luminance, which are the components of visual saliency. However, we know little about how saliency-driven attention emerges and develops socially through everyday free-viewing experiences. The present work assessed the saliency change in infants' egocentric scenes and investigated the impacts of manual engagements on infant object looking in the interactive context of object play. Thirty parent-infant dyads, including infants in two age groups (younger: 3- to 6-month-old; older: 9- to 12-month-old), completed a brief session of object play. Infants' looking behaviors were recorded by the head-mounted eye-tracking gear, and both parents' and infants' manual actions on objects were annotated separately for analyses. The present findings revealed distinct attention mechanisms that underlie the hand-eye coordination between parents and infants and within infants during object play: younger infants are predominantly biased toward the characteristics of the visual saliency accompanying the parent's handled actions on the objects; on the other hand, older infants gradually employed more attention to the object, regardless of the saliency in view, as they gained more self-generated manual actions. Taken together, the present work highlights the tight coordination between visual experiences and sensorimotor competence and proposes a novel dyadic pathway to sustained attention that social sensitivity to parents' hands emerges through saliency-driven attention, preparing infants to focus, follow, and steadily track moving targets in free-flow viewing activities.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lichao Sun
- Department of Psychology, University of Houston, TX, United States.
| | - David J Francis
- Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics, University of Houston, TX, United States.
| | - Yukie Nagai
- International Research Center for Neurointelligence, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
| | - Hanako Yoshida
- Department of Psychology, University of Houston, TX, United States.
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2
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Effect of peri-hand space among users of a familiar tool: more attention enhancement in space near palm than dorsal side of hand. CURRENT PSYCHOLOGY 2023. [DOI: 10.1007/s12144-023-04282-0] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/04/2023]
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3
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Kiepe F, Kraus N, Hesselmann G. Virtual occlusion effects on the perception of self-initiated visual stimuli. Conscious Cogn 2023; 107:103460. [PMID: 36577211 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2022.103460] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/11/2022] [Revised: 12/19/2022] [Accepted: 12/19/2022] [Indexed: 12/28/2022]
Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) has established itself as a useful tool in the study of human perception in the laboratory. A recent study introduced a new approach to examine visual sensory attenuation (SA) effects in VR. Hand movements triggered the appearance of Gabor stimuli, which were either presented behind the participant's hand - not rendered in VR ("virtual occlusion") - or elsewhere on the display. Virtual occlusion led to a rightward shift of the psychometric curve, suggesting that self-generated hand movements reduced the perceived contrast of the stimulus. Since such attenuation effects might provide a window into the predictive processing of the sensory and cognitive apparatus, we sought to better understand the nature of the virtual occlusion effects. In our study, the presentation of test stimuli was either self-initiated, self-initiated with a variable delay, or triggered externally; the test stimuli were occluded or not. In conflict with our hypothesis, we found moderate to strong evidence for an absence of any horizontal shifts between the psychometric curves. However, virtual occlusion was associated with a decrease in the slope of the psychometric function. Our results suggest that virtual occlusion attenuated the relative perceptual sensitivity, so that participants had more difficulty discriminating contrast differences when the test stimulus was presented behind the hand. We tentatively conclude that, in the visual domain, the discriminability of stimulus intensity is modified by internal predictive cues (i.e., proprioception), possibly linked to shifts in covert spatial attention.
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Affiliation(s)
- Fabian Kiepe
- Psychologische Hochschule Berlin (PHB), Department of General and Biological Psychology, Berlin, Germany.
| | - Nils Kraus
- Psychologische Hochschule Berlin (PHB), Department of General and Biological Psychology, Berlin, Germany
| | - Guido Hesselmann
- Psychologische Hochschule Berlin (PHB), Department of General and Biological Psychology, Berlin, Germany.
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Miall RC, Afanasyeva D, Cole JD, Mason P. Perception of body shape and size without touch or proprioception: evidence from individuals with congenital and acquired neuropathy. Exp Brain Res 2021; 239:1203-1221. [PMID: 33580292 PMCID: PMC8068692 DOI: 10.1007/s00221-021-06037-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/14/2020] [Accepted: 01/09/2021] [Indexed: 12/26/2022]
Abstract
The degree to which mental representations of the body can be established and maintained without somatosensory input remains unclear. We contrast two "deafferented" adults, one who acquired large fibre sensory loss as an adult (IW) and another who was born without somatosensation (KS). We compared their responses to those of matched controls in three perceptual tasks: first accuracy of their mental image of their hands (assessed by testing recognition of correct hand length/width ratio in distorted photographs and by locating landmarks on the unseen hand); then accuracy of arm length judgements (assessed by judgement of reaching distance), and finally, we tested for an attentional bias towards peri-personal space (assessed by reaction times to visual target presentation). We hypothesised that IW would demonstrate responses consistent with him accessing conscious knowledge, whereas KS might show evidence of responses dependent on non-conscious mechanisms. In the first two experiments, both participants were able to give consistent responses about hand shape and arm length, but IW displayed a better awareness of hand shape than KS (and controls). KS demonstrated poorer spatial accuracy in reporting hand landmarks than both IW and controls, and appears to have less awareness of her hands. Reach distance was overestimated by both IW and KS, as it was for controls; the precision of their judgements was slightly lower than that of the controls. In the attentional task, IW showed no reaction time differences across conditions in the visual detection task, unlike controls, suggesting that he has no peri-personal bias of attention. In contrast, KS did show target location-dependent modulation of reaction times, when her hands were visible. We suggest that both IW and KS can access a conscious body image, although its accuracy may reflect their different experience of hand action. Acquired sensory loss has deprived IW of any subconscious body awareness, but the congenital absence of somatosensation may have led to its partial replacement by a form of visual proprioception in KS.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Daria Afanasyeva
- School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
| | - Jonathan D Cole
- Centre of Postgraduate Research and Education, Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, UK
| | - Peggy Mason
- Department of Neurobiology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
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5
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Tseng P, Lo YH. Altered EEG Signal Complexity Induced by Hand Proximity: A Multiscale Entropy Approach. Front Neurosci 2020; 14:562132. [PMID: 33132825 PMCID: PMC7578420 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2020.562132] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/14/2020] [Accepted: 09/18/2020] [Indexed: 11/24/2022] Open
Abstract
Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is an important cognitive function that acts as a temporary storage for visual information. Previous studies have shown that VSTM capacity can be modulated by the location of one’s hands, where hand proximity enhances neural processing and memory of nearby visual stimuli. The present study used traditional event-related potentials (ERP) along with multiscale entropy (MSE) analysis to shed light on the neural mechanism(s) behind such near-hand effect. Participants’ electroencephalogram (EEG) data were recorded as they performed a VSTM task with their hands either proximal or distal to the display. ERP analysis showed altered memory processing in the 400–700 ms time window during memory retrieval period. Importantly, MSE analysis also showed significant EEG difference between hand proximal and distal conditions between scales 10 to 20, and such difference is clustered around the right parietal cortex – a region that is involved in VSTM processing and bimodal hand-eye integration. The implications of higher MSE time scale in the parietal cortex are discussed in the context of signal complexity and its possible relation to cognitive processing. To our knowledge, this study provides the first investigation using MSE to characterize the temporal characteristics and signal complexity behind the effect of hand proximity.
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Affiliation(s)
- Philip Tseng
- Graduate Institute of Mind, Brain and Consciousness, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan.,Brain and Consciousness Research Center, TMU-Shuang Ho Hospital, New Taipei City, Taiwan.,Psychiatric Research Center, Wan Fang Hospital, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan
| | - Yu-Hui Lo
- Brain and Consciousness Research Center, TMU-Shuang Ho Hospital, New Taipei City, Taiwan
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6
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Rodin has it! The role of hands in improving the selectivity of attention. Acta Psychol (Amst) 2020; 210:103160. [PMID: 32823058 DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2020.103160] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/15/2020] [Revised: 07/28/2020] [Accepted: 08/03/2020] [Indexed: 11/22/2022] Open
Abstract
We report a new discovery on the role of hands in guiding attention, using the classic Stroop effect as our assay. We show that the Stroop effect diminishes, hence selective attention improves, when observers hold their chin, emulating Rodin's famous sculpture, "The Thinker." In two experiments we show that the Rodin posture improves the selectivity of attention as efficiently as holding the hands nearby the visual stimulus (the near-hands effect). Because spatial proximity to the displayed stimulus is neither present nor intended, the presence of the Rodin effect implies that attentional prioritization by the hands is not limited to the space between the hands.
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Bamford LE, Klassen NR, Karl JM. Faster recognition of graspable targets defined by orientation in a visual search task. Exp Brain Res 2020; 238:905-916. [PMID: 32170332 DOI: 10.1007/s00221-020-05769-z] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/31/2019] [Accepted: 03/03/2020] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
Abstract
Peri-hand space is the area surrounding the hand. Objects within this space may be subject to increased visuospatial perception, increased attentional prioritization, and slower attentional disengagement compared to more distal objects. This may result from kinesthetic and visual feedback about the location of the hand that projects from the reach and grasp networks of the dorsal visual stream back to occipital visual areas, which in turn, refines cortical visual processing that can subsequently guide skilled motor actions. Thus, we hypothesized that visual stimuli that afford action, which are known to potentiate activity in the dorsal visual stream, would be associated with greater alterations in visual processing when presented near the hand. To test this, participants held their right hand near or far from a touchscreen that presented a visual array containing a single target object that differed from 11 distractor objects by orientation only. The target objects and their accompanying distractors either strongly afforded grasping or did not. Participants identified the target among the distractors by reaching out and touching it with their left index finger while eye-tracking was used to measure visual search times, target recognition times, and search accuracy. The results failed to support the theory of enhanced visual processing of graspable objects near the hand as participants were faster at recognizing graspable compared to non-graspable targets, regardless of the position of the right hand. The results are discussed in relation to the idea that, in addition to potentiating appropriate motor responses, object affordances may also potentiate early visual processes necessary for object recognition.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lindsay E Bamford
- Department of Psychology, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada.
| | - Nikola R Klassen
- Department of Psychology, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada
| | - Jenni M Karl
- Department of Psychology, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada
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George N, Sunny MM. Challenges to the Modularity Thesis Under the Bayesian Brain Models. Front Hum Neurosci 2019; 13:353. [PMID: 31649518 PMCID: PMC6796786 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00353] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/11/2019] [Accepted: 09/23/2019] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Modularity assumption is central to most theoretical and empirical approaches in cognitive science. The Bayesian Brain (BB) models are a class of neuro-computational models that aim to ground perception, cognition, and action under a single computational principle of prediction-error minimization. It is argued that the proposals of BB models contradict the modular nature of mind as the modularity assumption entails computational separation of individual modules. This review examines how BB models address the assumption of modularity. Empirical evidences of top-down influence on early sensory processes is often cited as a case against the modularity thesis. In the modularity thesis, such top-down effects are attributed to attentional modulation of the output of an early impenetrable stage of sensory processing. The attentional-mediation argument defends the modularity thesis. We analyse this argument using the novel conception of attention in the BB models. We attempt to reconcile classical bottom-up vs. top-down dichotomy of information processing, within the information passing scheme of the BB models. Theoretical considerations and empirical findings associated with BB models that address the modularity assumption is reviewed. Further, we examine the modularity of perceptual and motor systems.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nithin George
- Centre for Cognitive Science, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gandhinagar, India
| | - Meera Mary Sunny
- Centre for Cognitive Science, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gandhinagar, India
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9
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Prolonged subjective duration near the hands: Effects of hand proximity on temporal reproduction. Psychon Bull Rev 2019; 26:1303-1309. [PMID: 31144134 DOI: 10.3758/s13423-019-01614-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
Abstract
It has been reported that human visual perception and attention are altered when the hands are nearby. Previous studies indicate that placing hands near stimuli enhances a subject's temporal sensitivity. However, few researchers have investigated the effect of hand proximity on reproducing temporal duration. Moreover, the delayed attentional disengagement and enhanced magnocellular visual processing theories provide two distinct predictions of the hand proximity effect on reproduced duration. Delayed attentional disengagement near hands will cause prolonged reproductions, whereas enhanced magnocellular visual processing predicts more accurate reproduction in the peri-hand space. The current study is the first to show that a short temporal duration is reproduced for a longer period near hands than far from hands in the dual-responding-hand condition, and this hand-proximity effect is attenuated in the single-responding-hand condition. These findings together with two further studies suggest that reproducing a temporal duration is modulated by hand proximity through prolonged attentional switch.
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10
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Abstract
Recent studies have demonstrated altered visual processing of stimuli in the proximal region of the hand. It has been challenging to characterize the range and nature of these processing differences. In our attempt to deconstruct the factors giving rise to the Hand-Proximity Effects (HPEs), we manipulated the organization of items in a visual search display. In two experiments, we observed the absence of HPE. Specifically, in Experiment 1, we presented the search display in only one half of the monitor (split diagonally), which could be either near or far from the hand placed on the corner of the monitor. The results of a Bayesian analysis showed that the search efficiency was not significantly different for neither ‘near’ nor ‘far’ condition when compared with the baseline condition in which the hand rested on the lap. In Experiment 2, the search display was arranged horizontally across the monitor. A Bayesian analysis showed that RTs did not vary depending on the proximity of the target to the hand as well as the baseline (lap) condition. The present results characterize features of the HPE that have not been reported previously and are in line with recent reports of the failure to replicate HPE under various circumstances.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tony Thomas
- Centre for Cognitive Science, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gandhinagar, IN
| | - Meera Mary Sunny
- Centre for Cognitive Science, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gandhinagar, IN
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Gozli DG, Deng WS. Building Blocks of Psychology: on Remaking the Unkept Promises of Early Schools. Integr Psychol Behav Sci 2018; 52:1-24. [PMID: 29063441 DOI: 10.1007/s12124-017-9405-7] [Citation(s) in RCA: 16] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/24/2022]
Abstract
The appeal and popularity of "building blocks", i.e., simple and dissociable elements of behavior and experience, persists in psychological research. We begin our assessment of this research strategy with an historical review of structuralism (as espoused by E. B. Titchener) and behaviorism (espoused by J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner), two movements that held the assumption in their attempts to provide a systematic and unified discipline. We point out the ways in which the elementism of the two schools selected, framed, and excluded topics of study. After the historical review, we turn to contemporary literature and highlight the persistence of research into building blocks and the associated framing and exclusions in psychological research. The assumption that complex categories of human psychology can be understood in terms of their elementary components and simplest forms seems indefensible. In specific cases, therefore, reliance on the assumption requires justification. Finally, we review alternative strategies that bypass the commitment to building blocks.
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Affiliation(s)
- Davood G Gozli
- Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Macau, SAR, China.
| | - Wei Sophia Deng
- Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Macau, SAR, China
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Thomas T, Sunny MM. Altered Visuo-spatial Processing in the Peri-personal Space: A New Look at the Hand-Proximity Effects. J Indian Inst Sci 2017. [DOI: 10.1007/s41745-017-0057-x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/18/2022]
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