{"title":"Urgency overpowers cognitive control by amplifying cognitive processing asymmetries","authors":"Anika Krause, Christian H. Poth","doi":"10.3758/s13414-025-03102-w","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-025-03102-w","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Cognitive control is the functional backbone of intelligent behavior, because it allows to act according to one’s intentions, even when the environment elicits opposed behaviors. Recently, it has been shown that reactions under urgency in a cognitive control task are dominated by stimulus-driven information and goal-directed actions are overpowered, as reflected by a temporary drop in performance below chance level in conflict situations. This effect was shown for eye movements as well as manual cognitive control tasks. Crucially, most previous studies used tasks that involved a natural processing asymmetry between the stimulus-driven information and the goal-directed information, leaving it unclear whether urgency affects cognitive control in general. Here, we investigated whether urgency also impacts performance in tasks that evoke a stimulus-stimulus conflict between similarly processed stimuli. Therefore, urgency was applied to two Eriksen flanker tasks, one using color stimuli, the other one using letter stimuli. In both experiments, urgency did not lead to a drop in performance below chance level in conflict situations, meaning that goal-directed behavior could be maintained. In a third experiment, an Eriksen flanker task with letter stimuli and a stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) of 120 ms between the appearance of the flanker stimuli and the target stimulus, urgency evoked a large drop in performance below chance level. These results reveal that the effect of urgency on cognitive control is based on an amplification of cognitive processing asymmetries induced by urgency and is thus specific for tasks involving processing asymmetries, thereby evoking early-onset cognitive conflicts.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"87 6","pages":"1974 - 1993"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12331796/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144627822","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}
Hakan Karsilar, Sebastiaan Mathôt, Hedderik van Rijn
{"title":"Stimuli are perceived as lasting longer when there is something bright on the screen","authors":"Hakan Karsilar, Sebastiaan Mathôt, Hedderik van Rijn","doi":"10.3758/s13414-025-03120-8","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-025-03120-8","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Perceived time often diverges from physical time. This discrepancy is important given the crucial role of time perception in numerous cognitive processes. A critical question concerning the non-veridicality of timing is whether and how different physical attributes (e.g., size, speed, and numerosity) influence perceived duration. The present study deals specifically with how perceived time depends on stimulus brightness, both of a to-be-timed stimulus and the background on which this stimulus is presented. The results of two experiments show that increased brightness lengthens perceived duration, and, surprisingly, that this is the case both for the stimulus and the background. The finding that stimulus brightness affects time perception is a much needed replication of classic studies; however, the finding that background brightness similarly affects time perception is novel, and suggests that time perception may be biased by low-level visual perception. Additionally, we tested the hypothesis that large pupils (as a result of spontaneous pupil-size fluctuations) are associated with longer perceived durations. This hypothesis was based on the common assumption that arousal affects both pupil size and time perception; however, in contrast to this hypothesis, results show that pupil size has no relation to perceived time. Taken together, our study suggests that time perception is strongly affected by low-level visual input (brightness) but not—or hardly—by pupil-linked arousal.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"87 6","pages":"1948 - 1963"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12331826/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144627821","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":"Assessing Posner’s theory of alerting: A meta-analysis of speed-accuracy effects","authors":"Colin R. McCormick, John Christie","doi":"10.3758/s13414-025-03090-x","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-025-03090-x","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Posner and his colleagues proposed a seminal theory of how alerting influenced information processing over 50 years ago (Posner et al., <i>Memory & Cognition</i>, <i>1</i>, 2–12, 1973). In this study, participants were presented with warning signals at varying intervals before a target, and participants were asked to produce a spatial discrimination response. Trials in which participants were played a warning signal were compared to trials without a warning signal to understand the effect of phasic alerting using reaction time (RT) and error rate (ER). Posner and colleagues observed a general speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) across conditions, in which faster RTs led to higher ER, and concluded that phasic alertness shifts response criteria without improving the efficiency of information processing. More recent research has questioned whether this theory of alerting applies generally across all time-courses and conditions. The current meta-analysis aimed to test Posner’s theory of alerting (1975) using all available data in the field that closely matches the methodology used in Posner et al.’s <i>Memory & Cognition</i>, <i>1</i>, 2–12, (1973) influential study. After including data from 16 published experiments across three different signal-target foreperiod durations, our conclusions support that while a speed-accuracy trade-off is likely present at shorter foreperiods (50 ms), the longer foreperiods (200 and 400 ms) show evidence of an increase in the rate of information processing when the participant was alerted.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"87 6","pages":"2007 - 2028"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144621160","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":"Distractor suppression driven by statistical regularities of target could occur only for larger search arrays","authors":"Xing Zhou, Yun Sun, Qi Zhang, Feifei Cui","doi":"10.3758/s13414-025-03099-2","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-025-03099-2","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>A number of studies have suggested that biasing the probability by which distractors appear at locations in visual space may lead to attentional suppression of high-probability distractor locations. It effectively reduces capture by a distractor but also impairs target selection at this location. Recently, there is still debate on whether the distractor processing could be affected by the statistical regularities of the target location. In the current study, through four experiments, we manipulated search array size (the number of the elements on the display – four, six, ten, 12). In each experiment, we manipulated spatial regularities of the target including one low-probability target location and other high-probability target locations. We found that statistical regularities of the target location could affect the distractor processing, but this occurred only for larger search array sizes (e.g., ten and 12 elements). Our new finding provided the evidence for whether statistical regularities regarding the target could affect distractor processing. We concluded that search array size was a potential and critical factor for determining whether distractor suppression could be driven by statistical regularities of target location.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"87 7","pages":"2069 - 2084"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144621161","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":"Modulation of perception by emotion: Altered sensitivity and perceived magnitude of negatively valenced stimuli","authors":"Tal Shalev, Bat-Sheva Hadad","doi":"10.3758/s13414-025-03110-w","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-025-03110-w","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Emotional modulation of visual processing is observed across various domains of perception. We examined whether these modulations affect perceptual sensitivity, the perceived magnitude (biases) of visual stimuli, or both. We asked participants to reproduce the duration (Exp. 1) and size (Exp. 2) of threat-related stimuli (spiders), and those of neutral ones (2D disks and butterflies). Sensitivity was examined by measuring within-subject standard deviations of reproductions for varying magnitudes of the stimuli. Biases were examined by measuring regression to the-mean, a tendency of subjective estimates to gravitate toward the center of the distribution from which stimuli were sampled. Results showed a mild increase in the standard deviations of reproductions of larger magnitudes for negatively valenced stimuli, indicating lower sensitivity. While regression biases were overall observed for these stimuli, biases decreased for the higher levels of intensities, despite their lower sensitivity. Underestimation of above-mean magnitudes was relatively moderated, demonstrating altered relations between the reliability of the sensory input and perceptual biases for these stimuli. Overall, the results suggest that magnitude perception is biased toward the central tendency of the experienced stimuli, even for threatening stimuli; however, biases are milder for the intensified values, presumably to obtain more veridical perception of these stimuli.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"87 6","pages":"1964 - 1973"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12331848/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144610412","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":"Stay calm in crowds: Avoiding emotional faces in ensemble perception","authors":"Xin Luo, Megan Bartlett, Michael E. R. Nicholls","doi":"10.3758/s13414-025-03124-4","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-025-03124-4","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Previous research has shown that people tend to display attentional biases toward faces with strong emotions within crowds, often overestimating the extremity of the average emotional expression. However, this emotional amplification effect has not been consistently observed in tasks where observers summarize other crowd features, such as the number of faces. This study aims to explore the attentional mechanisms underlying these inconsistent findings. To do so, we recruited 584 participants across four online experiments and employed an equivalence judgment task to assess participants’ ability to estimate the number of emotional faces. In the task, participants determined whether the number of two types of facial expressions within a series of crowds was the “same” or “different.” Experiment 1 revealed that the number of emotional faces (angry and happy) was underestimated relative to neutral faces. Experiment 2 replicated this underestimation effect across different face types and exposure durations. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the emotional amplification effect may be caused by strong emotion contrasts within crowds. Experiment 4 confirmed that the underestimation of the number of emotional faces could be replicated in the numerosity estimation task with different instructions. Our findings suggest that people may strategically suppress attention to emotional faces to mitigate their emotional response. This study provides important empirical evidence to enhance our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying emotion perception and social behavior.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"87 7","pages":"2223 - 2240"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12331794/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144610413","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}
Aleksei U. Iakovlev, Vladislav A. Khvostov, Árni Gunnar Ásgeirsson, Igor S. Utochkin, Árni Kristjánsson
{"title":"Amplification from saliency affects explicit but not implicit ensemble representations","authors":"Aleksei U. Iakovlev, Vladislav A. Khvostov, Árni Gunnar Ásgeirsson, Igor S. Utochkin, Árni Kristjánsson","doi":"10.3758/s13414-025-03121-7","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-025-03121-7","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The visual system can encode multiple objects in the form of ensemble representations. Such representations can be accessed with either explicit or implicit reports, but depending on the type of report, the observed properties of the ensemble representation can differ in detail. Previous studies have suggested that the saliency of individual items biases the perceived mean of ensembles (the so-called amplification effect). It is unclear, however, whether saliency affects implicit representations of the whole feature distribution (beyond mean and variance). Our observers were presented with sets of lines varying in orientation and size where size was a task-irrelevant salient feature. To estimate explicit representations, observers adjusted the mean orientation. To access the implicit representation of the feature distribution, we used a visual search task (Feature Distribution Learning) for an oddly oriented line among heterogeneous distractors and measured the search times. The results revealed a strong saliency-induced bias in the explicit report task, with mean orientation estimates biased toward the more salient items. However, no such amplification effect was observed for the implicit report. Our results support the hypothesis that distinct mechanisms may underlie the implicit and explicit ensemble representations.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"87 7","pages":"2059 - 2068"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144610410","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":"Comparing sustained attention performance across laboratory-based versus web-based settings","authors":"Jinwon Kang, Matthew W. Lowder, Wonil Choi","doi":"10.3758/s13414-025-03126-2","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-025-03126-2","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Recently, there have been many attempts to replicate effects that have traditionally been observed in laboratory-based settings using web-based settings. While many classic effects have indeed been found to replicate, it is also true that web-based experiments often yield slower reaction times and less accurate responses compared with lab-based experiments. The aim of the current study was to compare performance on the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) across lab-based and web-based settings using a repeated-measures, within-subjects design. The results indicated no significant differences between the lab-based and web-based settings in reaction times for both go and no-go trials, as well as in post-error slowing. Additionally, no significant differences were observed in the accuracy of no-go trials. However, the standard deviation of reaction times was smaller in the lab-based setting, and accuracy in go trials was higher in the lab-based setting compared with the web-based setting. These findings suggest that a web-based setting can effectively replicate a laboratory-based setting in terms of reaction times, indicating that sustained attention effects are comparable across settings. However, the lower accuracy observed in the web-based setting suggests that participants may engage with the task less carefully. Furthermore, the greater variability in reaction times in the web-based setting implies a higher susceptibility to external influences. These results highlight the importance of careful methodological considerations when designing and interpreting the results of web-based experiments.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"87 6","pages":"2029 - 2040"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144610411","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":"Awareness of both global uncertainty and feedback in human time estimation","authors":"Chetan Desai, Farah Bader, Martin Wiener","doi":"10.3758/s13414-025-03115-5","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-025-03115-5","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Recent behavioral studies have shown that humans possess self-awareness of their individual timing ability in that they can discern the direction of their timing error. However, in these studies which included a single repeat (re-do) trial for each duration, it remains unclear whether the reduction in errors in the re-do trials was due to self-awareness of individual timing ability or because the participants used the feedback from the initial trials to improve on the re-do ones. To investigate this further, we conducted a behavioral study in which subjects were divided into two groups: one in which the “re-do” phase occurred frequently, but not always (80% of trials; called the “high-double” group), and one in which re-do trials were rare (20% of trials; called the “low-double” group). This was done to test the possibility of subjects relying on the re-do trials as a method of improvement. Subjects significantly improved in their performance on re-do trials regardless of whether re-dos were rare or frequent. Further, an unexpected finding was observed, where subjects in the low-double group also overall performed better than those in the high-double group. This finding suggests that subjects, knowing that re-do opportunities were rare, engaged better timing at the outset; yet these subjects still improved on re-do trials, suggesting humans are able to incorporate both global uncertainty and feedback.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"87 7","pages":"2121 - 2128"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12331858/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144602323","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":"Positive effects of recent history on the ensemble perception of facial attractiveness","authors":"Da Wang, Xu Luo, Na Xiao, Gaoxing Mei","doi":"10.3758/s13414-025-03122-6","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13414-025-03122-6","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Facial attractiveness is a crucial factor in social interactions. During the judgments of facial attractiveness, individuals not only can form the perception of single faces but also can extract summary statistics of multiple faces (i.e., ensemble perception). It is largely unknown whether and how recent perceptual history could have an influence on the ensemble perception of facial attractiveness. Here we combined a facial attractiveness rating task with a linear regression model to address these issues. In Experiment 1a and 1b we found that attractiveness judgments of an ensemble of current multiple faces were significantly biased toward an ensemble of previous multiple faces (i.e., a positive serial dependence effect). Experiment 2 further demonstrated that this positive effect originated from the global ensemble perception rather than the local perception. Moreover, Experiment 3 revealed serial dependence effects between the perception of a single face and the ensemble perception of multiple faces. Taken together, these findings showed the positive effect of recent perceptual history on the ensemble perception of facial attractiveness, indicating that the ensemble perception of high-level visual features such as facial attractiveness is controlled by the serial dependence mechanism.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55433,"journal":{"name":"Attention Perception & Psychophysics","volume":"87 6","pages":"1904 - 1914"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144602324","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}