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The FedEx logo makes clever use of figure-ground ambiguity to create an "invisible" arrow in the background space between "E" and "x". Most designers believe the hidden arrow can convey an unconscious impression of speed and precision about the FedEx brand, which may influence subsequent behavior. To test this assumption, we designed similar images with hidden arrows to serve as endogenous (but camouflaged) directional cues in a Posner's orienting task, where a cueing effect would suggest subliminal processing of the hidden arrow. Overall, we observed no cue congruency effect, unless the arrow is explicitly highlighted (Experiment 4). However, there was a general effect of prior knowledge: when people were under pressure to suppress background information, those who knew about the arrow could do so faster in all congruence conditions (i.e., neutral, congruent, incongruent), although they fail to report seeing the arrow during the experiment. This was true in participants from North America who had heard of the FedEx arrow before (Experiment 1 & 3), and also in our Taiwanese sample who were just informed of such design (Experiment 2). These results can be well explained by the Biased Competition Model in figure-ground research, and together suggest: (1) people do not unconsciously perceive the FedEx arrow, at least not enough to exhibit a cueing effect in attention, but (2) knowing about the arrow can fundamentally change the way we visually process these negative-space logos in the future, making people react faster to images with negative space regardless of the hidden content.

Despite numerous investigations of the prevalence effect on medical image perception, little research has been done to examine the effect of expertise, and its possible interaction with prevalence. In this study, medical practitioners were instructed to detect the presence of hip fracture in 50 X-ray images with either high prevalence (N[subscript signal] = 40) or low prevalence (N[subscript signal] = 10). Results showed that compared to novices (e.g., pediatricians, dentists, neurologists), the manipulation of prevalence shifted participant's criteria in a different direction for experts who perform hip fracture diagnosis on a daily basis. That is, when prevalence rate is low (p[subscript fracture-present] = 0.2), experts held more conservative criteria in answering "fracture-present," whereas novices were more likely to believe there was fracture. Importantly, participants' detection discriminability did not vary by the prevalence condition. In addition, all participants were more conservative with "fracture-present" responses when task difficulty increased. We suspect the apparent opposite criteria shift between experts and novices may have come from medical training that made novices to believe that a miss would result in larger cost compared to false positive, or because they failed to update their prior belief about the signal prevalence in the task, both would suggest that novices and experts may have different beliefs in placing the optimal strategy in the hip fracture diagnosis. Our work can contribute to medical education training as well as other applied clinical diagnosis that aims to mitigate the prevalence effect.

Visual statistical learning (VSL) occurs when participants are exposed to spatially or temporally ordered stimuli, and become increasingly sensitive to them without explicitly realizing the hidden regularities. In the temporal domain of VSL, participants are usually exposed to shape-triplets, followed by the use of familiarity judgments and recognition tasks to directly probe VSL. Other methods, such as the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task, indirectly probe the learning of temporal sequences, and provide evidence of learning within the triplets. Despite the RSVP's success, however, previous implementations of the RSVP task have only pseudorandomized the triplets to form the test sequence, such that the task permits only two stream locations for a given target shape (belonging to a certain within-triplet position), out of six available locations. These fixed locations may result in confounded response time (RT) findings and potentially lead to an overestimation of a weak (or nonexistent) VSL effect. In this study, we conduct 4 experiments and show that the previously reported VSL effect in RSVP is eliminated when the RSVP stream is fully counterbalanced (Experiment 1), and resurfaces again when the RSVP stream returns to its original pseudorandomized design (Experiment 2). Importantly, in both, we observe a "stream location effect," where RT gradually becomes faster to reflect the hazard rate of target appearance, which may have been the factor driving previously reported VSL effects. Follow-up experiments show that results from Experiment 1 are not due to the absence of implicit learning (Experiment 3), although the stream location effect can occur without any learning, suggesting that it is something inherent to the RSVP task (Experiment 4). Together, these results identify an influential effect, the stream location effect, inherently present in the RSVP task, and show how misinforming the RSVP task can be, when not used with properly controlled parameters, and demand a reexamination of the effects found in previous studies which could have been the effect of detection stream locations, misconstrued as VSL.

Doing harm is a moral violation, but helping a family member is morally obligatory. In this study, participants encountered this ethical dilemma through stories featuring their sibling (i.e., brother) as either the perpetrator or victim in various moral scenarios. Subsequently, they provided their moral judgements (i.e., moral acceptability and perceived transgression) and made decisions (i.e., willingness and difficulty to disclose what the agent did to the police) regarding the perpetrator. The manipulation of family membership was integrated into the moral scenarios, which were crafted based on whether the perpetrator had malicious intent and whether those intentions resulted in a harmful outcome (i.e., intentional harm, failed attempts to harm, accidental harm, and a harmless/baseline). While we initially expected that individuals would exhibit favouritism towards their brother when harmful intent or outcomes were absent, our findings revealed that both agent/victim identities (brother/stranger) and intent-outcome-based moral scenarios had an additive effect on both measures of moral judgement. This suggests that the family favouring effect was observed across all intent-outcome scenarios, with a slightly more pronounced effect when the brother accidentally harmed a stranger compared to a stranger accidentally harming the brother. Regarding moral decisions, participants demonstrated a willingness to disclose what they witnessed regardless of their familial relationship with the agent or victim, but it was universally perceived as a difficult decision to make. Together, our results underscore the context-specific nature of moral judgements and decisions, emphasising the significant impact of family members when they are involved as moral characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) is a form of noninvasive transcranial electrical stimulation that applies alternating current in various randomized frequencies to the cortex, thereby improving cognitive functioning in multiple domains. However, the precise mechanism of tRNS, as well as its impact on human electroencephalography (EEG), remains unclear. This is partly because most studies have used tRNS in conjunction with a cognitive task, making it difficult to tease apart whether the observed changes in EEG are a result of tRNS, the cognitive task, or their interaction. Methods: Forty-nine healthy individuals participated in this study and were randomly assigned to active tRNS (n = 24) and sham (n = 25) groups. tRNS was delivered for 20 minutes over Fp1/Fp2 and Oz. Resting-state EEG data were collected before and after either tRNS or sham stimulation. Results: Cluster-based permutation tests using FieldTrip revealed no frequency-specific effect of tRNS on resting-state EEG data across four frequency bands (theta, alpha, beta, gamma). Conclusions: These observations suggest that tRNS itself does not target or alter specific EEG frequencies. Rather, tRNS most likely interacts with the cognitive task/activity at hand to produce an observable difference in post-tRNS EEG. Positive tRNS-EEG findings from previous studies are also likely to have resulted from the interactive and cognitive activity-dependent nature of tRNS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Evidence on the long-term comparative effectiveness of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) psychotherapies in adults remains unknown. Therefore, we performed an extensive network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to determine the comparative effectiveness of psychotherapies for people diagnosed with PTSD. Methods: A comprehensive search was conducted in Cochrane library, Embase, Medline-OVID, PubMed, Scopus, and Psych-Info until March 2021. Studies on the effectiveness of cognitive processing therapy (CPT), cognitive therapy (CT), eye movement desensitisation reprocessing (EMDR), narrative exposure therapy (NET), prolonged exposure (PE), cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), present-centred therapy (PCT), brief eclectic psychotherapies (BEP), psychodynamic therapy (PDT) or combination therapies compared to no treatment (NT) or treatment as usual (TAU) in adults with PTSD were included. Frequentist and Bayesian approaches were used for analysis in R-software. Results: We included 98 RCTs with 5567 participants from 18 897 studies. CPT, EMDR, CT, NET, PE, CBT, and PCT were significant to reduce PTSD symptoms (SMD range: −1.53 to −0.75; Certainty: very low to high) at immediate post-treatment and ranked accordingly. Longitudinal analysis found EMDR (1.02) and CPT (0.85) as the significant therapies with large effect size in short-term and long-term follow-up, respectively. NET and CPT showed higher proportion of loss of PTSD diagnosis (RR range: 5.51–3.45) while there were no significant psychotherapies for retention rate compared to NT. Conclusions: Our findings provide evidence for improving current guidelines and informing clinical decision-making for PTSD management. However, the best PTSD treatment plan should be tailored to patients' needs, characteristics, and clinician expertise. Registration: PROSPERO CRD42020162143 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) is a technology that provides electrical stimulation to the cervical vagus nerve and can be applied in the treatment of a wide variety of neuropsychiatric and systemic diseases. VNS exerts its effect by stimulating vagal afferent and efferent fibers, which project upward to the brainstem nuclei and the relayed circuits and downward to the internal organs to influence the autonomic, neuroendocrine, and neuroimmunology systems. The neuroimmunomodulation effect of VNS is mediated through the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway that regulates immune cells and decreases pro-inflammatory cytokines. Traditional and non-invasive VNS have Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved indications for patients with drug-refractory epilepsy, treatment-refractory major depressive disorders, and headaches. The number of clinical trials and translational studies that explore the therapeutic potentials and mechanisms of VNS is increasing. In this review, we first introduced the anatomical and physiological bases of the vagus nerve and the immunomodulating functions of VNS. We covered studies that investigated the mechanisms of VNS and its therapeutic implications for a spectrumof brain disorders and systemic diseases in the context of neuroimmunomodulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Witnessing emotional events such as arousal or pain may impair ongoing cognitive processes such as inhibitory control. We found that this may be true only half of the time. Erotic images and painful video clips were shown to men and women shortly before a stop signal task, which measures cognitive inhibitory control. These stimuli impaired inhibitory control only in men and not in women, suggesting that emotional stimuli may be processed with different weights depending on gender. (Contains 2 figures.)