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The ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in the enforcement of national public health safety measures including precautionary behaviours such as border closures, movement restrictions, total or partial lockdowns, social distancing, and face mask mandates in order to reduce the spread of this disease. The current study uses affective priming, an indirect behavioural measure of implicit attitude, to evaluate COVID-19 attitudes. Explicitly, participants rated their overall risk perception associated with contracting COVID-19 significantly lower compared to their perception of necessary precautions and overall adherence to public health measures. During baseline trials, participants explicitly rated COVID-19 affiliated words as unpleasant, similar to traditional unpleasant word stimuli. Despite rating the COVID-19 affiliated words as unpleasant, affective priming was not observed for congruent prime-target COVID-19 affiliated word pairs when compared to congruent prime-target pleasant and unpleasant words. Overall, these results provide quantitative evidence that COVID-19 affiliated words do not invoke the same implicit attitude response as traditional pleasant and unpleasant word stimuli, despite conscious explicit rating of the COVID-19 words as unpleasant. This reduction in unpleasant attitude towards COVID-19 related words may contribute towards decreased fear-related behaviours and increased incidences of risky-behaviour facilitating the movement of the virus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Passive rotation has been shown to alter temporal-order judgments for tactile stimuli delivered to the hands giving an advantage to the leading hand. Here we measure thresholds for detecting stimulus onset asynchrony for touches on the hands during tilt to the left or right and during galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) that evoked illusory tilt. During tilt to one side, the effect of gravity on the otoliths is equivalent to a physical acceleration away from that side (e.g., tilt left is equivalent to accelerating rightwards). We therefore predicted a “leading hand advantage” for the hand opposite to the tilt direction. Thresholds for detecting asynchronicity for left-hand-first and right-hand-first touches (defined as correct detection 75% of the time) were measured separately using interleaved adaptive staircases for 15 participants. For both physical and illusory tilt there was a temporal advantage for stimuli presented to the hand contralateral to the tilt—equivalent to the “leading hand” during passive rotation. That is, there was a temporal advantage for the upward hand (for physical tilt) and for the anodal-side hand (for illusory tilt caused by GVS). These results are discussed in terms of attention and direct sensory components evoking the “leading hand” bias. These findings add to the emerging understanding of the pervasive role of vestibular activity in many aspects of cognitive processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating vision and hearing is an important way in which we process our rich sensory environment. Partial deprivation of the visual system from the loss of one eye early in life results in adaptive changes in the remaining senses (e.g., Hoover et al. in Exp Brain Res 216:565-74, 2012). The current study investigates whether losing one eye early in life impacts the temporal window in which audiovisual events are integrated and whether there is vulnerability to the sound-induced flash illusion. In Experiment 1, we measured the temporal binding window with a simultaneity judgement task where low-level auditory and visual stimuli were presented at different stimulus onset asynchronies. People with one eye did not differ in the width of their temporal binding window, but they took longer to make judgements compared to binocular viewing controls. In Experiment 2, we measured how many light flashes were perceived when a single flash was paired with multiple auditory beeps in close succession (sound induced flash illusion). Unlike controls, who perceived multiple light flashes with two, three or four beeps, people with one eye were not susceptible to the sound-induced flash illusion. In addition, they took no longer to respond compared to both binocular and monocular (eye-patched) viewing controls. Taken together, these results suggest that the lack of susceptibility to the sound-induced flash illusion in people with one eye cannot be accounted for by the width of the temporal binding window. These results provide evidence for adaptations in audiovisual integration due to the reduction of visual input from the loss of one eye early in life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]