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How people interact with AI generated contents is an new topic in the field of cognitive psychology and human-computer interaction. Due to the quick advancement of AI and the every day more complex outputs of AI, a study on how humans interact with AI generated content is timely and relevant.

The level of processing hypothesis (LoP) postulates several stages of transition from unaware to aware perception. During first stage, low-level processing of stimulus features, awareness is graded and during the second stage, high-level processing, involving semantic evaluation and categorisation, awareness is dichotomous. Studies on electrophysiological correlates of consciousness propose that visual awareness negativity (VAN) is modulated during low-level task and late positivity (LP) changes during high level task (Jimenez et al., 2021), attributing these neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) to different stages and processes. Here we implement the level of processing paradigm using four animal and four object words spoken in different pitches to investigate NCC of auditory consciousness. We predict that awareness will modulate AAN in the low-level task stronger than in the high level-task, LP will be modulated by both level of processing and accuracy. In addition we implement an exploratory factorial mass univariate analysis to find evidence of two parts of LP, recently shown in studies (Filimonov et al., 2022). We will also run the main analysis on two LP time windows. We predict that early LP will be mostly modulated by awareness and the accuracy responding and late LP will be modulated by accuracy and LoP task.

Natural settings have often been referred as restorative (e.g., Stress Reduction Theory and Attention Restoration Theory). Despite the stress-reduction and cognitive restoration outcomes of being exposed to natural environments, the physiological underpinning of such effects are still not clear. A recent fMRI study (Sudimac et al., 2022) showed that a walk in natural environments may reduce amygdala activity in response to fearful and neutral faces. Such finding is important as it may point to specific brain structures involved in the process of restoration in response to the experience of natural settings. The present study aims to use a similar design as that of Sudimac et al., (2022), adapting their experimental paradigm to an EEG-based study. Contrarily to Sudimac et al., (2022) who employed an in-vivo exposure to natural settings, the present study employs video stimuli. Nature videos have been shown (see Grassini et al., 2022) to modulate brain activity in response to nature vs. control conditions, therefore we expect that watching videos may produce similar results than the in-vivo exposure. EEG data will allow to understand how nature videos may be responsible for modulating attentional processes towards emotional stimuli (faces), and possibly connect these attentional processes to a modulation of amygdala activity, attempting to indirectly confirm the results of Sudimac et al., (2022).

Affective priming is a type of response priming often studied in experimental psychology. This type of priming concerns the evaluation of presented stimuli not only based on their features, but also on affective context. The affective context may be either a-priori or manipulated experimentally. Affective priming experimental paradigms aim at modulating judgments of targets following positive, neutral, or negative primes. From findings on affective priming it is to be expected that an emotional stimulus (e.g., positive or negative) displayed just before another stimulus would modulate the affective response to the second stimulus, depending on weather the emotional content of the second stimulus is coherent or uncoherent with the emotion elicited by the first stimulus. Evolutionary theories on the development of mammals brain have proposed the idea that ancestral evolutionary pressure posed by threatening stimuli had a role in shaping the development of the brain's perceptual and cognitive networks. The snake detection theory (SDT) claims that snakes have had a prominent role in shaping mammals brain, as a number of snake species actively hunt small mammals as e.g., rodents. According to the theory, hard-wired perceptual systems selectively developed for detecting snakes have been developed in early mammals evolution and can be still found in primates (then human) brains, even though big-size mammals such as humans are not threatened by snakes. A number of studies, employing behavioral and physiological methods, have provided evidence for the SDT, and have showed that human attention is selectively modulated by snakes and snake-like shapes. These experiments have generally used visual stimulation as e.g., images of snakes, and have compared the behavioral or brain physiology in reaction to the snake with the reactions to other threatening or non-threatening stimuli. One of the most compelling evidence of SDT is that the attention modulation towards snakes appear to be particularly selective as compared with other threat or anxiety inducing animal stimuli (e.g., spiders and crocodiles). Despite spiders are often rated by study participants as equally threatening or more threatening than snakes, the same selective attention modulation observed for snakes has not been observed in reaction to spider stimuli. The difference in behavioral and physiological reaction between snakes and spiders has been explained by the theorists of the SDT from an evolutionary basis: while snakes have posed an ancestral threat, spiders are perceived as dangerous and disgusting only since the middle age, when they where associated to diseases. Therefore snakes are able to selectively activate brain hard-wired evolutionary circuits, and spiders - while subjectively perceived as threatening - are not activating those anciently evolved part of the human brain. In the present study, we studied the affective priming effects elicited by images of snakes and spiders, and whether or not the effects are moderated by perceived fear or disgust. Images of nonthreatening animals (birds, frogs) and threatening animals (snakes, spiders) were presented as primes and the targets were images of fearful or happy faces. The participants responded as fast and accurately as possible whether the target face was fearful of happy. Priming should be observed as facilitated responses to fearful faces and delayed responses to happy faces, compared with the responses to control animals.

In the first experiment (Preregistration: Individual differences in emotional responses to nature and urban images during Affect Misattribution Procedure), we observed that the valence of Chinese characters were rated more positive after nature images than after urban images. Exposure to nature during childhood (measured with RNES-II, Wood et al., 2019) contributed to this affective priming effect such that only participants with higher than average exposure to nature during childhood showed the effect. Moreover, valence ratings after nature images were not modified by childhood nature exposure, but the ratings after urban images was: the higher the childhood nature exposure, the lower were the valence ratings after urban images. Thus, the affective priming resulted from modulation of the urban images only. Current nature exposure (NES-II) or nature connectedness (measured with EINS) were not related to the valence ratings. This pattern support evolutionary-constructivist framework in which nature innately evokes automatic positive affects, whereas the automatic affects toward urban settings vary individually, depending on learning experiences. The first experiments used young adults as participants (18-35 years old). In Experiment 2 we aim to replicate the findings of the first experiment and to extend them to middle aged participants (36-55 years old).

The evidence for unconsciously guided action on basis of masked visual stimulus presentation is contradictory. Many of studies that have provided support for the view that unconscious visual stimuli are able to affect responses (e.g., that discrimination of orientation or color is performed better than chance) have used subjective ratings for assessing the presence of consciousness. It is well known that subjective ratings are conservative, that is, the participants are biased to report that they do not see the stimulus even when they may have a weak conscious perception of it. On the other hand, there is less evidence for unconsciously guided responses when consciousness has been assessed with bias-free objective measures. In the present experiment, we use stimuli which produced above-chance discrimination of orientation and color without subjectively reported consciousness in a previous study (Koivisto & Neuvonen, Consciousness & Cognition, 81, 102929, 2020). In the present study, we measure consciousness with a bias-free procedure where the target is presented in one of two stimulus intervals (i.e., only one interval containing the target), the participants make a forced-choice discrimination of the stimulus orientation or color in both intervals, and finally they indicate in which of the two intervals the target was presented (= two-interval forced choice, 2IFC). Our primary interest is to test whether the orientation or color discrimination occurs above chance level when the 2IFC is performed wrongly (i.e., participants report that the interval did not contain the target). Because the participant should not have any reason to hide awareness of the stimulus in the 2IFC, a performance in orientation or color discrimination exceeding the chance level would provide strong evidence for unconsciously guided responses.

Exposure to natural environments is linked to psychological benefits, such as stress reduction, mood enhancement, and restoration from cognitive and attentional strain (Berman et al., 2008; Hartig et al., 2014; Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989; Ulrich, 1981). The Stress Reduction Theory (SRT, Ulrich, 1983; Ulrich et al., 1991) emphasizes the physiological and emotional effects human experiences when being exposed to natural environments. Exposure to natural environments elicit positive affects which counteract negative affects and stress. Attention restoration theory (ART, Kaplan, 1995; Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989) emphasizes the restorative effects of natural settings on human attentional and cognitive fatigue. These leading theories are evolution-based accounts which propose that physical features in natural environments are advantageous for the positive psychological and physiological effects. An alternative or complementary view for the evolutionary views is the constructionist account (Egner et al., 2020; Haga et al., 2016; Van Hedger et al., 2019) which assumes that the positive psychological effects of nature depend on learning and the associations and meanings humans attribute to the physical attributes of nature. Individuals differences in the effects of nature exposure have been studied relatively little. Although it has been known for long that spending time in natural environments has positive health effects, the individual differences in childhood and current exposure to nature in everyday nature exposure have been largely neglected in typical experimental studies which aim to study the mechanisms underlying the effects of nature. For example, it is not clear whether all humans automatically respond with positive emotions to nature, as assumed in evolution-based theories, or whether such responses have been learned during childhood or adulthood exposure, as assumed by constructivist theories. In addition, individuals vary in their nature connectedness, that is, their affective connection and feeling of belonging to nature (Tam, 2013). Nature connectedness is a trait-like feature which is stable over time (Mayer & Frantz, 2004), but short exposures to nature can produce short-term state-like fluctuations in it (Mayer et al., 2009). Connectedness to nature correlates positively with the frequency of time spent in nature and outdoors (Nisbet et al., 2009) and with the psychological well-being (Mayer et al., 2009; Pensini et al., 2016). Do persons with low nature connectedness automatically and emotionally respond equally positively to nature as compared with persons with strong nature connectedness? The aim of this study is to examine whether humans’ automatic emotional responses to natural stimuli are positive (as compared with responses to urban images), and whether or not such emotional responses depend on individual differences in childhood and adulthood nature exposure or in connectedness to nature. We examine automatic emotional responses with the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP; Payne et al., 2005), an “implicit” or indirect procedure in which a photograph of nature or urban setting is briefly presented, followed by a Chinese character. The participants are asked to evaluate the valence of their response to the Chinese character and are instructed not to let their reactions to the photograph to influence their evaluations of their responses to the Chinese characters. It is assumed that in spite of the instruction, the emotional response to the photograph will automatically spread to the evaluation of the valence (and arousal) related to the character. The explicit or “direct” task is physically identical to the indirect task, but the participants evaluate their emotional responses to the photographs. The results of the direct task are not of the primary interest in the present study, but its valence and arousal are used as covariates in the analyses of the results in the indirect task. In addition, we expect that indirect and direct tasks will produce different patterns of results, which would support the interpretation that they measured different processes.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-eab-10.1177_00139165221107535 for Top-Down Processing and Nature Connectedness Predict Psychological and Physiological Effects of Nature by Mika Koivisto, Enni Jalava, Lina Kuusisto, Henry Railo and Simone Grassini in Environment and Behavior

Source attribution of naturalistic stimuli (fire auditory stimuli plus control conditions) and psychophysiological effects