Competition between emotional faces in visuospatial working memory.

Visuospatial working memory (VSWM) helps track the identity and location of people during social interactions. Previous work showed better VSWM when all faces at encoding displayed a happy compared to an angry expression, reflecting a prosocial preference for monitoring who was where. However, social environments are not typically uniform, and certain expressions may more strongly compete for and bias face monitoring according to valence and/or arousal properties. Here, we used heterogeneous encoding displays in which two faces shared one emotion and two shared another, and asked participants to relocate a central neutral probe face after a blank delay. When considering the emotion of the probed face independently of the co-occurring emotion at encoding, an overall happy benefit was replicated. However, accuracy was modulated by the nonprobed emotion, with a relocation benefit for angry over sad, happy over fearful, and sad over happy faces. These effects did not depend on encoding fixation time, stimulus arousal, perceptual similarity, or response bias. Thus, emotional competition for faces in VSWM is complex and appears to rely on more than simple arousal- or valence-biased mechanisms. We propose a “social value (SV)” account to better explain when and why certain emotions may be prioritized in VSWM

The time course of colour guidance in realistic scene search

Colour is a source of attentional guidance and object segmentation when viewing a scene. In an eye-tracking study,we examined its role during search of targets placed in consistent or inconsistent locations within realistic scene contexts. Boththe target template and the whole scene were presented in full colour or grayscale. Colour presence did not influence earlysearch, considering latency, direction or gain of the first saccade, but affected later phases, with longer scene scanning andmore fixations required to locate the target in the grayscale condition, which also lengthened verification of template-objectmatching. These effects were enhanced in inconsistent scenes. Our results suggest that observers may not utilise colour cueswhen initiating scene inspection during search but also that colour information modulates efficiency of the search process interms of attentional selection and object recognition, in particular when the context of the scene does not provide reliablehigh-level guidance

The right hemisphere advantage in visual change detection depends on temporal factors

What accounts for the Right Hemisphere (RH) functional superiority in visual change detection? An original task which combines one-shot and divided visual field paradigms allowed us to direct change information initially to the RH or the Left Hemisphere (LH) by deleting, respectively, an object included in the left or right half of a scene presented centrally. We manipulated the perceptual salience and semantic relevance of the change as well as the duration of the Inter-Stimulus Interval (ISI) between the scenes in order to clarify the role of the RH in memory and attention processes, and to explore whether lengthening the ISI would enhance the contribution of the LH. When analyzing data collapsed over the two levels (high vs. low) of salience and of relevance, changes were better detected in the left visual field (lvf) than in the right visual field (rvf) in the case of a short ISI, while no difference emerged in the case of a long ISI. Moreover, lengthening the ISI resulted in a performance decrement in the lvf, both for accuracy and response speed. The fact that the RH superiority was limited to short intervals indicates that stimulus-driven orienting contributes more than perceptual processing to this hemispheric asymmetry. When considering perceptual and semantic properties of the change, the effect of the ISI duration seemed to specifically emerge in the case of low relevance, with an enhancement of accuracy in the rvf when comparing the long with the short ISI. This suggests that the ISI influence on hemispheric performance operates on different levels

Change Detection in Complex Scenes: Hemispheric Contribution and the Role of Perceptual and Semantic Factors

The perceptual salience and semantic relevance of objects for the meaning of a scene were evaluated with multiple criteria and then manipulated in a change-detection experiment that used an original combination of one-shot and tachistoscopic divided-visual-field paradigms to study behavioural hemispheric asymmetry. Coloured drawings that depicted meaningful situations were presented centrally and very briefly (120 ms) and only the changes were lateralised by adding an object in the right or in the left visual hemifield. High salience and high relevance improved both response times (RTs) and accuracy, although the overall contribution of salience was greater than that of relevance. Moreover, only for low-salience changes did relevance affect speed. RTs were shorter when a change occurred in the left visual hemifield, suggesting a right-hemisphere advantage for detection of visual change. Also, men responded faster than women. The theoretical and methodological implications are discussed

Detezione del cambiamento in scene visive complesse (salienza percettiva, rivelanza semantica e cpntributo degli emisferi cerebrali)

NICE-BU Lettres Arts Sci.Hum. (060882104) / SudocSudocItalyFranceITF

Linking hemispheric visuospatial functions to the awareness of visual change

We live in a world of multiple and continuous changes, which are decisive to give sense to our experience and organize our behavior. This review is devoted to the engagement of the cerebral hemispheres in the conscious perception of visual change when disturbances prevent the automatic capture of attention. The aim is to summarize and discuss this new line of investigation, which may provide substantial contribution, on one hand, to the understanding of attentional and memory processes involved in visual awareness and, on the other hand, to the specification of interhemispheric competences and interactions in a domain that is so crucial in our daily life. The theme is addressed in the broader context of the main axes of distinction between the specific left and right visuospatial functions, and taking into account the factors of inter-and intra-individual variability in the functional organization of the brain. Then, the different approaches for studying the lateral substrates of change perception are examined, showing a particular involvement of the right hemisphere which, however, is far from being understood in its various components and must be considered as emerging from dynamic interaction of neurocognitive networks that are distributed across the hemispheres. Limitations and potentials of these approaches are discussed

Look to the left, look to the right, to the left, to the right… A review on the effect of horizontal saccades on cognitive performance

Look to the left, now look to the right, then to the left, to the right… This is essentially what is asked to the participants in the studies examining the effects of horizontal saccadic eye movements on cognitive performance, mainly on memory. It has been suggested that short (about 30 seconds) series of horizontal saccades preceding an episodic memory task appear to improve memory performance, especially in highly right-handed individuals. However, studies have not yielded conclusive evidence, sometimes showing a positive effect on episodic retrieval, sometimes failing to report this effect. As the question of whether and how bilateral saccades may modulate cognitive efficiency seems to be of undeniable interest, both on a theoretical and a clinical perspective, we aim at reviewing the existing work. The paper presents basic information about the cerebral substrates of saccade generation, a classical experimental paradigm used in the field, the main results and the different hypotheses about the cerebral and cognitive mechanisms underlying the effects. We emphasise that studies are still scarce and carried out by a limited number of teams, and attempts of explanations are still very preliminary. We also describe a research approach of “adversarial collaboration”, which we consider particularly appropriate in this context. Finally, as it seems necessary to take into account the links between this scientific study of the effects of eye movements on cognitive and cerebral functioning and the numerous publications on the effectiveness of the psychotherapies using eye movements, we propose some considerations on the treatments based on the Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) approach

The elephant in the room: Inconsistency in scene viewing and representation.

We are very grateful to Andrew McKechnie for conducting a pilot study that informed the design and analysis of the data presented in Experiment 3 of the present study. For assistance with data collection for Experiments 1 and 2 we thank Ilaria Dal Lago, Anais Leroy, Teodor Nikolov, Hannah Nsiah-Amoako, Hanane Ramzaoui, Lara Wilson and Radia Zaghari. We also thank Monica Castelhano, Carrick Williams and an anonymous reviewer for thorough and helpful suggestions to improve this manuscript.Peer reviewedPostprin