{"title":"Attentional blur and blink: Effects of adaptive attentional scaling on visual awareness","authors":"Shuyao Wang , Aytaç Karabay , Elkan G. Akyürek","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103627","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103627","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Attentional scaling is a crucial mechanism that enables us to flexibly allocate our attention to larger or smaller regions in the visual field. Although previous studies have demonstrated the critical role of attentional scaling in visual processing, its impact on modulating visual awareness is not yet fully understood. This study investigates the adaptive control of attentional scaling and its influence on visual awareness in an attentional blink paradigm. Participants were required to attend to the first target’s location, which was manipulated either session-wise, trial-wise, or such that it could be learned across a block of trials. Discrete, all-or-none, awareness was expected when attention was allocated to a narrow area, while gradual awareness was expected when attention was allocated to a larger area. We used mixture modeling to assess second target awareness across these different attentional scales. The results revealed that participants could adaptively control their attentional scale both across stable sessions, and through (implicit) statistical learning in blocks of successive trials. This produced gradual perceptual awareness when the participants adopted a broad attentional scale, causing an attentional “blur”. However, trial-wise cues did not allow for attentional scaling, resulting in more discrete target perception overall, and an attentional “blink”. We conclude that the attentional scale is to some extent under adaptive control during the attentional blink/blur, where it can produce qualitatively different modes of perceptual awareness.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810023001642/pdfft?md5=6013e46f651ec491aa01cdebbaed322b&pid=1-s2.0-S1053810023001642-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139075833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Louise Dupraz , Jessica Bourgin , Lorenzo Pia , Julien Barra , Michel Guerraz
{"title":"Body ownership and kinaesthetic illusions: Dissociated bodily experiences for distinct levels of body consciousness?","authors":"Louise Dupraz , Jessica Bourgin , Lorenzo Pia , Julien Barra , Michel Guerraz","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103630","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2023.103630","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Seeing an embodied humanoid avatar move its arms can induce in the observer the illusion that its own (static) arms are moving accordingly, the kinematic signals emanating from this avatar thus being considered like those from the biological body. Here, we investigated the causal relationship between these kinaesthetic illusions and the illusion of body ownership, manipulated through visuomotor synchronisation. The results of two experiments revealed that the sense of body ownership over an avatar seen from a first-person perspective was intimately linked to visuomotor synchrony. This was not the case for kinaesthetic illusions indicating that when superimposed on the biological body, the avatar is inevitably treated at the sensorimotor level as one’s own body, whether consciously considered as such or not. The question of whether these two bodily experiences (body ownership and kinaesthetic illusion) are underpinned by distinct representations, the body image, and the body schema, is discussed.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139108729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is non-synesthetes’ B Blue? Grapheme–color association improves non-synesthetes’ detection in visual search","authors":"Hiroyuki Sasaki , Nana Watanabe","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103632","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103632","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Grapheme–color synesthesia is expected to provide a clue to solving the “binding problem” of visual features. Synesthetic research uses non-synesthetes as a control group and shows that synesthetes perform better with synesthetic color congruency, while non-synesthetes’ performances do not. However, non-synesthetes also have certain grapheme–color associations. Therefore, this study examined whether non-synesthetes’ grapheme–color associations improve their performance in a visual search task. The results indicated that non-synesthetes were significantly faster at detecting congruent targets with their grapheme–color associations, such as red for “A,” blue for “B,” and yellow for “C.” However, the effect was not found in relation to numerical characters. This study has implications for future neuroscience and consciousness research regarding grapheme–color synesthesia.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139068390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A dual process model of spontaneous conscious thought","authors":"Maria K. Pavlova","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103631","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103631","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In the present article, I review theory and evidence on the psychological mechanisms of mind wandering, paying special attention to its relation with executive control. I then suggest applying a dual-process framework (i.e., automatic vs. controlled processing) to mind wandering and goal-directed thought. I present theoretical arguments and empirical evidence in favor of the view that mind wandering is based on automatic processing, also considering its relation to the concept of working memory. After that, I outline three scenarios for an interplay between mind wandering and goal-directed thought during task performance (parallel automatic processing, off-task thought substituting on-task thought, and non-disruptive mind wandering during controlled processing) and address the ways in which the mind-wandering and focused-attention spells can terminate. Throughout the article, I formulate empirical predictions. In conclusion, I discuss how automatic and controlled processing may be balanced in human conscious cognition.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381002300168X/pdfft?md5=49cc68fbf1d2848ea5e114dc748495e2&pid=1-s2.0-S105381002300168X-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139051246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anna Eiserbeck , Alexander Enge , Milena Rabovsky , Rasha Abdel Rahman
{"title":"Distrust before first sight? Examining knowledge- and appearance-based effects of trustworthiness on the visual consciousness of faces","authors":"Anna Eiserbeck , Alexander Enge , Milena Rabovsky , Rasha Abdel Rahman","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2023.103629","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The present EEG study with 32 healthy participants investigated whether affective knowledge about a person influences the visual awareness of their face, additionally considering the impact of facial appearance. Faces differing in perceived trustworthiness based on appearance were associated with negative or neutral social information and shown as target stimuli in an attentional blink task. As expected, participants showed enhanced awareness of faces associated with negative compared to neutral social information. On the neurophysiological level, this effect was connected to differences in the time range of the early posterior negativity (EPN)—a component associated with enhanced attention and facilitated processing of emotional stimuli. The findings indicate that the social-affective relevance of a face based on emotional knowledge is accessed during a phase of attentional enhancement for conscious perception and can affect prioritization for awareness. In contrast, no clear evidence for influences of facial trustworthiness during the attentional blink was found.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139038632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How to get rich from inflation","authors":"Simon Alexander Burns Brown","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103624","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103624","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We seem to have rich experience across our visual field. Yet we are surprisingly poor at tasks involving the periphery and low spatial attention. Recently, Lau and collaborators have argued that a phenomenon known as “subjective inflation” allows us to reconcile these phenomena. I show inflation is consistent with multiple interpretations, with starkly different consequences for richness and for theories of consciousness more broadly. What’s more, we have only weak reasons favouring any of these interpretations over the others. I provisionally argue for an interpretation on which subjective experience is genuinely rich, but (in peripheral/unattended areas) unreliable as a guide to the external world. The main challenge for this view is that it appears to imply that experience in the periphery is not just unreliable but <em>unstable</em>. However, I argue that this consequence, while initially appearing unintuitive, is in fact plausible.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810023001617/pdfft?md5=1126474846aef4301aa8bcef18907034&pid=1-s2.0-S1053810023001617-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139049758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The relevance of syntactic complexity for truth judgments: A registered report","authors":"Oliver Schmidt, Daniel W. Heck","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103623","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103623","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Fluency theories predict higher truth judgments for easily processed statements. We investigated two factors relevant for processing fluency: repetition and syntactic complexity. In three online experiments, we manipulated syntactic complexity by creating simple and complex versions of trivia statements. Experiments 1 and 2 replicated the repetition-based truth effect. However, syntactic complexity did not affect truth judgments although complex statements were processed slower than simple statements. This null effect is surprising given that both studies had high statistical power and varied in the relative salience of syntactic complexity. Experiment 3 provides a preregistered test of the discounting explanation by using improved trivia statements of equal length and by manipulating the salience of complexity in a randomized design. As predicted by fluency theories, simple statements were more likely judged as true than complex ones, while this effect was small and not moderated by the salience of complexity.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810023001605/pdfft?md5=567e8a84639956eed6e9811e78a01809&pid=1-s2.0-S1053810023001605-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139028973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Age differences in priming as a function of processing at encoding","authors":"Emma V. Ward","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103626","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103626","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>It is unclear whether implicit memory (priming) is affected by aging. Some studies have reported no difference between young and older adults, while others have uncovered reliable reductions. An important factor that may explain these discrepancies is the manner of encoding. Processing requirements (perceptual/conceptual) have varied considerably between studies, yet processing abilities are not equally affected by aging. This study examined whether processing during encoding moderates age effects on priming. Young and older participants studied object-word pairs and made natural/manufactured (conceptual) and left/right rotation (perceptual) judgements in relation to the word or object. Objects served as targets on a subsequent continuous identification with recognition task to assess priming and recognition. Priming and recognition were greater in young than older adults for attended items, with a larger effect size in the conceptual than the perceptual condition. Findings suggest that age differences in priming may be a function of processing at encoding.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810023001630/pdfft?md5=482f6e33d338a08b11f16a0d881ac845&pid=1-s2.0-S1053810023001630-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139029142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The misjudgment of interoceptive awareness: Systematic overrating of interoceptive awareness among individuals with lower interoceptive metacognitive skills","authors":"Christian Rominger, Andreas R. Schwerdtfeger","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103621","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103621","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Knowing when perceiving inner bodily signals better and when perceiving them worse is a health relevant but understudied dimension of interoception. Therefore, the present study assessed interoceptive metacognition (IMC) as the skill to adequately monitor interoceptive accuracy in the cardiac domain. We used the Graz Ambulatory Interoception task (GRAIT), which applied two intervals of the heartbeat tracking task 12 times a day for 3 days in total to n = 66 participants. We assessed IMC as the relative correspondence between interoceptive accuracy and the subjective confidence ratings. We found that 6 % of the total IMC variance was due to person, which was assessed reliable (<span><math><mrow><msub><mi>R</mi><mrow><mi>KRn</mi></mrow></msub></mrow></math></span>=0.81). Furthermore, the between-person variation of IMC was negatively associated with the MAIA (especially attention regulation and self-regulation). People who believe that they are aware of their interoceptive experiences (MAIA) showed lower IMC. This study advocates the assessment of interoception in everyday life.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810023001587/pdfft?md5=92c1dd804bc49635fd0e473d7837d1c9&pid=1-s2.0-S1053810023001587-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138743734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Explanatory power by vagueness. Challenges to the strong prior hypothesis on hallucinations exemplified by the Charles-Bonnet-Syndrome","authors":"Franz Roman Schmid , Moritz F. Kriegleder","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2023.103620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2023.103620","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Predictive processing models are often ascribed a certain generality in conceptually unifying the relationships between perception, action, and cognition or the potential to posit a ‘grand unified theory’ of the mind. The limitations of this unification can be seen when these models are applied to specific cognitive phenomena or phenomenal consciousness. Our article discusses these shortcomings for predictive processing models of hallucinations by the example of the Charles-Bonnet-Syndrome. This case study shows that the current predictive processing account omits essential characteristics of stimulus-independent perception in general, which has critical phenomenological implications. We argue that the most popular predictive processing model of hallucinatory conditions – the strong prior hypothesis – fails to fully account for the characteristics of nonveridical perceptual experiences associated with Charles-Bonnet-Syndrome. To fill this explanatory gap, we propose that the strong prior hypothesis needs to include reality monitoring to apply to more than just veridical percepts.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810023001575/pdfft?md5=810e45a7df6ff29afbaca49d8850b66f&pid=1-s2.0-S1053810023001575-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138678493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}