Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Computational Thinking And Coding For Young Children: A Hybrid Approach To Link Unplugged And Plugged Activities, Daisuke Akiba

Publications and Research

In our increasingly technology-dependent society, the importance of promoting digital literacy (e.g., computational thinking, coding, and programming) has become a critical focus in the field of childhood education. While young children these days are routinely and extensively exposed to digital devices and tools, the efficacy of the methods for fostering digital skills in the early childhood classroom has not always been closely considered. This is particularly true in settings where early childhood educators are not digital experts. Currently, most of the efforts in standard early childhood settings, taught by teachers who are not digital experts, appear to revolve around “unplugged” …

Emotion Recognition With Audio, Video, Eeg, And Emg: A Dataset And Baseline Approaches, Jin Chen, Tony Ro, Zhigang Zhu

Publications and Research

This paper describes a new posed multimodal emotional dataset and compares human emotion classification based on four different modalities - audio, video, electromyography (EMG), and electroencephalography (EEG). The results are reported with several baseline approaches using various feature extraction techniques and machine-learning algorithms. First, we collected a dataset from 11 human subjects expressing six basic emotions and one neutral emotion. We then extracted features from each modality using principal component analysis, autoencoder, convolution network, and mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC), some unique to individual modalities. A number of baseline models have been applied to compare the classification performance in emotion recognition, …

Crowd Salience Heightens Tolerance To Healthy Facial Features, Mitch Brown, Ryan E. Tracy, Steven G. Young, Donald F. Sacco

Publications and Research

Objective: Recent findings suggest crowd salience heightens pathogen-avoidant motives, serving to reduce individuals’ infection risk through interpersonal contact. Such experiences may similarly facilitate the identification, and avoidance, of diseased conspecifics. The current experiment sought to replicate and extend previous crowding research.

Methods: In this experiment, we primed participants at two universities with either a crowding or control experience before having them evaluate faces manipulated to appear healthy or diseased by indicating the degree to which they would want to interact with them.

Results: Crowding-primed participants reported a more heightened preferences for healthy faces than control-primed participants. Additionally, crowd salience reduced …

During Natural Viewing, Neural Processing Of Visual Targets Continues Throughout Saccades, Atanas D. Stankov, Jonathan Touryan, Stephen Gordon, Anthony J. Ries, Jason Ki, Lucas C. Parra

Publications and Research

Relatively little is known about visual processing during free-viewing visual search in realistic dynamic environments. Free-viewing is characterized by frequent saccades. During saccades, visual processing is thought to be suppressed, yet we know that the presaccadic visual content can modulate postsaccadic processing. To better understand these processes in a realistic setting, we study here saccades and neural responses elicited by the appearance of visual targets in a realistic virtual environment. While subjects were being driven through a 3D virtual town, they were asked to discriminate between targets that appear on the road. Using a system identification approach, we separated overlapping …

Does Rehearsal Matter? Left Anterior Temporal Alpha And Theta Band Changes Correlate With The Beneficial Effects Of Rehearsal On Working Memory, Chelsea Reichert Plaska, Kenneth Ng, Timothy M. Ellmore

Publications and Research

Rehearsal during working memory (WM) maintenance is assumed to facilitate retrieval. Less is known about how rehearsal modulates WM delay activity. In the present study, 44 participants completed a Sternberg Task with either intact novel scenes or phase-scrambled scenes, which had similar color and spatial frequency but lacked semantic content. During the rehearsal condition participants generated a descriptive label during encoding and covertly rehearsed during the delay period. During the suppression condition participants did not generate a label during encoding and suppressed (repeated “the”) during the delay period. This was easy in the former (novel scenes) but more difficult in …

Memory Bias Toward Emotional Information In Burnout And Depression, Renzo Bianchi, Eric Laurent, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Lucas M. Bietti, Eric Mayor

Publications and Research

A sample of 1015 educational staff members, exhibiting various levels of burnout and depressive symptoms, underwent a memory test involving incident encoding of positive and negative words and a free recall task. Burnout and depression were each found to be associated with increased recall of negative items and decreased recall of positive items. Results remained statistically significant when controlling for history of depressive disorders. Burnout and depression were not related to mistakes in the reported words, or to the overall number of recalled words. This study suggests that burnout and depression overlap in terms of memory biases toward emotional information.

Consistent Failure To Produce A Cognitive Load Effect In Visual Working Memory Using A Standard Dual-Task Procedure, Timothy J. Ricker, Evie Vergauwe

Publications and Research

Working memory performance is impaired when an attention-demanding task is executed during memory retention. The cognitive load effect is the consistent finding that the size of the memory impairment is determined by the relative amount of time that the secondary processing task occupies attention during memory retention. Cognitive load has been proposed to be a Priority-A benchmark any model of working memory should be able to explain (Oberauer et al., 2018), in part because the effect appears to generalize across different experimental procedures and materials. Using a standard dual-task procedure, we detail four experiments using a visual working memory recall …

Spatial Organization In Self-Initiated Visual Working Memory, Hagit Magen, Tatiana Aloi Emmanouil

Publications and Research

Ample research in visual working memory (VWM) has demonstrated that the memorized items are maintained in integrated spatial configurations, even when the spatial context is task irrelevant. These insights were obtained in studies in which participants were provided with the information they memorized. However, the encoding of provided information is only one aspect of memory. In everyday life, individuals often construct their own memory representations, an aspect of memory we have previously termed self-initiated (SI) working memory. In this study, we employed a SI VWM task in which participants selected the visual targets they memorized. The spatial locations of the …

Visual Modulation Of Resting State Α Oscillations, Kelly Webster, Tony Ro

Publications and Research

Once thought to simply reflect passive cortical idling, recent studies have demonstrated that α oscillations play a causal role in cognition and perception. However, whether and how cognitive or sensory processes modulate various components of the α rhythm is poorly understood. Sensory input and resting states were manipulated in human subjects while electroencephalography (EEG) activity was recorded in three conditions: eyes-open fixating on a visual stimulus, eyes-open without visual input (darkness), and eyes-closed without visual input (darkness). We show that α power and peak frequency increase when visual input is reduced compared to the eyes open, fixating condition. These results …

Measuring Perceptual Consciousness, Marjan Persuh

Publications and Research

Conscious perception is typically assessed with either objective or subjective measures (Seth et al.,2008). Measures are considered objective if conscious perception is estimated from performancein a discrimination task; inability to discriminate between stimuli is taken as evidence thatparticipants had no conscious perception (Hannula et al., 2005). Measures are considered subjectiveif participants report their visual experience on each trial (Sergent and Dehaene, 2004; Del Culet al., 2007). One type of subjective measures consists of metacognitivejudgments; the relationshipbetween metacognition and perceptual awareness is a matter ofdebate (Fleming and Lau, 2014;Jachs et al., 2015) and I will not discuss these measures further. Likewise, …

The Role Of Sleep Deprivation And Fatigue In The Perception Of Task Difficulty And Use Of Heuristics, Mindy Engle-Friedman, Gina Marie Mathew, Anastasia Martinova, Forrest Armstrong, Viktoriya Konstantinov

Publications and Research

Objectives: This study investigated the effects of sleep deprivation on perception of task difficulty and use of heuristics (mental shortcuts) compared to naturally-experienced sleep at home. Methods: Undergraduate students were screened and assigned through block-random assignment to Naturally-Experienced Sleep (NES; n=19) or Total Sleep Deprivation (TSD; n=20). The next morning, reported fatigue, perception of task difficulty, and use of “what-is-beautiful-is-good,” “greedy algorithm,” and “speed-accuracy trade-off ” heuristics were assessed. Results: NES slept for an average of 354.74 minutes (SD=72.84), or 5.91 hours. TSD rated a reading task as significantly more difficult and requiring more time than NES. TSD was …

Perception Of American–English Vowels By Early And Late Spanish–English Bilinguals, Miriam Baigorri, Luca Campanelli, Erika S. Levy

Publications and Research

Increasing numbers of Hispanic immigrants are entering the US and learning American–English (AE) as a second–language (L2). Previous studies investigating the relationship between AE and Spanish vowels have revealed an advantage for early L2 learners for their accuracy of L2 vowel perception. Replicating and extending such previous research, this study examined the patterns with which early and late Spanish–English bilingual adults assimilated naturally-produced AE vowels to their native vowel-inventory and the accuracy with which they discriminated the vowels. Twelve early Spanish–English bilingual, 12 late Spanish–English bilingual, and 10 monolingual listeners performed perceptual-assimilation and categorical-discrimination tasks involving AE /i,ɪ,ɛ,ʌ,æ,ɑ,o/. Early bilinguals …

Regulating Rumination By Anger: Evidence For The Mutual Promotion And Counteraction (Mpmc) Theory Of Emotionality, Jun Zhan, Fan Tang, Mei He, Jin Fan, Jing Xiao, Chang Liu, Jing Luo

Publications and Research

Unlike the strategy of cognitive regulation that relies heavily on the top-down control function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which was recently found may be critically impaired in stressful situations, traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine views different types of emotionality as having mutual promotion and counteraction (MPMC) relationships, implying a novel approach that requires less cognition to emotional regulation. Actually, our previous studies have indicated that anger responses could be successfully regulated via the induction of sadness, and this efficiency could not be influenced by stress, thus providing evidences for the hypothesis of “sadness counteracts anger” (SCA) proposed by the …

Language Experience With A Native-Language Phoneme Sequence Modulates The Effects Of Attention On Cortical Sensory Processing, Valerie L. Shafer, Monica Wagner, Jungmee Lee, Francesca Mingino, Colleen O'Brien, Adam Constantine, Mitchell Steinschneider

Publications and Research

Auditory evoked potentials (AEP) reflect spectro-temporal feature changes within the spoken word and are sufficiently reliable to probe deficits in auditory processing. The current research assessed whether attentional modulation would alter the morphology of these AEPs and whether native-language experience with phoneme sequences would influence the effects of attention. Native-English and native-Polish adults listened to nonsense word pairs that contained the phoneme sequence onsets /st/, /sət/, /pət/ that occur in both the Polish and English languages and the phoneme sequence onset /pt/ that occurs in the Polish language, but not the English language. Participants listened to word pairs within two …

Combined Mnemonic Strategy Training And High-Definition Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation For Memory Deficits In Mild Cognitive Impairment, Benjamin M. Hampstead, Krishnankutty Sathian, Marom Bikson, Anthony Y. Stringer

Publications and Research

Introduction: Memory deficits characterize Alzheimer’s dementia and the clinical precursor stage known as mild cognitive impairment. Nonpharmacologic interventions hold promise for enhancing functioning in these patients, potentially delaying functional impairment that denotes transition to dementia. Previous findings revealed that mnemonic strategy training (MST) enhances long-term retention of trained stimuli and is accompanied by increased blood oxygen level–dependent signal in the lateral frontal and parietal cortices as well as in the hippocampus. The present study was designed to enhance MST generalization, and the range of patients who benefit, via concurrent delivery of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Methods: This protocol describes …

Regulating Anger Under Stress Via Cognitive Reappraisal And Sadness, Jun Zhan, Xiaofei Wu, Jin Fan, Jiayou Guo, Jianshe Zhou, Jun Ren, Chang Liu, Jing Luo

Publications and Research

Previous studies have reported the failure of cognitive emotion regulation (CER), especially in regulating unpleasant emotions under stress. The underlying reason for this failure was the application of CER depends heavily on the executive function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), but this function can be impaired by stress-related neuroendocrine hormones. This observation highlights the necessity of developing selfregulatory strategies that require less top-down cognitive control. Based on traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine, which examine how different types of emotions promote or counteract one another, we have developed a novel emotion regulation strategy whereby one emotion is used to alter another. …

How Stable Are Human Aesthetic Preferences Across The Lifespan?, Cameron Pugach, Helmut Leder, Daniel J. Graham

Publications and Research

How stable are human aesthetic preferences, and how does stability change over the lifespan?Here we investigate the stability of aesthetic taste in a cross-sectional study. We employed a simple rank-order preference task using paintings and photographs of faces and landscapes. In each of the four stimulus classes, we find that aesthetic stability generally follows an inverted U-shaped function, with the greatest degree of stability appearing in early to middle adulthood. We propose that one possible interpretation of this result is that it indicates a role for cognitive control (i.e., the ability to adapt cognition to current situations) in the construction …

Inhibitory Control Under Threat: The Role Of Spontaneous Eye Blinks In Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Mikael Rubin, Denise A. Hien, Dipanjana Das, Robert D. Melara

Publications and Research

This study is the first to explore spontaneous eye blink rate (sEBR) in individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We investigated the connection between the magnitude of flanker interference in PTSD participants and sEBR during performance on a modified version of the Eriksen flanker task. As a peripheral measure of cognitive control and dopaminergic function, sEBR may illuminate the relationship between PTSD and executive function. Findings revealed a positive relationship between sEBR and flanker interference in participants diagnosed with PTSD, to both threat-related and neutral stimuli, whereas this relationship was negative in participants exposed to trauma but without PTSD and …

Cognitive Sociology, Michael W. Raphael

Publications and Research

Cognitive sociology is the study of the conditions under which meaning is constituted through processes of reification. Cognitive sociology traces its origins to writings in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of culture, cognitive and cultural anthropology, and more recently, work done in cultural sociology and cognitive science. Its central questions revolve around locating these processes of reification since the locus of cognition is highly contentious. Researchers consider how individuality is related to notions of society (structures, institutions, systems, etc.) and notions of culture (cultural forms, cultural structures, sub-cultures, etc.). These questions further explore how these answers depend on learning processes …

Language Complexity, Belief-Consistency And The Evaluation Of Policies, Matthew H. Goldberg, Cheryl L. Carmichael

Publications and Research

Policy proposals often contain complex legal, technical, or scientific jargon, making it difficult for people to evaluate their favorability toward the policy. We proposed one experiment testing the effect of language complexity on people’s evaluation of a policy proposal as moderated by their initial policy beliefs. We hypothesized that when a policy was consistent with one’s beliefs or if participants had no policy preference, they would evaluate it more favorably when it was simple than when it was complex; when a policy was inconsistent with one’s beliefs, they would evaluate it less unfavorably when it was complex than when it …

Dissociable Early Attentional Control Mechanisms Underlying Cognitive And Affective Conflicts, Taolin Chen, Keith M. Kendrick, Chunliang Feng, Shiyue Sun, Xun Yang, Xiaogang Wang, Wenbo Luo, Suyong Yang, Xiaoqi Huang, Pedro A. Valdes-Sosa, Qiyong Gong, Jin Fan, Yue-Jia Luo

Publications and Research

It has been well documented that cognitive conflict is sensitive to the relative proportion of congruent and incongruent trials. However, few studies have examined whether affective conflict processing is modulated as a function of proportion congruency (PC). To address this question we recorded eventrelated potentials (ERP) while subjects performed both cognitive and affective face-word Stroop tasks. By varying the proportion of congruent and incongruent trials in each block, we examined the extent to which PC impacts both cognitive and affective conflict control at different temporal stages. Results showed that in the cognitive task an anteriorly localized early N2 component occurred …

The Capacity Of Cognitive Control Estimated From A Perceptual Decision Making Task, Tingting Wu, Alexander J. Dufford, Melissa-Ann Mackie, Laura J. Egan, Jin Fan

Publications and Research

Cognitive control refers to the processes that permit selection and prioritization of information processing in different cognitive domains to reach the capacity-limited conscious mind. Although previous studies have suggested that the capacity of cognitive control itself is limited, a direct quantification of this capacity has not been attempted. In this behavioral study, we manipulated the information rate of cognitive control by parametrically varying both the uncertainty of stimul measured as information entropy and the exposure time of the stimuli. We used the relationship between the participants’ response accuracy and the information rate of cognitive control (in bits per second, bps) …

Editorial: The Temporal Dynamics Of Cognitive Processing, Timothy M. Ellmore, Peter F. Dominey, John F. Magnotti

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Using The Visual World Paradigm To Study Retrieval Interference In Spoken Language Comprehension, Irina A. Sekerina, Luca Campanelli, Julie A. Van Dyke

Publications and Research

The cue-based retrieval theory (Lewis et al., 2006) predicts that interference from similar distractors should create difficulty for argument integration, however this hypothesis has only been examined in the written modality. The current study uses the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) to assess its feasibility to study retrieval interference arising from distractors present in a visual display during spoken language comprehension. The study aims to extend findings from Van Dyke and McElree (2006), which utilized a dual-task paradigm with written sentences in which they manipulated the relationship between extra-sentential distractors and the semantic retrieval cues from a verb, to the spoken …

Barack Obama Blindness (Bob): Absence Of Visual Awareness To A Single Object, Marjan Persuh, Robert D. Melara

Publications and Research

In two experiments, we evaluated whether a perceiver’s prior expectations could alone obliterate his or her awareness of a salient visual stimulus. To establish expectancy, observers first made a demanding visual discrimination on each of three baseline trials. Then, on a fourth, critical trial, a single, salient and highly visible object appeared in full view at the center of the visual field and in the absence of any competing visual input. Surprisingly, fully half of the participants were unaware of the solitary object in front of their eyes. Dramatically, observers were blind even when the only stimulus on display was …

Attention Strongly Modulates Reliability Of Neural Responses To Naturalistic Narrative Stimuli, Jason J. Ki, Simon P. Kelly, Lucas C. Parra

Publications and Research

Attentional engagement is a major determinant of how effectively we gather information through our senses. Alongside the sheer growth in the amount and variety of information content that we are presented with through modern media, there is increased variability in the degree to which we “absorb” that information. Traditional research on attention has illuminated the basic principles of sensory selection to isolated features or locations, but it provides little insight into the neural underpinnings of our attentional engagement with modern naturalistic content. Here, we show inhumansubjects that the reliability of an individual’s neural responses with respect to a larger group …

Survey Data On Household Spatial Quality And Experiences Of Stress, Grace Campagna

Publications and Research

This data article describes a dataset of 1,668 cases representing self- reported assessments of housing inadequacy and perceived housing stress. The dataset also contains person-level and household-level demographic data to contextualize the above measures. A second supplemental file contains the text of the survey instrument. Discussion of theoretical background and measures development as well as a more detailed socioeconomic profile of the sample is available in the associated research article.

A Mendelian Randomization Study Of Testosterone And Cognition In Men, Jie Zhao, Tai Hing Lam, Chaoqiang Jiang, Stacey S. Cherny, Bin Liu, Kar Keung Cheng, Weisen Zhang, Gabriel M. Leung, C Mary Schooling

Publications and Research

Testosterone replacement for older men is increasingly common, with some observations suggesting a protective effect on cognitive function. We examined the association of endogenous testosterone with cognitive function among older men in a Mendelian randomization study using a separate-sample instrumental variable (SSIV) analysis estimator to minimize confounding and reverse causality. A genetic score predicting testosterone was developed in 289 young Chinese men from Hong Kong, based on selected testosterone-related single nucleotide polymorphisms (rs10046, rs1008805 and rs1256031). The association of genetically predicted testosterone with delayed 10-word recall score and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score was assessed at baseline and follow-up using …

The Effects Of Changing Attention And Context In An Awake Offline Processing Period On Visual Long-Term Memory, Timothy M. Ellmore, Anna Feng, Kenneth Ng, Luthfunnahar Dewan, James C. Root

Publications and Research

There is accumulating evidence that sleep as well as awake offline processing is important for the transformation of new experiences into long-term memory (LTM). Yet much remains to be understood about how various cognitive factors influence the efficiency of awake offline processing. In the present study we investigated how changes in attention and context in the immediate period after exposure to new visual information influences LTM consolidation. After presentation of multiple naturalistic scenes within a working memory paradigm, recognition was assessed 30 min and 24 h later in three groups of subjects. One group of subjects engaged in a focused …

Increases In Perspective Embedding Increase Reading Time Even With Typical Text Presentation: Implications For The Reading Of Literature, D. H. Whalen, Lisa Zunshine, Michael Holquist

Publications and Research

Reading fiction is a major component of intellectual life, yet it has proven difficult to study experimentally. One aspect of literature that has recently come to light is perspective embedding (“she thought I left” embedding her perspective on “I left”), which seems to be a defining feature of fiction. Previous work (Whalen et al., 2012) has shown that increasing levels of embedment affects the time that it takes readers to read and understand short vignettes in a moving window paradigm. With increasing levels of embedment from 1 to 5, reading times in a moving window paradigm rose almost linearly. However, …