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The traditional lecture model has come under scrutiny for being ineffective at capturing students’ attention (Bradbury, 2016). These effects are exacerbated as universities shift towards online modes of delivery (Fauville et al., 2023; Mu et al., 2019). This failure to capture attention ultimately creates barriers for learning, as poorer attention during lectures is predictive of poorer recall of lecture content (Schachter & Szpunar, 2015). In efforts to address this, studies have found that university students report less mind-wandering and retain more information when lectures are punctuated with frequent rest breaks, or are interpolated with quizzes that prime students to engage with future topics (pre-testing) or assess knowledge of recently covered topics (post-testing) (Welhaf et al., 2022; Buglass et al., 2021; Szpunar et al., 2013). However, the implications of these findings for attention are limited by the use of subjective self-report and little research has directly compared the outcomes of all three lecture strategies. The current study therefore aims to systematically compare the impacts of rest breaks, pre-testing and post-testing on students’ attention and retention of lecture content. We build on previous experiments by comparing how all three lecture strategies influence students’ eye-gaze patterns, which serve as a proxy for how well students are maintaining their attention (Rosengrant et al., 2021; Ranti et al., 2020). We also compare how each lecture strategy predicts students’ long-term recall of lecture content, and investigate the extent that recall in the interpolated testing conditions is influenced by a practice advantage. Finally, we examine note-taking patterns between the lecture conditions, and how this might be related to students’ learning outcomes. In doing so, we can create evidence-based recommendations for educators on how to use each strategy to produce specific learning outcomes and further our knowledge of how attention fluctuates in dynamic contexts. We investigate the following research questions: 1. How do rest breaks, pre-testing and post-testing (lecture strategies) influence patterns of on-task gaze fixation durations throughout the course of a lecture? 2. How do these lecture strategies influence students’ long-term recall of lecture content? 3. Does presenting material in a quiz format during the lecture affect recall of that material later? 4. Does the completeness of students’ notes differ between lectures that use rest breaks, pre-testing and post-testing, and is the completeness of note-taking related to recall?

Vigilance decrements, where performance on monotonous tasks with rare targets worsens over time, have been well documented in the literature (Langner & Eickhoff, 2013). Recently, Karimi-Rouzbahani et al. (2021) replicated these findings with a dynamic multiple-object-monitoring (MOM) task that better captures elements of real-world environments and allows distinction of vigilance effects from the general effects of sustained attention. However, this study only compared very rare target frequencies (6%) to active responding (targets frequency of 50%). To more clearly understand how target frequency influences vigilance performance, examination of the intermediate target frequencies is necessary. Thus, the current study will use the MOM task (see Karimi-Rouzbahani et al., 2021 for more detail) and manipulate target frequency to: 1. Examine the effect of target frequency (TF) on the magnitude of the vigilance decrement. 2. Assess whether the findings of the original study (Karimi-Rouzbahani et al., 2021) can be replicated with a shorter task duration of 20 minutes. For this study, performance will be measured using the magnitude of the vigilance decrement. This decrement will be inferred from a) miss rate for targets; and b) reaction time (RT), defined as average RT on hits. A greater vigilance decrement will be demonstrated by an increase in miss rate and/or increase in RT over time on task (specifically, a comparison of the average performance in the first 3 blocks relative to the final 3 blocks).

Study details and pre-registration for Experiment 1 on Bodily-self cues and visuo-tactile temporal order judgments.

Raw data (BIDS), analysis scripts, figures, and stimuli for "Temporal dissociation of neural activity underlying synesthetic and perceptual colours"

The aim of this study was to investigate the dynamic effect of attention on visual processing, while 1) controlling for target-related confounds, and 2) directly investigating the influence of temporal expectation. We used using multivariate pattern analysis of EEG data.

This experiment is based upon the results of Crowe, Howard, Gilchrist, and Kent (2021) who explored the effect of motion on visual search in a change event task. The authors developed a dynamic visual search task, which involved monitoring the display for a critical change event, to investigate the effect that dynamic stimuli may have on the detection of a feature change in visual search (Crowe, Howard, Gilchrist, & Kent, 2021). Participants needed to search for an orientation change of Gabor patches, where the display showed either all static or all dynamic stimuli or a combination of static and dynamic stimuli with either a static or dynamic target (Crowe et al., 2021). Crowe et al. found that motion of the distractors and the target itself slowed down change detection. Crowe et al. suggest that the motion of the target and distractor stimuli silence fast feature change detection, as seen in the ‘Motion Silencing Effect’ (MSE) with other types of stimuli (Suchow & Alvarez, 2011a). The MSE is a visual illusion where a stimulus display changing in size, shape, hue or brightness appears to change more slowly in its respective stimulus dimension once the display starts to rotate, with an apparent cessation of stimulus change at higher rotation speeds (Suchow & Alvarez, 2011a). The authors initially suggested that motion silences the detection of this feature change, despite participants attending to the display and being aware that the stimuli are changing (Suchow & Alvarez, 2011b). It is plausible that the MSE is contributing to the finding by Crowe et al. (2021) of motion possessed by both the target and distractor stimuli slowing down rapid feature change detection. However, the search task employed by Crowe et al. is complex in comparison to the methods used in more ‘classic’ motion silencing experiments. The latter usually employ psychophysical methods, in the form of method-of-adjustment or binary choice tasks, where the observer fixates their gaze on a constrained display of changing stimuli arranged in an annulus (Choi, Bovik, & Cormack, 2014; Suchow & Alvarez, 2011a). To the authors’ best knowledge, no task has yet investigated the MSE in a visual search task, or any task that may translate to more real-world applications. As such, this study aims to investigate the role of the MSE in dynamic change detection tasks, which require visual search for successful task completion. To approach the question of whether dynamic change detection tasks are also subject to motion silencing, the authors have decided to approximate the study by Crowe et al. (2021) gradually, through an initial exploration into the occurrence of the MSE in static and dynamic Gabor patch displays. Here, each Gabor patch changes orientation, and the displays will be shown at different rotational speeds. The participants will be required to make a binary judgement after each visual display, to indicate whether they were able to perceive the orientation change of the individual Gabor patches, or not.

The aim of this project is to examine the nature of object representations during dynamic occlusion. We recorded MEG data to test whether object features such as shape, luminance, and object position are represented during occlusion.

This project investigates the influence of reward on the perception of visual information. Previous studies repeatedly show that reward can capture attention even if the reward information is not behaviorally relevant or counterproductive. This indicates that the effect of reward occurs before the information reaches attention. This project explores this idea of reward's impact on early stages of brain's information-processing stream, i.e., perception.

Computer-aided detection (CAD) systems generally use a binary cue to indicate a target in an image to an observer (Cunningham, Drew, & Wolfe, 2017). This means that the CAD system provides a marker around (or an arrow pointing towards) any location in an image where the strength of the signal is above a certain threshold and does not provide a marker for those locations where the signal is below the threshold. CAD systems are not completely accurate. In target-present trials, the CAD system may correctly mark the target only (hit), however it may also commit three errors: It may correctly mark the target and incorrectly mark one or more distractors (hit / false alarm), fail to mark the target and incorrectly mark one or more distractors (miss / false alarm), or fail to mark the target and correctly not mark any distractors (miss). In target-absent trials, the CAD may correctly not mark any distractors (correct rejection), or incorrectly mark one or more distractors (false alarm). CAD systems that use binary cues have been shown to lead to increased detection (by the observer) of targets that are marked by the CAD, but they also lead to decreased detection of targets that are missed by the CAD, especially when a distractor has also been cued (Drew, Guthrie, & Reback, 2020; see also Russell & Kunar, 2012 for the exogenous cueing of low prevalence targets). When the CAD system does not provide any cue in a target-present trial (miss), the increased misses of these targets could be due to an overreliance of the observer on the information that the CAD conveys (the overreliance hypothesis; Kunar Watson, Taylor-Phillips, & Wolska, 2017). When the CAD system fails to cue a target and also cues a distractor (miss / false alarm) the increased misses of these targets could be due to an overreliance on the CAD and/or because the exogenous CAD cue(s) capture the observer’s attention to specific locations in the image, drawing it away from non-cued locations that may contain a target. Here, we will test the overreliance hypothesis by removing the localised attentional capture aspect of the CAD cues. We will use non-spatial CAD cues to convey the CAD information to the observer through a coloured border around the image when a target is detected by the CAD system. These cues will provide CAD information to the observer without capturing attention to specific locations. These cues differ from spatial cues in the errors that the system can make. When a target is present and the system provides a cue, it can no longer make the hit / false alarm or miss / false alarm errors. Participants will complete a letter search task under two conditions: with non-spatial CAD cues and without. We predict that participants will perform better (than without CAD) when the non-spatial CAD correctly cues a target (hit), demonstrating that participants are using the CAD information. We also predict that participants will perform worse (than without CAD) when the non-spatial CAD fails to cue a target (miss), thus providing support for the overreliance hypothesis. If participants perform better on CAD hit trials, but no worse on CAD miss trials, both relative to without CAD, this suggests that attentional capture may be responsible for some of the errors in spatial CAD.

Suchow and Alvarez (2011a) demonstrated that a stimulus undergoing a feature change in either size, hue, shape or brightness would appear to change more slowly once the display started to rotate. The stimulus, often an annulus made up out of small circles that would exhibit the feature change, would even appear to stop changing at high rotation speeds (Suchow & Alvarez, 2011a). Though previous studies have investigated to what extent grouping (Peirce, 2013), crowding, global motion (Turi & Burr, 2013), velocity, spacing and eccentricity (Choi et al., 2014, 2016) contribute to this visual illusion, no consensus has been reached on what exactly drives this effect called ‘motion silencing’. This study is a follow-up study to The Motion Silencing Effect (MSE) in Static and Dynamic Orientation Change Detection: Experiment 1 (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/TZ79W), where we investigated the MSE in a change detection task for dynamic and static Gabor patch displays. We found that local orientation change detection was less accurate with increasing global motion of the display, in line with the MSE and that there was no qualitative difference between the static and dynamic condition that involved global rotation. In this study, we will investigate the role of attention in the MSE, as this has not been researched yet (Suchow & Alvarez, 2017) and qualitative feedback from participants of our first study suggested that covert orienting of attention towards an individual Gabor patch helped successful detection of change. Consequently, we will use the Posner Cueing Paradigm (Posner, 1980; Posner et al., 1978) to direct spatial attention covertly in a direction discrimination task. Using valid, invalid and neutral cueing conditions and the psi-marginal adaptive method (Prins, 2013; Prins & Kingdon, 2009) to estimate threshold parameters, participants will be required to give a binary judgment after each stimulus display, to indicate which way individual Gabor patches rotated throughout the display.

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-pss-10.1177_09567976211021843 for Reward Rapidly Enhances Visual Perception by Phillip (Xin) Cheng, Anina N. Rich and Mike E. Le Pelley in Psychological Science

The neural processes underlying vicarious touch still remain unclear. Here we investigate the temporal characteristics of seeing and feeling touch by applying multivariate analyses to time series EEG data. We examine if and when there is information in the neural activation patterns about which finger was touched in either modality. We then test if there is information about the touched finger in data from one modality (e.g., vision) that is also present in the data from the other modality (e.g., touch) and at what timepoints this generalises. This study will provide both theoretical and methodological insights that can facilitate future research into touch processing generally and vicarious touch more specifically.

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-pss-10.1177_09567976211021843 for Reward Rapidly Enhances Visual Perception by Phillip (Xin) Cheng, Anina N. Rich and Mike E. Le Pelley in Psychological Science

Body ownership relies on spatiotemporal correlations between multisensory signals and visual cues specifying oneself such as body form and orientation. The mechanism for the integration of bodily signals remains unclear. One approach to model multisensory integration that has been influential in the multisensory literature is Bayesian causal inference. This specifies that the brain integrates spatial and temporal signals coming from different modalities when it infers a common cause for inputs. As an example, the rubber hand illusion shows that visual form and orientation cues can promote the inference of a common cause (one’s body) leading tospatial integrationshown by a proprioceptive drift of the perceived location of the real hand towards the rubber hand. Recent studies investigating the effect of visual cues ontemporal integration, however, have led to conflicting findings. These could be due to task differences, variation in ecological validity of stimuli and/or small samples. In this pre-registered study, we investigated the influence of visual information on temporal integration using a visuo-tactile temporal order judgement task with realistic stimuli and a sufficiently large sample determined by Bayesian analysis. Participants viewed videos of a touch being applied to plausible or implausible visual stimuli for one’s hand (hand oriented plausibly, hand rotated 180 degrees, or a sponge) while also being touched at varying stimulus onset asynchronies. Participants judged which stimulus came first: viewed or felt touch. Results show that visual cues do not modulate visuo-tactile temporal order judgements. This is not in line with the idea that bodily signals indicating oneself influence the integration of multisensory signals in the temporal domain. The current study emphasises the importance of rigour in our methodologies and analyses to advance the understanding of how properties of multisensory events affect the encoding of temporal information in the brain.

Figure S1. Detection accuracy: percentage correct for individual radiologists on target present trials for (a) low-density and (b) high-density mammograms on the detection task. The three radiologists that had piloted the experiment previously are illustrated in red. Figure S2. Detection accuracy: percentage correct for individual radiologists on target absent trials for (a) low-density and (b) high-density mammograms on the detection task. The three radiologists that had piloted the experiment previously are illustrated in red. Figure S3. Detection accuracy: sensitivity (dâ ˛) for individual radiologists for (a) low-density and (b) high-density mammograms. The three radiologists that had piloted the experiment previously are illustrated in red. Figure S4. Detection and localisation results: percentage correct on the localisation task for individual radiologists on trials when detection was correct for (a) low-density and (b) high-density mammograms. The three radiologists that had piloted the experiment previously are illustrated in red. Chance is 4.4% and adjusted to 9.1% when including the ROA (dotted line) with 95% confidence intervals. Figure S5. Detection and localisation results: percentage correct on the localisation task when a region of acceptance (ROA) around the lesion is included for individual radiologists for (a) low-density and (b) high-density mammograms. The three radiologists that had piloted the experiment previously are illustrated in red. Chance is 4.4% and adjusted to 9.1% when including the ROA (dotted line) with 95% confidence intervals. (DOCX 1002 kb)

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is proposed to drive brain-wide focus by biasing processing in favour of task-relevant information. A longstanding debate concerns whether this is achieved through enhancing processing of relevant information and/or by inhibiting irrelevant information. To address this, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) during fMRI, and tested for causal changes in information coding. Participants attended to one feature, whilst ignoring another feature, of a visual object. If dlPFC is necessary for facilitation, disruptive TMS should decrease coding of attended features. Conversely, if dlPFC is crucial for inhibition, TMS should increase coding of ignored features. Here, we show that TMS decreases coding of relevant information across frontoparietal cortex, and the impact is significantly stronger than any effect on irrelevant information, which is not statistically detectable. This provides causal evidence for a specific role of dlPFC in enhancing task-relevant representations and demonstrates the cognitive-neural insights possible with concurrent TMS-fMRI-MVPA.

Funder: Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics, University of Reading, Funder: ARC Discovery Project (DP170101840) ARC Discovery Project (DP12102835), Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is proposed to drive brain-wide focus by biasing processing in favour of task-relevant information. A longstanding debate concerns whether this is achieved through enhancing processing of relevant information and/or by inhibiting irrelevant information. To address this, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) during fMRI, and tested for causal changes in information coding. Participants attended to one feature, whilst ignoring another feature, of a visual object. If dlPFC is necessary for facilitation, disruptive TMS should decrease coding of attended features. Conversely, if dlPFC is crucial for inhibition, TMS should increase coding of ignored features. Here, we show that TMS decreases coding of relevant information across frontoparietal cortex, and the impact is significantly stronger than any effect on irrelevant information, which is not statistically detectable. This provides causal evidence for a specific role of dlPFC in enhancing task-relevant representations and demonstrates the cognitive-neural insights possible with concurrent TMS-fMRI-MVPA.

Figure S1. Detection accuracy: percentage correct for individual radiologists on target present trials for (a) low-density and (b) high-density mammograms on the detection task. The three radiologists that had piloted the experiment previously are illustrated in red. Figure S2. Detection accuracy: percentage correct for individual radiologists on target absent trials for (a) low-density and (b) high-density mammograms on the detection task. The three radiologists that had piloted the experiment previously are illustrated in red. Figure S3. Detection accuracy: sensitivity (dâ ˛) for individual radiologists for (a) low-density and (b) high-density mammograms. The three radiologists that had piloted the experiment previously are illustrated in red. Figure S4. Detection and localisation results: percentage correct on the localisation task for individual radiologists on trials when detection was correct for (a) low-density and (b) high-density mammograms. The three radiologists that had piloted the experiment previously are illustrated in red. Chance is 4.4% and adjusted to 9.1% when including the ROA (dotted line) with 95% confidence intervals. Figure S5. Detection and localisation results: percentage correct on the localisation task when a region of acceptance (ROA) around the lesion is included for individual radiologists for (a) low-density and (b) high-density mammograms. The three radiologists that had piloted the experiment previously are illustrated in red. Chance is 4.4% and adjusted to 9.1% when including the ROA (dotted line) with 95% confidence intervals. (DOCX 1002 kb)

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is proposed to drive brain-wide focus by biasing processing in favour of task-relevant information. A longstanding debate concerns whether this is achieved through enhancing processing of relevant information and/or by inhibiting irrelevant information. To address this, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) during fMRI, and tested for causal changes in information coding. Participants attended to one feature, whilst ignoring another feature, of a visual object. If dlPFC is necessary for facilitation, disruptive TMS should decrease coding of attended features. Conversely, if dlPFC is crucial for inhibition, TMS should increase coding of ignored features. Here, we show that TMS decreases coding of relevant information across frontoparietal cortex, and the impact is significantly stronger than any effect on irrelevant information, which is not statistically detectable. This provides causal evidence for a specific role of dlPFC in enhancing task-relevant representations and demonstrates the cognitive-neural insights possible with concurrent TMS-fMRI-MVPA.

Evidence from neuroimaging and brain stimulation studies suggest that visual information about objects in the periphery is fed back to foveal retinotopic cortex in a separate representation that is essential for peripheral perception. The characteristics of this phenomenon have important theoretical implications for the role fovea-specific feedback might play in perception. In this work, we employed a recently developed behavioral paradigm to explore whether late disruption to central visual space impaired perception of color. In the first experiment, participants performed a shape discrimination task on colored novel objects in the periphery while fixating centrally. Consistent with the results from previous work, a visual distractor presented at fixation ~100ms after presentation of the peripheral stimuli impaired sensitivity to differences in peripheral shapes more than a visual distractor presented at other stimulus onset asynchronies. In a second experiment, participants performed a color discrimination task on the same colored objects. In a third experiment, we further tested for this foveal distractor effect with stimuli restricted to a low-level feature by using homogenous color patches. These two latter experiments resulted in a similar pattern of behavior: a central distractor presented at the critical stimulus onset asynchrony impaired sensitivity to peripheral color differences, but, importantly, the magnitude of the effect was stronger when peripheral objects contained complex shape information. These results show a behavioral effect consistent with disrupting feedback to the fovea, in line with the foveal feedback suggested by previous neuroimaging studies.

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is proposed to drive brain-wide focus by biasing processing in favour of task-relevant information. A longstanding debate concerns whether this is achieved through enhancing processing of relevant information and/or by inhibiting irrelevant information. To address this, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) during fMRI, and tested for causal changes in information coding. Participants attended to one feature, whilst ignoring another feature, of a visual object. If dlPFC is necessary for facilitation, disruptive TMS should decrease coding of attended features. Conversely, if dlPFC is crucial for inhibition, TMS should increase coding of ignored features. Here, we show that TMS decreases coding of relevant information across frontoparietal cortex, and the impact is significantly stronger than any effect on irrelevant information, which is not statistically detectable. This provides causal evidence for a specific role of dlPFC in enhancing task-relevant representations and demonstrates the cognitive-neural insights possible with concurrent TMS-fMRI-MVPA., Jade Jackson et al. use fMRI concurrent with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in an attention task to evaluate whether the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is involved in facilitation of relevant information, or suppression of irrelevant information. Their results suggest that the dlPFC is causally involved in processing relevant information in an attention task and highlight the utility of a dual fMRI-TMS approach.