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Bilingual environments provide a commonplace example of increased complexity and uncertainty. Learning multiple languages entails mastery of a larger and more variable range of sounds, words, syntactic structures, pragmatic conventions, and more complex mapping of linguistic information to objects in the world. Recent research suggests that bilingual learners demonstrate fundamental variation in how they explore and learn from their environment, which may derive from this increased complexity. In particular, the increased complexity and variability of bilingual environments may broaden the focus of learners' attention, laying a different attentional foundation for learning. In this review, we introduce a novel framework, with accompanying empirical evidence, for understanding how early learners may adapt to a more complex environment, drawing on bilingualism as an example. Three adaptations, each relevant to the demands of abstracting structure from a complex environment, are introduced. Each adaptation is discussed in the context of empirical evidence attesting to shifts in basic psychological processes in bilingual learners. This evidence converges on the notion that bilingual learners may explore their environment more broadly. Downstream consequences of broader sampling for perception and learning are discussed. Finally, recommendations for future research to expand the scientific narrative on the impact of diverse environments on learning are provided. Public Significance Statement: This article focuses on how bilingual experience, as a source of environmental diversity, determines how learners attend to their environment. The premise of the article is that more diverse environments are more complex and may instill different modes of learning and attention, fostering greater attention to novelty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual art is pervasive in modern society. From advertising to fine arts galleries, the visual arts play a visible role in how we view and understand the world. In this review, we consider research that speaks to whether our experiences with art can change the way we see. Numerous studies speak, often indirectly, to this question—addressing whether artists see things differently from nonartists. Specifically, we reviewed literature that investigates the ways artistic ability and artistic training interact with visual abilities from the perspective that artists can be described as experts in visual media. Some work suggests that those who identify as artists or undergo artistic training perform better than nonartists on measures of low-level vision, high-level perception, and visual cognition, and show differences in brain activity while engaged in perceptual or artistic tasks. Other studies do not support these conclusions, however, and report no differences between artists and nonartists. We conclude that experimentally designed and well controlled training studies are necessary to elucidate whether artistic training shapes the brain and its perceptual and cognitive processes or whether budding artists gravitate toward the visual arts because of existing visual abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structural-contextual dual frameworks theory comprises two heuristic frameworks that provide alternative means for the interpretation of metaphor in pictorial artworks (Crawford & Juricevic, 2016). The first of these frameworks is the contextual framework, which contends that the interpretation of pictorial metaphors is contextually rooted, and the second is the structural framework which interprets metaphor based on structural components of an artwork. We used these frameworks to analyze the literal and metaphorical use of the pictorial device of exaggerated size in 59 well-known works of art sampled from across history. Exaggerated size was chosen for analysis because it is often used literally (e.g., to depict an actual giant) or metaphorically (e.g., to depict an existential concern). The artworks were sorted into four separate categories (Literal-Literal, Metaphorical-Literal, Literal-Metaphorical, and Metaphorical-Metaphorical) based on their interpretation by the structural and contextual frameworks (respectively). A cumulative Poisson distribution with α <.05 revealed that artists typically produced artworks in all categories except for the incongruent combination of literal contextual information and metaphoric structural information. This suggests that when contextual and structural information conflicts in art, viewers rely on contextual information; when metaphoric and literal information conflicts, viewers favor metaphoric interpretations. This present study supports the idea that the structural-contextual dual frameworks theory may be used to investigate the use of metaphors across art styles and media. These results also provide a guide for combining literal and metaphorical information, whether the goal is ease of communication or to intentionally challenge the viewer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People see some impossible events as more impossible than others. For example, walking through a solid wall seems more impossible if it is made of stone rather than wood. Across four experiments, we investigated how children and adults assess the relative impossibility of events, contrasting two kinds of information they may use: perceptual information and causal knowledge. In each experiment, participants were told about a wizard who could magically transform target objects into other things. Participants then assessed which of the two transformation spells would be easier or harder, a spell transforming a target object into a perceptual match (i.e., a similar-looking thing) or one transforming it into a causal match (e.g., an item made of similar materials). In Experiments 1–3, children aged 4–7 mainly thought that transformations into the perceptual match would be easier, though this tendency varied with age. Adults were overall split when choosing which spell would be easier. In Experiment 1, this was because of variations in their judgments across different pairs of spells; in Experiments 2 and 4, the split resulted because different subsets of adults preferred either the perceptual or causal match. Overall, these findings show that children, and many adults, use perceptual reasoning to assess relative impossibility. Public Significance Statement: Besides differentiating possible events from ones that are impossible, people see some events as more impossible than others. We investigated how children and adults make these judgments by asking them about magical transformations. One way that people might assess the relative impossibility of magic is by drawing on their causal knowledge. However, we find that young children, and even many adults, instead make these judgments using shallow perceptual information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When presented with surprising claims, older children investigate such claims more often than younger children. The present study tests whether older children (6–7-year-olds) are more skeptical than younger children (4–5-year-olds) about surprising claims that lack supporting evidence because they expect informants to provide evidence for them. To test this hypothesis, we presented 140 4–7-year-old children (47–96 months, 46.4% girls, 53.6% boys, 86.4% with at least one parent who completed a BA degree, 50% parents with income above median) with a series of vignettes. In each vignette, the protagonist wanted to accomplish a task and needed to select the most appropriate object for that task. Before deciding which object to use, the protagonist heard a surprising claim about one of the object's properties, presented with or without supporting evidence. For example, in the supporting explanation condition, the informant stated that the smallest object was the heaviest and that they knew because they had lifted the objects. Children were then asked whether the protagonist knew which object to use and why. Contrary to expectation, children across all ages typically indicated that the protagonist had sufficient knowledge, regardless of whether an informant provided supporting evidence or not. However, with increasing age, children became more skeptical of both supported and unsupported surprising claims and increasingly stated that the protagonist should not select the object suggested by the informant. Finally, when asked to justify this judgment, older children were more likely than younger to express skepticism toward the claims, especially when presented without supporting evidence. Public Significance Statement: The results of this study show that with age, children become increasingly skeptical of surprising claims, whether unsupported or not, as well as increasingly likely to express this skepticism. By generating new knowledge on children's capacity to reason about uncertainty and their emerging critical stance toward surprising claims, later research may build on this work to develop educational tools for practical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time attention coordination in parent–toddler dyads is often studied in tightly controlled laboratory settings. These studies have demonstrated the importance of joint attention in scaffolding the development of attention and the types of dyadic behaviors that support early language learning. Little is known about how often these behaviors occur in toddlers' everyday lives. We brought wireless head-mounted eye trackers to families' homes to study the moment-to-moment patterns of toddlers' and parents' visual attention and manual activity in daily routines. Our sample consisted of English- and Spanish-speaking families who all reported being middle- or upper middle-class. Toddlers were 2 to 3 years old. Consistent with the findings from previous laboratory studies, we found variability in how frequently toddlers attended to named objects in two everyday activities—Object Play and Mealtime. We then tested whether parent–toddler joint attention in the seconds before a naming utterance increased toddler's attention on the named object. We found that joint attention accompanied by the attended object being held increased the child's attention to the labeled object during naming. We posit that in the rich, noisy world of toddlers' everyday lives, embodied attention plays a critical role in coordinating dyadic behaviors and creating informative naming moments. Our findings highlight the importance of studying toddlers' natural behavior in the real world. Public Significance Statement: This study used eye-tracking glasses to measure toddler and parent attention at home and to test whether findings from laboratory tasks matter in the real world. Toddlers' attention to an object while it is named by their parent is thought to be important for word learning. We found that toddlers' attention to a named object increases when they and their parent coordinate their attention to held objects, supporting previous lab-based work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans and other animals are able to perceive and represent a number of objects present in a scene, a core cognitive ability thought to underlie the development of mathematics. However, the perceptual mechanisms that underpin this capacity remain poorly understood. Here, we show that our visual sense of number derives from a visual system designed to efficiently encode the location of objects in scenes. Using a mathematical model, we demonstrate that an efficient but information-limited encoding of objects' locations can explain many key aspects of number psychophysics, including subitizing, Weber's law, underestimation, and effects of exposure time. In two experiments (N = 100 each), we find that this model of visual encoding captures human performance in both a change-localization task and a number estimation task. In a third experiment (N = 100), we find that individual differences in change-localization performance are highly predictive of differences in number estimation, both in terms of overall performance and inferred model parameters, with participants having numerically indistinguishable inferred information capacities across tasks. Our results therefore indicate that key psychophysical features of numerical cognition do not arise from separate modules or capacities specific to number, but rather as by-products of lower level constraints on perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empathy, or Einfühlung as it was originally coined, first entered the psychological lexicon when it was used to describe the embodiment of artistic emotive qualities. Based on the empirical aesthetics literature, we explored this construct in the framework of visual attention in conjunction with analyses of aesthetic engagement and interest. A visual search paradigm was employed to examine the preattentive prioritization of components of emotive visual artworks between individuals scoring high or low on a validated questionnaire of empathy. Reaction times were significantly faster across all artworks, and several specific locations were responded to faster by highly empathic individuals. High empathy was associated with an enriched aesthetic experience, indexed by aesthetic interest and emotional engagement, to the most emotive artwork of the set. Qualitative measures provided further insights into the qualities of the artworks that may account for the differences reported here. The findings further contribute to understanding the myriad of psychological variables that influence our experience of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital visual data afford psychologists with exciting research possibilities. It becomes possible to see real-life interactions in real time and to be able to analyze this behavior in a fine-grained and systematic manner. However, the fact that faces (and other personally identifying physical characteristics) are captured as part of these data sets means that this kind of data is at the highest level of sensitivity by default. When this is combined with the possibility of automatic collection and processing, then the sensitivity risks are compounded. Here we explore the ethical challenges that face psychologists wishing to take advantage of digital visual data. Specifically, we discuss ethical considerations around data acquisition, data analysis, data storage, and data sharing. We begin by considering the challenges of securing visual data from both public space security systems and social media sources. We then explore the dangers of bias and discrimination in automatic data processing, as well as the dangers to human analysts. We set out the ethical requirements for secure data storage, the dangers of "function creep," and the challenges of the right of the individual to withdraw from databases. Finally, we consider the tensions that exist between sensitive visual data that require extra protections and the recent open science movement, which advocates data transparency and sharing. We conclude by offering a practical route map for tackling these complex ethical issues in the form of a Privacy and Data Protection Impact Assessment template for researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We presented 28 Spanish monolingual and 28 Catalan–Spanish close-language bilingual 5-year-old children with a video of a talker speaking in the children's native language and a nonnative language and examined the temporal dynamics of their selective attention to the talker's eyes and mouth. When the talker spoke in the children's native language, monolinguals attended equally to the eyes and mouth throughout the trial, whereas close-language bilinguals first attended more to the mouth and then distributed attention equally between the eyes and mouth. In contrast, when the talker spoke in a nonnative language (English), both monolinguals and bilinguals initially attended more to the mouth and then gradually shifted to a pattern of equal attention to the eyes and mouth. These results indicate that specific early linguistic experience has differential effects on young children's deployment of selective attention to areas of a talker's face during the initial part of an audiovisual utterance. Public Significance Statement: This study shows that selective attention to a talker's face is a temporally dynamic process that depends on prior linguistic experience. Close-language 5-year-old bilingual children exhibited greater initial attention to a talker's mouth than did monolingual children. This suggests that regular and continuous experience with two close languages modulates how audiovisual speech cues are exploited, primarily at the start of communicative bouts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many aspects of visual perception, including the classification of shapes into known categories and the induction of new shape categories from examples, are driven by shape similarity. But there is as yet no generally agreed, principled measure of the degree to which two shapes are "similar." Here, we derive a measure of shape similarity based on the Bayesian skeleton estimation framework of Feldman and Singh (2006). The new measure, called generative similarity, is based on the idea that shapes should be considered similar in proportion to the posterior probability that they were generated from a common skeletal model rather than from distinct skeletal models. We report a series of experiments in which subjects were shown a small number (1, 2, or 3) of 2D or 3D "nonsense" shapes (generated randomly in a manner designed to avoid known shape categories) and asked to select other members of the "same" shape class from a larger set of (random) alternatives. We then modeled subjects' choices using a variety of shape similarity measures drawn from the literature, including our new measure, skeletal cross-likelihood, a skeleton-based measure recently proposed by Ayzenberg and Lourenco (2019), a nonskeletal part-based similarity model proposed by Erdogan and Jacobs (2017), and a convolutional neural network model (Vedaldi & Lenc, 2015). We found that our new similarity measure generally predicted subjects' selections better than these competing proposals. These results help explain how the human visual system evaluates shape similarity and open the door to a broader view of the induction of shape categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can choice, confidence, and response times be modeled simultaneously? Here, we propose the new dynamical weighted evidence and visibility (dynWEV) model, an extension of the drift-diffusion model of decision-making, to account for choices, reaction times, and confidence simultaneously. The decision process in a binary perceptual task is described as a Wiener process accumulating sensory evidence about the choice options bounded by two constant thresholds. To account for confidence judgments, we assume a period of postdecisional accumulation of sensory evidence and parallel accumulation of information about the reliability of the present stimulus. We examined model fits in two experiments, a motion discrimination task with random dot kinematograms and a postmasked orientation discrimination task. A comparison between the dynWEV model, two-stage dynamical signal detection theory, and several versions of race models of decision-making showed that only dynWEV produced acceptable fits of choices, confidence, and reaction time. This finding suggests that confidence judgments depend not only on choice evidence but also on a parallel estimate of stimulus discriminability and postdecisional accumulation of evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In empirical aesthetics, choosing stimuli, especially artworks, is a persistent challenge. Artworks differ largely in terms of style, complexity, formal features, and valence, as well as historical context, presentation quality, genre, and content, all of which might influence aesthetic experiences. To advance the comparability of studies and increase our understanding of studied effects, it is important that the research community develops and, ideally, utilizes common standards or even data sets for stimulus selection. Here, we present the Vienna Art Picture System (VAPS), which provides such a comprehensive data set of visual artistic stimuli consisting of 999 fine art paintings from 347 European painters and from 13 art historical periods/styles from 1434 to the beginning of the 21st century. The artworks correspond to five genre categories: scenes, portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and paintings with increasing levels of abstraction. As a base for future research, the data set contains rating information (based on a German-speaking student sample of 60 women and 60 men) on five variables: liking, emotional valence, emotional arousal, visual complexity, and familiarity. The VAPS is freely accessible to the scientific community for noncommercial use at https://osf.io/a7xcr/. Thus, the VAPS offers a normed (mean, standard deviation) set of fine art pictures that can be used as a tool for researchers in the field of empirical visual aesthetics, and experimental psychology, to select stimulus sets suited to their needs and that can provide a basis for more standardized and comparable research across individual laboratories and researchers in the rapidly expanding assessment of experiences with art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A match-action cut in feature films connects two shots of a single continuous movement. This type of editing often goes unnoticed and is arguably the most effective form of continuity editing. However, the literature offers little agreement on editing best practice and, by implication, on how our perceptual system deals with disjointed moving images. Studies have suggested that frames should overlap across the cut for the viewer to experience continuity, but also that leaving out frames is preferable, and even that viewers are unable to discriminate such detail. We conducted an experiment to investigate viewer preferences for match-action cuts, using type of cut as well as velocity of movement as predictors and number of overlapping/elliptical frames as the outcome variable. Thirty-nine participants determined the smoothest cut in eight film-clips in a within-subjects design. Surprisingly, we found that average viewer preferences were less than a single frame from a straight cut for all cut-types. We also found that velocity had a small but statistically significant effect on editing preferences. The preference for straight cuts found in the present study runs counter to the idea that perceived continuity across match-action cuts requires objective dis-continuity and suggests that the straight cut provides a simple rule of thumb for film editors. In addition, we interpret the conflicting results from previous studies together with our own findings based on a discrimination task of finding the optimal cut as indicating that human visual perception allows for a window of acceptable continuity cuts centered around the straight cut. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research demonstrated a top-salience bias in object identification, with random shapes appearing more similar when they share the same top versus the same bottom. This is consistent with tops of natural objects and lifeforms tending to be more informative locations of intentionality and functionality, leading observers to favor attending to tops. However, this bias may also reflect a generic downward vantage tendency that occurs with more informative interactive aspects of scenes typically lying below the horizon. Two experiments test for this overall pattern of vertical attention bias (VAB) for both objects and scenes. Participants observed picture triptychs and judged if the center object or scene appeared more similar to flanking comparison figures that contain the same top versus same bottom. Experiment 1 used vertically information-balanced impoverished stimuli, either polygon objects or polygon-array scenes. Experiment 2 extended the triptych stimuli to naturalistic objects or scenes. Results generally support a VAB for object tops and scene bottoms that varies as a function of the informative aspects of visually attended stimuli. This pattern held for information-balanced objects but not scenes, however, with more ecologically valid naturalistic stimuli, VAB was large and robust, consistent with a vertical information imbalance that drives a generic downward vantage. Public Significance Statement: This study shows how a general visual perceptual tendency to attend to interactive space can lead to seemingly opposite stimulus-related biases, salience of tops of objects, but bottoms of scenes. Our findings integrate these biases and support that they are both consistent with a general downward vantage and a vertical attention bias toward the most useful interactive parts of our environment. This work has potential relevance to both perceptual theory and design applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how 7-month-old infants categorize graphical images varying in basic perceptual features by using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) task. Most participants were Caucasian and their parents had a higher education, but the family's socioeconomic background was mixed. Experiment 1 (N = 23) tested brain responses to configurational versus scrambled image sequences and found an oddball effect for both conditions, with configurational information leading to stronger neural responses. Experiment 2 explored the role of category learning for later FPVS performance: Group A (control; n = 22) participated in the FPVS categorization task only. Group B (fam; n = 21) was first familiarized with standard exemplars. Group C (fam + contrast; n = 29) was presented an additional exemplar of the contrasting category before the FPVS task. Electroencephalogram analyses revealed a decrease in Nc amplitude (measuring attention) throughout the familiarization phase. Long looking at the out-of-category exemplar in Group C indicated infants' visual interest. Brain responses in the subsequently presented FPVS were strong but did not differ between groups. This highlights the ability of the infant brain to organize perceptual input very rapidly without requiring familiarization but also points to the need for further studies exploring brain processes associated with infants' category learning and categorization at the brain level. Public Significance Statement: Within milliseconds, the brain of 7-month-old infants categorized artificial objects based on low-level perceptual features, but responses were stronger when additional configurational information was provided. A familiarization with the standard category led to neural adaptation and to visual interest in a subsequently presented out-of-category exemplar, but this experience did not affect categorization in a FPVS task, thus pointing to the need of more studies exploring the mechanisms underlying infant categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adults have a vertical attention bias (VAB) that directs their focus toward object tops and scene bottoms. This is consistent with focusing attention on the informative aspects and affordances of the environment, and generally favoring a downward gaze. The smaller size of children, combined with their relatively limited interactions with objects and scenes, could lead them to have diminished bias that only gradually develops. Alternatively, an early coupling of attention to action space could lead to VAB similar to adults. The current study investigates the developmental timeline of VAB, comparing 4–7-year-olds to adults. Participants (N = 50 children, 53 adults; 58% White, 22% Asian, 6% Black, 2% Native American, and 12% other) observed naturalistic photographic triptychs (48 objects, 52 scenes, all online). They made similarity judgments comparing a test figure to two flanking figures containing either the same top or same bottom. We found that (a) children and adults exhibit a common VAB for object tops and scene bottoms and (b) the adult bias is stronger than children's. Exploratory analyses revealed the same age trend within children, with VAB increasing with age, and asymptoting at the adult level at age 8. This demonstrates that despite age and body size differences that could make the environment for young children relatively disparate from adults, their perceptual system is already largely attuned to their individual interactive action space, with only minor continuing residual development. The findings support that, like adults, young children focus their attention on their action space and body level affordances, where they interact more with tops of objects and bottoms of scenes. Public Significance Statement: This study confirms that visual perceptual biases to favor attending to object tops and scene bottoms extend from adults to 4–7-year-olds children. The findings support that both groups attend more to their interactive space near their arms and legs, below eye height. This supports a common vertical attention bias coupled to a general downward vantage, largely independent of age, body size, and cognitive growth, which could help designers optimize learning environment layouts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transparency in research reporting is crucial for evaluating the reproducibility and validity of research, including potential confounding factors (internal validity) and generalizability (external validity). Here, we focus on visual stimuli—stimuli routinely used to elicit mental processes and behaviors—as a case study to systematically assess and evaluate current practices in reporting visual characteristics, including display setup, stimulus size, luminance/color, and contrast. Our first study scrutinized recent publications (N = 360) in leading journals in neuroscience and psychology—spanning vision, cognitive, clinical, developmental, and social/personality psychology. The second study examined recent publications (N = 114) on visual attentional bias in clinical samples, involving tasks known to be sensitive to visual properties. Analyzing the full text and supplemental materials of these articles, the two studies reveal a systematic lapse in current practices of reporting characteristics of visual stimuli. This reporting failure was not due to authors making visual materials available online, which was rare (<20%) and could not replace the reporting of visual characteristics. Failure to report stimulus properties hinders efforts to build cumulative science: (a) direct replications become challenging if not impossible; (b) internal validity may be compromised; and (c) generalizability across stimulus properties is prematurely assumed, and its evaluation is precluded in the first place. Our findings have immediate implications for journal policies on reporting practices, urging for explicit emphasis on transparent reporting of stimulus properties, particularly when perceptual components are involved. To assist in this effort, we provide templates for reporting study setup, visual displays, and visual stimuli. Public Significance Statement: Numerous editorials, writing guides, author guidelines, and manifestos for reproducible science have focused on the importance of transparency in data, code, and research materials. We identify a pervasive failure to report properties of visual stimuli in research in psychology and neuroscience—which may undermine research reproducibility and validity—and outline potential solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative, data-driven models for mental representations have long enjoyed popularity and success in psychology (e.g., distributional semantic models in the language domain), but have largely been missing for the visual domain. To overcome this, we present ViSpa (Vision Spaces), high-dimensional vector spaces that include vision-based representation for naturalistic images as well as concept prototypes. These vectors are derived directly from visual stimuli through a deep convolutional neural network trained to classify images and allow us to compute vision-based similarity scores between any pair of images and/or concept prototypes. We successfully evaluate these similarities against human behavioral data in a series of large-scale studies, including off-line judgments—visual similarity judgments for the referents of word pairs (Study 1) and for image pairs (Study 2), and typicality judgments for images given a label (Study 3)—as well as online processing times and error rates in a discrimination (Study 4) and priming task (Study 5) with naturalistic image material. ViSpa similarities predict behavioral data across all tasks, which renders ViSpa a theoretically appealing model for vision-based representations and a valuable research tool for data analysis and the construction of experimental material: ViSpa allows for precise control over experimental material consisting of images and/or words denoting imageable concepts and introduces a specifically vision-based similarity for word pairs. To make ViSpa available to a wide audience, this article (a) includes (video) tutorials on how to use ViSpa in R and (b) presents a user-friendly web interface at http://vispa.fritzguenther.de. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental trajectories. There is a limited understanding of how perceptual and cognitive development influences learning as prior studies have examined separate participants in a single modality. The current study presents a comprehensive assessment of category learning in 8–12-year-old children (12 female; 34 white, 1 Asian, 1 more than one race; M household income $85–$100 K) and 18–61-year-old adults (13 female; 32 white, 10 Black or African American, 4 Asian, 2 more than one race, 1 other; M household income $40–55 K) in a broad sample collected online from the United States. Across multiple sessions, participants learned categories across modalities (auditory, visual) that engage different learning systems (explicit, procedural). Unsurprisingly, adults outperformed children across all tasks. However, this enhanced performance was asymmetrical across categories and modalities. Adults far outperformed children in learning visual explicit categories and auditory procedural categories, with fewer differences across development for other types of categories. Adults' general benefit over children was due to enhanced information processing, while their superior performance for visual explicit and auditory procedural categories was associated with less cautious correct responses. These results demonstrate an interaction between perceptual and cognitive development that influences learning of categories that may correspond to the development of real-world skills such as speech perception and reading. Public Significance Statement: Category learning is a fundamental ability that supports complex processes across modalities and across the lifespan. We investigate learning of auditory and visual categories in 8–12-year-old children and adults. Categories that relate to real-world learning challenges children encounter in speech perception and reading are learned much better in adults than children and are associated with distinct decision processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our visual system possesses a remarkable ability to extract summary statistical information from groups of similar objects, known as ensemble perception. It remains elusive whether the processing of ensemble statistics exerts influences on our perceptual decision-making and what roles consciousness and attention play in this process. In a series of experiments, we demonstrated that the processing of ensemble statistics can exert significant modulation effects on our perceptual decision-making, which is independent of consciousness but relies on attentional resources. More intriguingly, the conscious and unconscious ensemble representations respectively induce repulsive and attractive modulation effects, with the unconscious effect susceptible to the temporal separation and the distinction between the inducers and the targets. These results not only suggest that the conscious and unconscious ensemble representations engage different visual processing mechanisms but also highlight the distinct roles of consciousness and attention in ensemble perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested 6- and 8-month-old White and non-White infants (N = 53 total, 28 girls) from Northern California in a visual search task to determine whether a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous display (a singleton) attracts attention because it is a unique singleton and "pops out" in a categorical manner, or whether attention instead varies in a graded manner on the basis of quantitative differences in physical salience. Infants viewed arrays of four or six items; one item was a singleton and the other items were identical distractors (e.g., a single cookie and three identical toy cars). At both ages, infants looked to the singletons first more often, were faster to look at singletons, and looked longer at singletons. However, when a computational model was used to quantify the relative salience of the singleton in each display—which varied widely among the different singleton-distractor combinations—we found a strong, graded effect of physical salience on attention and no evidence that singleton status per se influenced attention. In addition, consistent with other research on attention in infancy, the effect of salience was stronger for 6-month-old infants than for 8-month-old infants. Taken together, these results show that attention-getting and attention-holding in infancy vary continuously with quantitative variations in physical salience rather than depending in a categorical manner on whether an item is unique. Public Significance Statement: This study shows that how infants focus their attention is influenced by several different factors, including the infants' age and the characteristics of images (such as color and brightness). These results help us understand how infants process visual information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors is presented (previewed) before a second set that contains the target item. Preview search is more efficient than if all items are presented simultaneously, suggesting that temporally "old" objects can be ignored (the preview benefit). In two experiments, we examined the developmental trajectory for time-based visual selection in a sample of 192 6-, 8-, and 12-year-old children (49% female, predominantly White), with adults as controls (75% female, predominantly White), in the United Kingdom. The results showed an absence of the ability to ignore previewed moving distractors in 6-year-olds and confirmed its presence from 8 years of age. However, full development of this ability, which includes maintaining inhibition of previewed items over extended periods, was only present from the age of 12. Individual differences in executive functions, namely inhibition, were associated with preview search efficiency in 6-year-olds and adults. Overall, the results suggest a developmental trajectory in the ability to ignore moving old objects that occurs in two stages and develops later than the ability to ignore previewed stationary objects. The results are discussed in terms of underlying inhibitory mechanisms, in addition to individual differences in the expression of this ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing attention skills allow children to parse their complex world by orienting to a subset of especially salient or meaningful inputs. Infants and children are biased to orient to faces and have difficulty ignoring faces when they appear as distractors. Although these past findings suggest that faces are more salient than nonsocial stimuli, it is unclear whether specific types of faces capture attention to a greater extent than others. Caregiver faces are one of the most prevalent and socially motivating stimuli in infants' and children's environments, suggesting that they may be biased to orient to caregiver faces to a greater extent than faces in general. Forty-six 6- to 10-year-old children across the United States and Canada completed an online attention capture task in which participants searched for a target within arrays containing multiple distractors. During some trials, either a stranger or the child's caregiver's face appeared as one of the distractors. Children showed consistently poorer performance (i.e., increased omission errors, poorer accuracy, and slower response times) when the caregiver face appeared as a distractor, especially during trials in which the target was present and within larger search arrays. These increased performance costs indicate an enhanced orienting bias to caregiver faces, which may reflect increased motivational salience of these faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has long been interest in how the mind represents numerical magnitude, particularly in the absence of symbols. For humans and nonhuman animals, number represents a core dimension of perceptual experience by which objects in the physical world are delineated. The physical world is also well characterized by other dimensions, many of which covary with number. Yet, the general consensus is that number is perceived independently of other magnitudes that co-occur with it. Here, we present evidence against the independence of number perception. In particular, we use evidence from neuroimaging, computational modeling, visual illusions, and psychophysics to introduce a novel theory of visual number encoding, wherein nonnumerical magnitude information such as cumulative surface area is encoded along with number and sustained throughout visual perception. Moreover, we propose that the experience of number per se reflects the readout of a multidimensional (i.e., integral) representation vis-à-vis selective attention, not the independent encoding of number. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental disorders in adults with intellectual disability (ID) occur at rates much higher than in those without ID; however, many clinicians report little to no training in providing clinical services to this population. Due to the historically qualitative nature of the most literature in this field, it has been difficult for clinicians to identify appropriate accommodations and assessments to make treatment more accessible to those with ID. The objective of this scoping review was to identify psychotherapy practices for adults with ID in the areas of treatment accommodations and outcome measures/treatment monitoring tools. In the absence of treatment guidelines for this population, practices were drawn from treatment outcome research. Research reports describing treatment for this population were examined to identify the types of accommodations and practices employed by clinical research scientists when delivering psychotherapy. Specific practices, accommodations and tools are suggested based on the available research. The most common type of intervention was cognitive behavior therapy (i.e., 48.1%). Key aspects of accommodations to treatment included incorporating self-determination, the use of simplified language, visual supports, involving caregivers, and teaching prerequisite skills. This review details the accommodations and provides some practical suggestions and resources for clinicians when providing psychotherapy to adults with ID. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A foundational assumption of human communication is that speakers should say as much as necessary, but no more. Yet, people routinely produce redundant adjectives and their propensity to do so varies crosslinguistically. Here, we propose a computational theory, whereby speakers create referential expressions designed to facilitate listeners' reference resolution, as they process words in real time. We present a computational model of our account, the Incremental Collaborative Efficiency (ICE) model, which generates referential expressions by considering listeners' real-time incremental processing and reference identification. We apply the ICE framework to physical reference, showing that listeners construct expressions designed to minimize listeners' expected visual search effort during online language processing. Our model captures a number of known effects in the literature, including cross-linguistic differences in speakers' propensity to over-specify. Moreover, the ICE model predicts graded acceptability judgments with quantitative accuracy, systematically outperforming an alternative, brevity-based model. Our findings suggest that physical reference production is best understood as driven by a collaborative goal to help the listener identify the intended referent, rather than by an egocentric effort to minimize utterance length. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People readily generalize knowledge to novel domains and stimuli. We present a theory, instantiated in a computational model, based on the idea that cross-domain generalization in humans is a case of analogical inference over structured (i.e., symbolic) relational representations. The model is an extension of the Learning and Inferencewith Schemas andAnalogy (LISA; Hummel&Holyoak, 1997, 2003) and Discovery of Relations by Analogy (DORA; Doumas et al., 2008) models of relational inference and learning. The resulting model learns both the content and format (i.e., structure) of relational representations from nonrelational inputswithout supervision, when augmented with the capacity for reinforcement learning it leverages these representations to learn about individual domains, and then generalizes to new domains on the first exposure (i.e., zero-shot learning) via analogical inference. We demonstrate the capacity of the model to learn structured relational representations from a variety of simple visual stimuli, and to perform cross-domain generalization between video games (Breakout and Pong) and between several psychological tasks. We demonstrate that the model's trajectory closely mirrors the trajectory of children as they learn about relations, accounting for phenomena from the literature on the development of children's reasoning and analogy making. The model's ability to generalize between domains demonstrates the flexibility afforded by representing domains in terms of their underlying relational structure, rather than simply in terms of the statistical relations between their inputs and outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across a broad range of stimulus types and tasks (16 stimulus types × 26 tasks, 1,744 observers in total), the present study employed an individual-item differences analysis to extract the factors of visual-attentional processing. Three orthogonal factors were identified and they can be summarized as an FVS 2.0 framework: featural, visual, and spatial strengths. Apart from one exception (low-level motion), the FVS 2.0 framework accounts for the vast majority (95.4%) of the variances in the 25 tasks. Therefore, the three straightforward factors provide a unifying framework for understanding the relationship between stimulus types as well as those between tasks. Combining these and other related results, the role of preattentive features seems to be rather different from the traditional view: visual features are general purpose, exclusive, innate, constancy based, and keyword like.A general-purpose, exclusive, innate, constancy-based and keyword-like (GEICK) conjecture is proposed which suggests that the features are conscious-level keywords generated by the specific brain area of V4 and/or IT and then used by all other brain areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is inconsistent evidence that human bodies are processed through holistic processing as it has been widely reported for faces. To assess how configurai and holistic processes may develop with age, we administered a visual body recognition task assessing the presence of body inversion and composite illusion effects to white adults (114 participants, 77 women, aged between 18 and 35 years) and children (138 participants, 74 girls, aged between 6 and 11 years). Furthermore, to verify the presence of an own-age bias in body processing, we presented either child or adult bodies to both age groups. Adults and children showed reliable and comparable body inversion and composite illusion effects, confirming the use of configurai and holistic body processing. Cross-sectional analysis showed that these perceptual strategies were already reliable in children aged 6-7 years and did not encounter significant changes across childhood. Although we found reliable body inversion and composite illusion effects for both own- and different-age bodies, results pointed to greater composite illusion effects for own-age bodies. This may suggest that sharing similar body structures might facilitate the holistic processing of others' bodies. These findings provide new insights into the development of body-specific perceptual processes and may have theoretical and clinical implications for the evaluation and treatment of body perception disorders in childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inattentional blindness (IB), the failure to notice something right in front of you, offers cognitive scientists and practitioners alike a unique means of studying the nature of visual perception. The present meta-analysis sought to provide the first synthesis of the two leading theories of IB—attention set and load theory. We aimed to estimate the magnitude of the effect of each, how they interact, and how task parameters moderate the magnitude of IB summary estimates. We further sought to address several theoretical issues that have persisted within this broad literature. A total of 317 effect sizes from 81 studies that had manipulated attention set or load were synthesized in a multilevel meta-analysis. Results indicated no significant difference between the attention set summary estimate (odds ratio [OR] = 3.26, 95% confidence interval [95% CI] [2.33, 4.57]) and the load summary estimate (OR = 1.75, 95% CI [1.10, 2.79]). Theoretical moderators included a difference between feature attention sets (OR = 5.02, 95% CI [2.95, 8.55]), semantic attention sets (OR = 2.64, 95% CI [1.64, 4.25]), and inherent sets (OR = 1.90, 95% CI [1.35, 2.68]), while perceptual load (OR = 2.55, 95% CI [1.66, 3.92]) and cognitive load (OR = 1.67, 95% CI [1.14, 2.44]) were more comparable. The primary task was found as a key task parameter that moderated summary estimates. The attention set summary estimate was moderated by the number of targets and distractors, whereas the load summary estimate was moderated by the full attention (FA) trial exclusion criterion. Analyses indicated any potential publication bias were overall not likely to impact our conclusions. We discuss the implications of results for a conceptual understanding of IB and how the phenomenon can be more reliably studied in future. Public Significance Statement: Most of us experience inattentional blindness every day, sometimes as trivial errors like failing to notice a grammatical error in a passage of text. Other times, the phenomenon poses more serious concerns, such as missing a pedestrian while driving. The importance of studying inattentional blindness is therefore clear—not only can it tell us something about how the mind and brain work, but it can help inform interventions for the lapses in attention that occur in everyday life. Our analysis examines the two leading theories of inattentional blindness and finds that the most critical component in explaining why the phenomenon occurs is seemingly the relevance of the information to the observer. Our work emphasizes that more research is needed to unpack how these theories interact, as well as how inattentional blindness may be shaped by situational factors such as time and task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eyewitness identifications play a key role in the justice system, but eyewitnesses can make errors, often with profound consequences. We used findings from basic science and innovative technologies to develop and test whether a novel interactive lineup procedure, wherein witnesses can rotate and dynamically view the lineup faces from different angles, improves witness discrimination accuracy compared with a widely used procedure in laboratories and police forces around the world—the static frontal-pose photo lineup. No novel procedure has previously been shown to improve witness discrimination accuracy. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 220) identified culprits from sequentially presented interactive lineups or static frontal-pose photo lineups. In Experiment 2, participants (N = 8,507) identified culprits from interactive lineups that were either presented sequentially, simultaneously wherein the faces could be moved independently, or simultaneously wherein the faces moved jointly into the same angle. Sequential interactive lineups enhanced witness discrimination accuracy compared with static photo lineups, and simultaneous interactive lineups enhanced witness discrimination accuracy compared with sequential interactive lineups. These finding were true both when participants viewed suspects who were of the same or different ethnicity/race as themselves. Our findings exemplify how basic science can be used to address the important applied policy issue on how best to conduct a police lineup and reduce eyewitness errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Words influence cognition well before infants know their meanings. For example, three-month-olds are more likely to form visually based categories when exemplars are paired with spoken words than with sine-wave tones, a likely precursor to learning symbolic relations between words and their referents. However, it is unclear why words have these effects. In 3 experiments we tested the hypothesis that exaggerated "showing" gestures used when naming objects, and the resultant cross-modal synchrony between a name and object motion. can affect object categorization. Participants were 119 3-month-old infants (56 were female and 63 were male). According to caregiver report, the sample was composed of European American (N = 114) Black (N = 6), Hispanic (N = 2) and multiracial (N = 6) infants. Participants were growing up predominantly in homes with at least I parent who completed a college education or a higher degree (80%), and the remaining 20% completed high school. After replicating evidence that words and tones have different effects on categorization, we found that prefamiliarizing infants with tone-object synchrony leads tones to influence categorization as words do. Moreover, we found that concentrated experience with word-object synchrony enhances the effects that words themselves have on categorization. Thus, temporal structure within caregivers' communicative behaviors may lead words to facilitate categorization, and ultimately to aid in forming symbolic representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual metacognition is the ability to evaluate one's performance on visual perceptual tasks. The field of visual metacognition unites the long tradition of visual psychophysics with the younger field of metacognition research. This article traces the historical roots of the field and reviews progress in the areas of (a) constructing appropriate measures of metacognitive ability, (b) developing computational models, and (c) revealing the neural correlates of visual metacognition. First, I review the most popular measures of metacognitive ability with an emphasis on their psychophysical properties. Second, I examine the empirical targets for modeling, the dominant modeling frameworks and the assumed computations underlying visual metacognition. Third, I explore the progress on understanding the neural correlates of visual metacognition by focusing on anatomical and functional studies, as well as causal manipulations. What emerges is a picture of substantial progress on constructing measures, developing models, and revealing the neural correlates of metacognition, but very little integration between these three areas of inquiry. I then explore the deep, intrinsic links between the three areas of research and argue that continued progress requires the recognition and exploitation of these links. Throughout, I discuss the implications of progress in visual metacognition for other areas of metacognition research, and pinpoint specific advancements that could be adopted by researchers working in other subfields of metacognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography of Michael J. Arcaro, a recipient of an award for distinguished scientific career contributions to psychology who began his academic career at Boston University, where he pursued a dual degree in psychology and philosophy, is presented. Arcaro started as a research assistant in Dr. Sabine Kastner' laboratory at Princeton University. He also had the privilege to work with Dr. Margaret Livingstone as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School.

Observers experience complex patterns of visual motion in daily life due to their own movements through space, the movement of objects, and the geometry of surfaces in the visible world. Motion information shapes behavior and brain activity beginning in infancy. And yet most prior behavioral research has focused on how children process only one type, linear motion, leaving largely unexplored how children respond to radial or rotational motion patterns that co-occur with linear motion in everyday visual experience. This study examined how children and adults detect linear and radial motion patterns corrupted by a range of noise levels. Five to eight-year-old children (n = 25, 16 females; 76% White, 4% Asian, 16% more than one, 4% unknown) and young adults (n = 29, 15 females; 83.33% White, 16.67% Asian) viewed pairs of radial and linear motion displays mixed with random noise at one of two speeds (2 deg/s or 8 deg/s). Participants selected the display with coherent motion. Children and adults showed higher accuracy (percent correct) to radial versus linear motion patterns. Children had higher accuracy to the faster speed, while adults showed the opposite pattern. Adults showed better performance than children in all conditions. Exploratory analyses showed that male children had higher accuracy than their female peers. We conclude that motion processing develops in childhood with separable developmental trajectories for the processing of slow and fast visual motion, and that while further investigation is warranted, sex differences in motion processing found in young and older adults may begin in middle childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dichotomy between explicit and implicit theory of mind remains controversial. This study proposed a developmental and social-constructionist perspective that challenges this notion through a model showing that coordination of perspectives (CoP) is a continuously developing ability in children. Our tested model comprises eight distinct abilities that emerge sequentially. We tested our model using 25 different tasks in a longitudinal six-wave study with 300 native Polish children aged from 1 year (MT1 = 1 year 0 months; SDT1 = 1.73 weeks; 44% girls) to 3.5 years (MT6 = 3 years 6 months; SDT6 = 1.81 weeks; 45% girls). All children were Caucasian; both parents of 54% children had university degree. Structural equation modeling with factor scores for each of the eight abilities was used to verify the fit of obtained data. We provide preliminary support for distinguishing six abilities: (a) immediate social perspective-tracking and taking at age of 1 year, (b) deferred social perspective-tracking and visual perspective-taking as an intermediate step at age of 2 years, and (c) epistemic perspective-tracking and taking at 3.5 years. Using our new nomenclature-emphasizing the function of coordination of own and another person perspective in social situations-we found that development of mindreading begins when infants coordinate their bodily-expressed orientations with those of others, and by the age of 4 is manifested by coordinating own and others mental states. Thus, we support the idea of heterotypic continuity of mindreading development. Development of CoP and difference between perspective-tracking and taking should be further elucidated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participants ranging in age from 3 to 98 years (N = 708; approximately 60% female; 49% Caucasian, 38% Asian; 12% Other ethnicities, 1% Indigenous; modal household income > $80,000) completed a battery of tasks involving verbal ability, executive function, and perspective-taking. Wherever possible, all participants completed the same version of a task. The current study tested hindsight bias and false-belief reasoning to determine how these constructs relate to each other across the child-to-adult life span. Participants of all ages showed robust hindsight bias and false-belief reasoning errors. Hindsight bias followed a U-shaped function, wherein preschoolers and older adults showed more hindsight bias than older children and younger adults. False-belief reasoning, conversely, was relatively constant from preschool to older adulthood. Hindsight bias did not correlate with false-belief reasoning. We conclude that hindsight bias and false-belief reasoning errors are robust but unrelated cognitive biases across the life span. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This award recognizes a distinguished career and enduring contribution to applications of psychology. Frederick Morrison, PhD, is recognized for pioneering research linking psychology and education. He was one of the first psychologists to utilize the information-processing approach to study childhood reading disorders, demonstrating that dyslexic children do not suffer primarily from a visual-perceptual deficit but from a language-based phonological coding problem. He discovered and exploited a natural experiment, termed school cutoff, to study the causal impact of early schooling on children's language, cognitive, social, and academic skills. His findings confirmed the critical role of instructional practices on children's growth but also that the most effective instruction varied with the skill level of the child. Based on these insights, with colleague Carol Connor, Morrison developed and implemented an intervention to individualize student instruction, confirming that children benefit from different types of instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describing, analyzing, and explaining patterns in eye movement behavior is crucial for understanding visual perception. Further, eye movements are increasingly used in informing cognitive processmodels. In this article, we start by reviewing basic characteristics and desiderata for models of eye movements. Specifically, we argue that there is a need for models combining spatial and temporal aspects of eye-tracking data (i.e., fixation durations and fixation locations), that formal models derived from concrete theoretical assumptions are needed to inform our empirical research, and custom statistical models are useful for detecting specific empirical phenomena that are to be explained by said theory. In this article, we develop a conceptual model of eye movements, or specifically, fixation durations and fixation locations, and from it derive a formal statistical model--meeting our goal of crafting a model useful in both the theoretical and empirical research cycle. We demonstrate the use of the model on an example of infant natural scene viewing, to show that the model is able to explain different features of the eye movement data, and to showcase how to identify that the model needs to be adapted if it does not agree with the data. We conclude with discussion of potential future avenues for formal eye movement models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We extend decades of research on infants' visual processing by examining their eye gaze during viewing of natural scenes. We examined the eye movements of a racially diverse group of 4- to 12-month-old infants (N = 54; 27 boys; 24 infants were White and not Hispanic, 30 infants were African American, Asian American, mixed race and/or Hispanic) as they viewed images selected from the MIT Saliency Benchmark Project. In general, across this age range infants' fixation distributions became more consistent and more adult-like, suggesting that infants' fixations in natural scenes become increasingly more systematic. Evaluation of infants' fixation patterns with saliency maps generated by different models of physical salience revealed that although over this age range there was an increase in the correlations between infants' fixations and saliency, the amount of variance accounted for by salience actually decreased. At the youngest age, the amount of variance accounted for by salience was very similar to the consistency between infants' fixations, suggesting that the systematicity in these youngest infants' fixations was explained by their attention to physically salient regions. By 12 months, in contrast, the consistency between infants was greater than the variance accounted for by salience, suggesting that the systematicity in older infants' fixations reftected more than their attention to physically salient regions. Together these results show that infants' fixations when viewing natural scenes becomes more systematic and predictable, and that predictability is due to their attention to features other than physical salience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the approach/avoidance training (AAT) effect has focused on its evaluative consequences (with approached stimuli evaluated as more positive than avoided ones). Building on a grounded cognition framework, we investigated AAT effects on the visual representation of stimuli (here, neutral faces). We formulated specific predictions regarding the facial features that should be the most biased and the conditions under which the effect should be the strongest. We tested these predictions in five preregistered experiments using a reverse correlation paradigm. In Experiments 1–2, the facial representations resulting from an AAT looked more "approachable" and "avoidable," respectively. Specifically, we observed more bias on facial traits related to approach/avoidance (e.g., trustworthiness) than on traits less relevant for these actions (e.g., cleverness). Experiment 2 additionally tested the unique contribution of both approach and avoidance as compared to control actions. Experiments 3A–4 showed that this effect depends on experiencing the AAT (compared to the mere instructions of approach/avoidance) and on the sensory aspects of approach/avoidance that are mimicked in the AAT. Finally, Experiment 5 supported the idea that the AAT effect still emerges in the absence of explicit instructions of approach/avoidance (i.e., by only leaving the sensory aspects of approach/avoidance). The present research enriches the literature by revealing AAT effects that extend beyond mere evaluative consequences to the visual representation of the target stimuli. Our results also inform existing theoretical views on AAT effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are able to compare intensities across different sorts of stimuli, like in matching the brightness of visual stimuli of different hue, or the loudness of auditory stimuli of different spectral shapes. We can even match the brightness of a visual stimulus to the loudness of a tone, and vice versa. The termcross-dimensionalmatching is used to subsume these kinds of intra- and cross-modal tasks. The often replicated regression effect in crossdimensional matching relates to the observation that the intensity of whatever stimulus is adjusted exhibits a tendency toward some mean magnitude, which is interpreted as serving as an internal reference. Internal references, however, are not part of psychophysical theory in the tradition of Stevens. They form a key ingredient for the theory of global psychophysics initiated by R. Duncan Luce, which also makes explicit Stevens' assumption of an underlying ratio scale of perceived intensity towhich all sensations map, and renders it empirically testable. The present article generalizes Luce's theory of cross-dimensional magnitude production (Luce et al., 2010) to integrate potentially role-dependent internal references (pertaining to the standard, or the adjusted stimulus) as suggested by the regression effect. Reconsidering available empirical evidence for magnitude production and matching experiments in the light of these theoretical developments leads to a coherent picture. The results indicate that internal references are role-dependent in cross-dimensional tasks (intra- or cross-modal), but role-independent in intra-dimensional tasks. Moreover, predictions derived from the generalized theory provide a close fit to classical matching data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many middle-school students struggle with basic reading skills. One reason for this might be a lack of automaticity in word-level lexical processes. To investigate this, we used a novel backward masking paradigm, in which a written word is either covered with a mask or not. Participants (N = 444 [after exclusions]; nfemale = 264, nmale = 180) were average to struggling middle-school students from an urban area in Eastern Iowa that were all native speakers of English and were roughly equally from grades 6, 7, and 8 (average age: 13 years). Two-hundred-fifty-five students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for economic disadvantage. Participants completed different masked and unmasked task versions where they read a word and selected a response (e.g., a pictured referent). This was related to standardized measures of decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension. Decoding was uniquely predicted by knowledge (unmasked performance), whereas fluency was uniquely predicted by automaticity (masked performance). Automaticity was stable across two testing points. Thus, automaticity should be considered an individually reliable marker/reading trait that uniquely predicts some skills in average to struggling middle-school students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of correlational research has revealed systematic relationships between various aspects of visuospatial processing and representational drawing ability. However, very few studies have sought to examine the longitudinal development of the relation between drawing and visuospatial ability. The current investigation explored change in drawing and visuospatial skill in art students taking a foundational drawing course (N = 42) in a longitudinal design. Measures of representational drawing skill, dispositional traits, and visuospatial skill were taken at three time points over the course of 5 months. The findings reveal improvements in representational drawing, mental rotation, disembedding figures, and attentional switching. However, individual differences in change over time on one task did not predict change in another, revealing implications for domain-specific and domain-general aspects of art and design expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers of aesthetics universally agree that visual and auditory stimuli may be considered beautiful. Divergently, controversy greets the question "Can olfactory or gustatory experiences be conceptualized as beautiful?" In Study 1 participants inhaled Joy® perfume applied to a cotton pad for 30 s and immediately completed the AESTHEMOS (Schindler et al., 2017), a scale measuring aesthetic emotions. Results indicated stronger prototypical (feeling of beauty and liking, fascination, being moved, and awe), pleasing (joy, humor, vitality, energy, and relaxation), and epistemic (surprise, interest, intellectual challenge, and insight) aesthetic emotions, and fewer negative aesthetic emotions (feeling of ugliness, boredom, confusion, anger, uneasiness, and sadness), were elicited by the perfume compared with a no-scent control condition. Results showed 36% of participants found some beauty in the perfume experience. Study 2 showed significantly higher prototypical and pleasing aesthetic emotions, and less negative aesthetic emotions were stimulated by a Werther's caramel candy compared with a control condition (an unflavored sugar cube); and 45% of participants found some beauty in the taste. In both studies the findings were unrelated to participants' levels of trait appreciation of beauty, as measured by the Engagement with Beauty Scale—Revised (EBS-R; Diessner, Pohling, Stacy, & Güsewell, 2018). In Study 3 we found that when the EBS-R predicted the response to an artwork, it did not predict gustatory beauty; and when the EBS-R predicted olfactory beauty, it did not predict the beauty of an artwork. Thus, the general trait of appreciating beauty, as measured by the EBS-R, may not extend to olfactory or gustatory beauty. The results are discussed in the context of philosophical approaches and empirical aesthetic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While known to influence visual lexical processing, the semantic information we associate with words has recently been found to influence auditory lexical processing as well. The present work explored the influence of semantic richness in auditory lexical decision. Study 1 recreated an experiment investigating semantic richness effects in concrete nouns (Goh et al., 2016). In Study 2, we expanded the stimulus set from 442 to 8,626 items, exploring the robustness of effects observed in Study 1 against a larger data set with increased diversity in both word class and other characteristics of interest. We also utilized generalized additive mixed models to investigate potential nonlinear effects. Results indicate that semantic richness effects become more nuanced and detectable when a wider set of items belonging to different parts of speech is examined. Findings are discussed in the context of models of spoken word recognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Perceptual learning (PL) can significantly improve human performance in perceptual tasks primarily through template reweighting. Previous studies have documented how PL changes perceptual template in stimulus feature space. We investigated how PL reweights visual information in time. With a dynamic external noise paradigm and the elaborated perceptual template model (ePTM) analysis, we found that training with an orientation identification task in the zero external noise condition reduced contrast thresholds in both zero and high external noise conditions, whereas training in the high external noise condition only reduced contrast thresholds in high external noise conditions. The ePTM analysis showed that training in both zero and high external noise changed the overall amplitude, but not the shape of the temporal window of the perceptual template to exclude external noise across time, and training in zero external noise additionally reduced additive internal noise. Our results provided additional constraints for models of PL. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Prior evidence demonstrates that relative to younger adults, older human adults exhibit attentional biases toward positive and/or away from negative socioaffective stimuli (i.e., the age-related positivity effect). Whether or not the effect is phylogenetically conserved is currently unknown and its biopsychosocial origins are debated. To address this gap, we evaluated how visual processing of socioaffective stimuli differs in aged, compared to middle-aged, rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta ) using eye tracking in two experimental designs that are directly comparable to those historically used for evaluating attentional biases in humans. Results of our study demonstrate that while younger rhesus possesses robust attentional biases toward threatening pictures of conspecifics' faces, aged animals evidence no such bias. Critically, these biases emerged only when threatening faces were paired with neutral and not ostensibly "positive" faces, suggesting social context modifies the effect. Results of our study suggest that the evolutionarily shared mechanisms drive age-related decline in visual biases toward negative stimuli in aging across primate species. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Investigating cues that underpin perceptual judgments of interpersonal coordination has important implications for understanding sociocognitive evaluations of the quality of human interactions. With a focus on musical interpersonal coordination, we conducted 2 experiments investigating the impact of music style, modality of stimulus presentation, rater expertise, and audio/visual stimulus features on ratings of perceived synchrony in improvised duo performances. In the first experiment, participants made synchrony ratings following 10-s excerpts of musical performances, whereas in the second experiment, participants rated longer (up to 1 min) excerpts continuously as the music unfolded. Several consistent results emerged across the 2 experiments, including that participants perceived standard jazz improvisations featuring a regular beat as significantly more synchronous than free improvisations that aimed to eschew the induction of such a beat. However, ratings of perceived synchrony were more similar across these 2 styles when only the visual information from the performance was available, suggesting that performers' bodily cues functioned similarly to communicate and coordinate musical intentions. Computational analysis of the audio and visual aspects of the performances indicated that synchrony ratings increased with increases in audio event density and when coperformers engaged in periodic movements at similar frequencies, whereas the salience of visual information increased when synchrony ratings were made continuously over longer timescales. These studies reveal new insights about the correspondence between objective and subjective measures of synchrony and contribute methodological advances indicating both parallels and divergences between the results obtained in paradigms utilizing global versus continuous ratings of musical synchrony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]