Object Affordances Potentiate Responses but Do Not Guide Attentional Prioritization

Handled objects automatically activate afforded responses. The current experiment examined whether objects that afford a response are also prioritized for attentional processing in visual search. Targets were pictures of coffee cups with handles oriented either to the right or the left. Subjects searched for a target, a right-handled vs. left -handled coffee cup, among a varying number of distractor cups oriented in the opposite direction. Responses were faster when the direction of target handle and the key press were spatially matched than mismatched (stimulus -response compatibility (SRC) effect), but object affordance did not moderate slopes of the search functions, indicating the absence of attentional prioritization effect. These findings imply that handled objects prime afforded responses without influencing attentional prioritization

The Gaze-Cueing Effect in the United States and Japan: Influence of Cultural Differences in Cognitive Strategies on Control of Attention

The direction of seen gaze automatically and exogenously guides visual spatial attention, a phenomenon termed as the gaze-cueing effect. Although this effect arises when the duration of stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between a non-predictive gaze cue and the target is relatively long, no empirical research examined the factors underlying this extended cueing effect. Two experiments compared the gaze-cueing effect at longer SOAs (700 ms) in Japanese and American participants. Cross-cultural studies on cognition suggest that Westerners tend to use a context-independent analytical strategy to process visual environments, whereas Asians use a context-dependent holistic approach. We hypothesized that Japanese participants would not demonstrate the gaze-cueing effect at longer SOAs because they are more sensitive to contextual information, such as the knowledge that the direction of a gaze is not predictive. Furthermore, we hypothesized that American participants would demonstrate the gaze-cueing effect at the long SOAs because they tend to follow gaze direction whether or not it is predictive. In Experiment 1, American participants demonstrated the gaze-cueing effect at the long SOA, indicating that their attention was driven by the central non-predictive gaze direction regardless of the SOAs. In Experiment 2, Japanese participants demonstrated no gaze-cueing effect at the long SOA, suggesting that the Japanese participants exercised voluntary control of their attention, which inhibited the gaze-cueing effect with the long SOA. Our findings suggest that the control of visual spatial attention elicited by social stimuli systematically differs between American and Japanese individuals

Early Visual Perception Potentiated by Object Affordances: Evidence From a Temporal Order Judgment Task

Perceived objects automatically potentiate afforded action. Object affordances also facilitate perception of such objects, and this occurrence is known as the affordance effect. This study examined whether object affordances facilitate the initial visual processing stage, or perceptual entry processes, using the temporal order judgment task. The onset of the graspable (righthandled) coffee cup was perceived earlier than that of the less graspable (left-handled) cup for right-handed participants. The affordance effect was eliminated when the coffee cups were inverted, which presumably conveyed less affordance information. These results suggest that objects preattentively potentiate the perceptual entry processes in response to their affordances

Does Decision-Making Speed Depend on Non-interactive Others?

This study examined the influence that the mere presence of others (i.e., non-interactive) has on the decision-making speed of individuals. The study compared four conditions: a participant executing a given task by himself or herself, or with another person next to him or her and executing the same task either quickly, at a normal speed, or at a slow speed. The results of these comparisons showed that when the other person made decisions quickly, a participant’s decision-making sped up to align with that of the other person. Interestingly, even when a participant’s decision-making speed was accelerated under the influence of the other person’s decision-making speed, there appeared to be no difference in the participant’s degree of satisfaction with the results, compared to when making decisions at his or her own pace. Furthermore, the study results showed that the physical presence of another person was essential to transmitting decision-making speed: transmission did not occur after attempts were made to manipulate speed solely through the use of artificial sound

Semantic activation of target congruence contingently captures attention

Contingent attentional capture occurs when a stimulus property captures an observer's attention, usually related to the observer's top-down attentional set for target-defining properties. This study examined whether contingent attentional capture occurs for a stimulus property that does not define the target by itself, but is congruent with the target-defining property. In an RSVP stream, we defined the target by a color (e.g., a green-colored Japanese Kanji character). Before the target onset we presented a distractor that referred to the target-defining color (e.g., a white-colored Kanji character with the meaning "green"). We observed that the distractor produced contingent attentional capture which was revealed by a deficit in identifying the subsequent target. This result suggested that the attentional set included congruency between the activated meaning and the target-defining color to detect the target.Summary of Awarded Presentation at the 25th Annual Meetin

The transitions of time-dependent performance in a task

For prolonged cognitive tasks the efficiency of an observer, as a function of test period, is often illustrated as a downward-sloping curve. This deterioration is called the vigilance decrement and is due to a shift in attention during a task. We have investigated the temporal features of attention by using an RSVP task. We focused on transient performance in a trial, in addition to prolonged performance throughout the experiment. Throughout the experiment a vigilance decrement occurred. During a trial however, the detection of a target at the beginning of a sequence was dramatically low and recovered as it appeared later. This result has been shown neither in the vigilance studies, which predict high performance after the task onset, nor in the RSVP studies, which predict high and fair detection of only target in the sequence. This result would reflect a gradual modulation of temporal attention to a rapid sequence.Summary of Awarded Presentation at the 23rd Annual Meetin

Early Visual Perception Potentiated by Object Affordances: Evidence From a Temporal Order Judgment Task

Perceived objects automatically potentiate afforded action. Object affordances also facilitate perception of such objects, and this occurrence is known as the affordance effect. This study examined whether object affordances facilitate the initial visual processing stage, or perceptual entry processes, using the temporal order judgment task. The onset of the graspable (right-handled) coffee cup was perceived earlier than that of the less graspable (left-handled) cup for right-handed participants. The affordance effect was eliminated when the coffee cups were inverted, which presumably conveyed less affordance information. These results suggest that objects preattentively potentiate the perceptual entry processes in response to their affordances.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP20609565 (to Atsunori Ariga), JP15H05709, JP25242060, and JP16H01866 (to Yuki Yamada)

Object Affordances Potentiate Responses but Do Not Guide Attentional Prioritization

Handled objects automatically activate afforded responses. The current experiment examined whether objects that afford a response are also prioritized for attentional processing in visual search. Targets were pictures of coffee cups with handles oriented either to the right or the left. Subjects searched for a target, a right-handled vs. left-handled coffee cup, among a varying number of distractor cups oriented in the opposite direction. Responses were faster when the direction of target handle and the key press were spatially matched than mismatched (stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effect), but object affordance did not moderate slopes of the search functions, indicating the absence of attentional prioritization effect. These findings imply that handled objects prime afforded responses without influencing attentional prioritization.This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 15H05709

Implicit Attitudes About Agricultural and Aquatic Products From Fukushima Depend on Where Consumers Reside

Japanese consumers are still hesitant to purchase products from Fukushima, although 7 years have passed since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and these products are officially considered safe. In this study, we examined whether Japanese consumers have negative implicit attitudes toward agricultural and aquatic products from the Fukushima region and whether these attitudes are independent of their explicit attitudes. Japanese students completed an implicit association test and a questionnaire to assess their implicit and explicit attitudes toward products from Fukushima relative to another region. The results of two experiments reliably demonstrated that the public has negative implicit attitudes toward Fukushima products, whereas their explicit attitudes are consistently positive. These observations predominantly held for participants living close to Fukushima (Tokyo) as opposed to participants living far away (Hiroshima): Experiment 1 (n = 40). Furthermore, individual differences in aversion to germs contributed to the implicit attitudes; the implicit negative attitudes were attenuated among the participants with a relatively low aversion to germs: Experiment 2 (n = 60). These results suggest that the implicit attitudes associated with the behavioral immune system, which is conceptualized as a suite of psychological mechanisms designed to proactively resist pathogenic threats, may underlie the hesitation to purchase products from Fukushima

Erroneous selection of a non-target item improves subsequent target identification in rapid serial visual presentations

The second of two targets (T2) embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVSVP) is often missed even though the first (T1) is correctly reported (attentional blink). The rate of correct T2 identification is quite high, however, when T2 comes immediately after T1 (lag-1 sparing). This study investigated whether and how non-target items induce lag-1 sparing. One T1 and two T2s comprising letters were inserted in distractors comprising symbols in each of two synchronised RSVSVPs. A digit (dummy) was presented with T1 in another stream. Lag-1 sparing occurred even at the location where the dummy was present (Experiment 1). This distractor-induced sparing effect was also obtained even when a Japanese katakana character (Experiment 2) was used as the dummy. The sparing effect was, however, severely weakened when symbols (Experiment 3) and Hebrew letters (Experiment 4) served as the dummy. Our findings suggest a tentative hypothesis that attentional set for item nameability is meta-categorically created and adopted to the dummy only when the dummy is nameable