Michael C. W. English, Murray T. Maybery, Troy A. W. Visser
{"title":"Autistic traits specific to communication ability are associated with performance on a Mooney face detection task","authors":"Michael C. W. English, Murray T. Maybery, Troy A. W. Visser","doi":"10.3758/s13414-024-02902-w","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-024-02902-w","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Difficulties in global face processing have been associated with autism. However, autism is heterogenous, and it is not known which dimensions of autistic traits are implicated in face-processing difficulties. To address this gap in knowledge, we conducted two experiments to examine how identification of Mooney face stimuli (stylized, black-and-white images of faces without details) related to the six subscales of the Comprehensive Autistic Trait Inventory in young adults. In Experiment 1, regression analyses indicated that participants with poorer communication skills had lower task sensitivity when discriminating between face-present and face-absent images, whilst other autistic traits had no unique predictive value. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and additionally showed that autistic traits were linked to a reduced face inversion effect. Taken together, these results indicate autistic traits, especially communication difficulties, are associated with reduced configural processing of face stimuli. It follows that both reduced sensitivity for identifying upright faces amongst similar-looking distractors and reduced susceptibility to face inversion effects may be linked to relatively decreased reliance on configural processing of faces in autism. This study also reinforces the need to consider the different facets of autism independently.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"86 7","pages":"2504 - 2516"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/s13414-024-02902-w.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140959879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fazilet Zeynep Yildirim-Keles, Daniel R. Coates, Bilge Sayim
{"title":"Attention in redundancy masking","authors":"Fazilet Zeynep Yildirim-Keles, Daniel R. Coates, Bilge Sayim","doi":"10.3758/s13414-024-02885-8","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-024-02885-8","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Peripheral vision is limited due to several factors, such as visual resolution, crowding, and attention. When attention is not directed towards a stimulus, detection, discrimination, and identification are often compromised. Recent studies have found a new phenomenon that strongly limits peripheral vision, “redundancy masking”. In redundancy masking, the number of perceived items in repeating patterns is reduced. For example, when presenting three lines in the peripheral visual field and asking participants to report the number of lines, often only two lines are reported. Here, we investigated what role attention plays in redundancy masking. If redundancy masking was due to limited attention to the target, it should be stronger when less attention is allocated to the target, and absent when attention is maximally focused on the target. Participants were presented with line arrays and reported the number of lines in three cueing conditions (i.e., single cue, double cue, and no cue). Redundancy masking was observed in all cueing conditions, with observers reporting fewer lines than presented in the single, double, and no cue conditions. These results suggest that redundancy masking is not due to limited attention. The number of lines reported was closer to the correct number of lines in the single compared to the double and the no cue conditions, suggesting that reduced attention additionally compromised stimulus discrimination, and replicating typical effects of diminished attention. Taken together, our results suggest that the extent of attention to peripherally presented stimuli modulates discrimination performance, but does not account for redundancy masking.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"86 5","pages":"1 - 14"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140946650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Corey S. Shayman, Mirinda M. Whitaker, Erica Barhorst-Cates, Timothy E. Hullar, Jeanine K. Stefanucci, Sarah H. Creem-Regehr
{"title":"The addition of a spatial auditory cue improves spatial updating in a virtual reality navigation task","authors":"Corey S. Shayman, Mirinda M. Whitaker, Erica Barhorst-Cates, Timothy E. Hullar, Jeanine K. Stefanucci, Sarah H. Creem-Regehr","doi":"10.3758/s13414-024-02890-x","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-024-02890-x","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Auditory cues are integrated with vision and body-based self-motion cues for motion perception, balance, and gait, though limited research has evaluated their effectiveness for navigation. Here, we tested whether an auditory cue co-localized with a visual target could improve spatial updating in a virtual reality homing task. Participants navigated a triangular homing task with and without an easily localizable spatial audio signal co-located with the home location. The main outcome was unsigned angular error, defined as the absolute value of the difference between the participant’s turning response and the correct response towards the home location. Angular error was significantly reduced in the presence of spatial sound compared to a head-fixed identical auditory signal. Participants’ angular error was 22.79° in the presence of spatial audio and 30.09° in its absence. Those with the worst performance in the absence of spatial sound demonstrated the greatest improvement with the added sound cue. These results suggest that auditory cues may benefit navigation, particularly for those who demonstrated the highest level of spatial updating error in the absence of spatial sound.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"86 5","pages":"1473 - 1479"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140900229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"New task–new results? How the gaze cone is influenced by the method of measurement","authors":"Linda Linke, Gernot Horstmann","doi":"10.3758/s13414-024-02884-9","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-024-02884-9","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Perceiving direct gaze — the perception of being looked at — is important in everyday life. The gaze cone is a concept to define the area in which observers perceive gaze as direct. The most frequently used methods to measure direct gaze threshold fall into two broad groups: First, a variant of the method of constant stimuli, firstly introduced by Gibson and Pick (<i>The American Journal of Psychology, 76</i>, 386–394, 1963). Second, a variant of the method of adjustment, firstly introduced by Gamer and Hecht (<i>Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33</i>, 705–715, 2007). Previous studies found a considerable range of thresholds, and although some influences on thresholds are already known (uncertainty, clinical groups), thresholds often vary for no apparent reason. Another important method is a triadic gaze-perception task, which usually finds triadic gaze direction judgments to be overestimated. In two experiments, we compare the method of adjustment with the method of constant stimuli. Experiment 1 additionally examines the influence of the overestimation effect found in the triadic task. Results indicate that thresholds are larger when measured by the method of adjustment than by constant stimuli. Furthermore, Experiment 1 finds a nonlinear overestimation factor, indicating that gaze directions near 0° are less overestimated than larger eccentricities. Correcting the thresholds with individually obtained overestimation factors widens the gaze cone but does not eliminate the average difference between the methods of adjustments and constant stimuli.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"86 5","pages":"1800 - 1815"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/s13414-024-02884-9.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140900215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"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 who and the where: Attention to identities and locations in groups","authors":"Helen L. Ma, Ralph S. Redden, Dana A. Hayward","doi":"10.3758/s13414-024-02879-6","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-024-02879-6","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>While it is widely accepted that the single gaze of another person elicits shifts of attention, there is limited work on the effects of multiple gazes on attention, despite real-world social cues often occurring in groups. Further, less is known regarding the role of unequal reliability of varying social and nonsocial information on attention. We addressed these gaps by employing a variant of the gaze cueing paradigm, simultaneously presenting participants with three faces. Block-wise, we manipulated whether one face (<i>Identity</i> condition) or one location (<i>Location</i> condition) contained a gaze cue entirely predictive of target location; all other cues were uninformative. Across trials, we manipulated the number of valid cues (number of faces gazing at target). We examined whether these two types of information (<i>Identity</i> vs. <i>Location</i>) were learned at a similar rate by statistically modelling cueing effects by trial count. Preregistered analyses returned no evidence for an interaction between condition, number of valid faces, and presence of the predictive element, indicating type of information did not affect participants’ ability to employ the predictive element to alter behaviour. Exploratory analyses demonstrated (i) response times (RT) decreased faster across trials for the Identity compared with Location condition, with greater decreases when the predictive element was present versus absent, (ii) RTs decreased across trials for the Location condition only when it was completed first, and (iii) social competence altered RTs across conditions and trial number. Our work demonstrates a nuanced relationship between cue utility, condition type, and social competence on group cueing.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"86 5","pages":"1816 - 1832"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/s13414-024-02879-6.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140900230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Task-order control in dual-tasks: Only\u0000 marginal interactions between conflict at lower levels and higher processes of task\u0000 organization","authors":"Valentin Koob, David Dignath, Markus Janczyk","doi":"10.3758/s13414-024-02876-9","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-024-02876-9","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>When simultaneously performing two tasks that share response properties,\u0000 interference can occur. Besides general performance decrements, performance in the\u0000 first task is worse when the second task requires a spatially incompatible response,\u0000 known as the backward crosstalk effect (BCE). The size of this BCE, similar to\u0000 congruency effects in conflict tasks, is subject to a sequential modulation, with a\u0000 smaller BCE after incompatible compared to compatible trials. In the present study,\u0000 we focus on a potential bidirectional interaction between crosstalk (and its\u0000 resolution) at a lower level of task performance and higher-order processes of task\u0000 organization. Two questions were of particular interest: First, do participants\u0000 switch task order more frequently after a conflict-prone incompatible trial than\u0000 after a compatible trial? Second, does changing task order influence the efficiency\u0000 of conflict resolution, as indexed by the size of the sequential modulation of the\u0000 BCE. Across four experiments, we only found marginal evidence for an influence of\u0000 lower-level conflict on higher-order processes of task organization, with only one\u0000 experiment revealing a tendency to repeat task order following conflict. Our results\u0000 thus suggest practical independence between conflict and task-order control. When\u0000 separating processes of task selection and task performance, the sequential\u0000 modulation was generally diminished, suggesting that conflict resolution in\u0000 dual-tasks can be disrupted by a deliberate decision about task order, or,\u0000 alternatively, by a longer inter-trial interval. Finally, the study found a strong\u0000 bias towards repeating the same task order across trials, suggesting that task-order\u0000 sets not only impact task performance but also guide task selection.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"86 5","pages":"1 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/s13414-024-02876-9.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140878009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}