Evaluative learning refers to the change in the affective evaluation of a previously neutral stimulus that occurs after the stimulus has been associated with a second, positive or negative, affective stimulus . Four experiments are reported in which the AS was presented very briefly. Significant evaluative learning was observed in participants who did not notice the presentation of the affective stimuli or could not discriminate between the briefly presented positive and negative ASi when asked to do so (...) . In two other experiments , no significant learning effect was obtained. A meta-analysis performed on the present and previously reported results gave evidence for a small, though statistically reliable evaluative learning effect when ASi are presented “subliminally.” This finding supports the hypothesis that evaluative associations can be learned implicitly. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 84-95, January 2022. Emotional stimuli such as images, words, or video clips are often used in studies researching emotion. New sets are continuously being published, creating an immense number of available sets and complicating the task for researchers who are looking for suitable stimuli. This paper presents the KAPODI-database of emotional stimuli sets that are freely available or available upon request. Over 45 aspects including over 25 key set characteristics have (...) been extracted and listed for each set. The database facilitates finding of and comparison between individual sets. It currently contains sets published between 1963 and 2020. A searchable online version allows users to select specific set characteristics and to find matching sets accordingly, as well as to add new published sets. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 84-95, January 2022. Emotional stimuli such as images, words, or video clips are often used in studies researching emotion. New sets are continuously being published, creating an immense number of available sets and complicating the task for researchers who are looking for suitable stimuli. This paper presents the KAPODI-database of emotional stimuli sets that are freely available or available upon request. Over 45 aspects including over 25 key set characteristics have (...) been extracted and listed for each set. The database facilitates finding of and comparison between individual sets. It currently contains sets published between 1963 and 2020. A searchable online version allows users to select specific set characteristics and to find matching sets accordingly, as well as to add new published sets. (shrink)

This study investigated visual statistical learning (VSL) in 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing non‐signers. Previous research with hearing individuals suggests that SL mechanisms support literacy. Our first goal was to assess whether VSL was associated with reading ability in deaf individuals, and whether this relation was sustained by a link between VSL and sign language skill. Our second goal was to test the Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis, which makes the prediction that deaf people should be impaired in sequential processing tasks. (...) For the VSL task, we adopted a modified version of the triplet learning paradigm, with stimuli presented sequentially across space and time. Results revealed that measures of sign language skill (sentence comprehension/repetition) did not correlate with VSL scores, possibly due to the sequential nature of our VSL task. Reading comprehension scores (PIAT‐R) were a significant predictor of VSL accuracy in hearing but not deaf people. This finding might be due to the sequential nature of the VSL task and to a less salient role of the sequential orthography‐to‐phonology mapping in deaf readers compared to hearing readers. The two groups did not differ in VSL scores. However, when reading ability was taken into account, VSL scores were higher for the deaf group than the hearing group. Overall, this evidence is inconsistent with the Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis, suggesting that humans can develop efficient sequencing abilities even in the absence of sound. (shrink)

In his target article Lockhead calls attention to numerous complications that prevent a valid straightforward or Fechnerian interpretation of psychophysical data. Here I describe three additional sources of bias, all involving the influence of stimuli presented before the start of an investigation.

Unconscious stimuli can influence participants’ motor behavior but also more complex mental processes. Recent research has gradually extended the limits of effects of unconscious stimuli. One field of research where such limits have been proposed is spatial cueing, where exogenous automatic shifts of attention have been distinguished from endogenous controlled processes which govern voluntary shifts of attention. Previous evidence suggests unconscious effects on mechanisms of exogenous shifts of attention. Here, we applied a cue-priming paradigm to a spatial cueing (...) task with arbitrary cues by centrally presenting a masked symmetrical prime before every cue stimulus. We found priming effects on response times in target discrimination tasks with the typical dynamic of cue-priming effects indicating that central symmetrical stimuli which have been associated with endogenous orienting can modulate shifts of spatial attention even when they are masked. Prime–Cue Congruency effects of perceptual dissimilar prime and cue stimuli suggest that these effects cannot be entirely reduced to perceptual repetition priming of cue processing. In addition, priming effects did not differ between participants with good and poor prime recognition performance consistent with the view that unconscious stimulus features have access to processes of endogenous shifts of attention. (shrink)

Previous experiments have shown a serial-position effect (SPE) in paired-associate (PA) learning where the pairs contained stimuli pre- viously learned in serial order. The present experiment extended the number of pairs from 10 to 14. Pairs containing stimuli from terminal serial positions were learned with significantly fewer errors than pairs whose stimuli derived from central positions. The latter produced a dip in the PA error distribution suggesting the presence of sequential associations in SL between items occupying central (...) positions. (shrink)

The anchoring effect is a form of cognitive bias in which exposure to some piece of information affects its subsequent numerical estimation. Previous studies have discussed which stimuli, such as numbers or semantic priming stimuli, are most likely to induce anchoring effects. However, it has not been determined whether anchoring effects will occur when a number is presented alone or when the semantic priming stimuli have an equivalent dimension between a target and the stimuli without (...) a number. We conducted five experimental studies using stimuli to induce anchoring effects. We found that anchoring effects did not occur when a number was presented alone or when phrases to induce semantic priming were used without presenting a number. These results indicate that both numerical and semantic priming stimuli must be presented for anchoring effects to occur. Our findings represent a substantial contribution to the literature on anchoring effects by offering insights into how these effects are generated. (shrink)

Researchers in the fields of sign language and gesture studies frequently present their participants with video stimuli showing actors performing linguistic signs or co-speech gestures. Up to now, such video stimuli have been mostly controlled only for some of the technical aspects of the video material, leaving open the possibility that systematic differences in video stimulus materials may be concealed in the actual motion properties of the actor’s movements. Computer vision methods such as OpenPose enable the fitting of (...) body-pose models to the consecutive frames of a video clip and thereby make it possible to recover the movements performed by the actor in a particular video clip without the use of a point-based or markerless motion-tracking system during recording. The OpenPoseR package provides a straightforward and reproducible way of working with these body-pose model data extracted from video clips using OpenPose, allowing researchers in the fields of sign language and gesture studies to quantify the amount of motion pertaining only to the movements performed by the actor in a video clip. These quantitative measures can be used for controlling differences in the movements of an actor in stimulus video clips or, for example, between different conditions of an experiment. In addition, the package also provides a set of functions for generating plots for data visualization, as well as an easy-to-use way of automatically extracting metadata from large sets of video files. (shrink)

The present study was designed to explore the performance costs of negative emotional stimuli in a vigilance task. Forty participants performed a vigilance task in two conditions: one with task-irrelevant negative-arousing pictures and one with task-irrelevant neutral pictures. In addition to performance, we measured subjective state and frontal cerebral activity with near infrared spectroscopy. Overall performance in the negative picture condition was lower than in the neutral picture condition and the negative picture condition had elevated levels of energetic arousal, (...) tense arousal and task-related thoughts. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between the impact of the negative pictures on tense arousal and task-related thoughts and the impact of the negative pictures on performance . These results provide support for indirect cost models of negative emotional stimuli on target detection performance. (shrink)

It is well-documented that emotional stimuli impact both the cognitive and motor aspects of “goal-directed” behavior. However, how emotional distractors impact motor performance remains unclear. This study aimed to characterize how movement quality was impacted during emotional distractors. We used a modified oddball paradigm and documented the performance of pure movement. Participants were designated to draw a triangle or a polygon, while an emotional stimulus was presented. Speed was assessed using reaction time and movement time. The quality and (...) precision of movement were assessed by calculating the accuracy and root-mean-square error. Compared to drawings of triangles, polygons had higher accuracy under negative stimuli, but lower RMSE under positive stimuli. The results indicate that distracting emotional stimuli impact different aspects of movement quality, with movement complexity influencing accuracy under negative distractors and precision under positive distractors. This study provides further evidence that movement precision is an important feature of emotional embodiment that should be incorporated in future studies. (shrink)

In two experiments, we examined the impact of color on cognitive performance by asking participants to categorize stimuli presented in three different colors: red, green, and gray (baseline). Participants were either asked to categorize the meaning of words as related to the concepts of “go” or “stop” (Experiment 1) or to indicate if a neutral verbal stimulus was a word or not (lexical decision task, Experiment 2). Overall, we observed performance facilitation in response to go stimuli (...) class='Hi'>presented in green (vs. red or gray) and performance inhibition in response to go stimuli presented in red. The opposite pattern was observed for stop‐related stimuli. Importantly, results also indicated that color might also be used to categorize neutral stimuli. Overall, these findings provide support to the green‐go and red‐stop color associations and test the potential functional autonomy acquired by these colors and the boundary conditions to their effects on stimuli categorization. (shrink)

Because of their evolutionary importance, threat-detection mechanisms are likely to exist at a variety of levels. A recent study of face recognition suggests that novel stimuli receive enhanced processing when presented as fear-related. This suggests the existence of a complex, context-dependent threat-detection mechanism that can adaptively respond to spatiotemporally varying and unique environmental features.

While we often talk about time using spatial terms, experimental investigation of space-time associations has focused primarily on the space in front of the participant. This has had two consequences: the disregard of the space behind the participant and the creation of potential task demands produced by spatialized manual button-presses. We introduce and test a new paradigm that uses auditory stimuli and vocal responses to address these issues. Participants made temporal judgments about deictic or sequential relationships presented auditorily (...) along a body-centered sagittal or transversal axis. Results involving the transversal axis replicated previous work while sagittal axis results were surprising. Deictic judgments did not use the sagittal axis but sequential judgments did, in a previously undocumented way. Participants associated earlier judgments with the space in front of them and later judgments with the space behind them. These findings, using a new approach, p.. (shrink)

Previous studies have highlighted that temporal source memory can be influenced by factors such as the individual’s age and the emotional valence of the event to be remembered. In this study, we investigated how the different points of view (POVs) from which an event is presented could interact with the relationship between age-related differences and emotional valence on temporal source memory. One hundred and forty-one younger adults (aged 18–30) and 90 older adults (aged 65–74) were presented with a (...) series of emotional videos shot from different POVs (first vs. third-person) in three sessions. In the fourth session, participants were asked to indicate in which session (1, 2, or 3) they viewed each video. The results indicated that the first-person POV amplified the effects of the emotional valence on temporal source memory. Only in this experimental condition, older adults “pushed away” negative stimuli by perceiving them as more distant in time, and “kept closer” positive stimuli by perceiving them as more recent. In comparison, younger adults “kept closer” positive stimuli. These findings add to the existing literature on the positivity effect on temporal source memory and highlighted the importance of considering the POV in relation to the emotional valence. (shrink)

Trait mindfulness confers emotional benefits and encourages skillful emotion regulation, in part because it helps people more deliberately attend to internal experiences and external surroundings. Such heightened attentional control might help skillfully deploy one’s attention towards certain kinds of stimuli, which may in turn help regulate emotions, but this remains unknown. Testing how trait mindful people deploy attention when regulating their emotions could help uncover the specific mechanisms of mindfulness that confer its emotional benefits. The present study aimed to (...) determine whether high trait mindfulness is associated with sustained attention biases to (i.e. longer gaze at) emotional scenes, when all participants are given the emotion regulation goal of staying in a positive mood. To measure this, we used eye tracking to assess selective attention to positive, neutral, and negative photographs. Higher trait mindfulness was associated with both a stronger attention bias for positive (vs. neutral and vs. negative) images, as well as greater success staying in a positive mood during viewing. Surprisingly, this attention bias towards the positive images did not mediate the relationship between mindfulness and maintenance of positive mood. Future work should compare visual attention to other emotion regulation strategies that may maximise positive affect for mindful people. (shrink)

Processing the various features from different feature maps and modalities in coherent ways requires a dedicated integration mechanism . Many authors have related feature binding to conscious awareness but little is known about how tight this relationship really is. We presented subjects with asynchronous audiovisual stimuli and tested whether the two features were integrated. The results show that binding took place up to 350 ms feature-onset asynchronies, suggesting that integration covers a relatively wide temporal window. We also asked (...) subjects to explicitly judge whether the two features would belong to the same or to the different events. Unsurprisingly, synchrony judgments decreased with increasing asynchrony. Most importantly, feature binding was entirely unaffected by conscious experience: features were bound whether they were experienced as occurring together or as belonging to a separate events, suggesting that the conscious experience of unity is not a prerequisite for, or a direct consequence of binding. (shrink)

We demonstrate “economies of experience” in eye-movement patterns—that is, optimization of eye-movement patterns aimed at more efficient and less costly visual processing, similar to the priming-induced formation of sparser cortical representations or reduced reaction times. Participants looked at Mooney-type, degraded stimuli that were difficult to recognize without prior experience, but easily recognizable after exposure to their undegraded versions. As predicted, eye-movement dispersion, velocity, and the number of fixations decreased with each stimulus presentation. Further analyses showed that this effect was (...) contingent on recognition, and the selection of information from the stimulus could be informed by the identity of the presented object. Finally, our study demonstrates that after exposure to the undegraded version of the stimulus, eye-movement patterns associated with its degraded and undegraded versions become more similar. This suggests that eye-movement patterns can evolve to facilitate the optimal processing of a given stimulus via experience-driven perceptual learning. (shrink)

Engagement of integrins and other adhesion receptors can induce tyrosine phosphorylation of focal adhesion kinase (FAK), a tyrosine kinase present in focal adhesions. Furthermore, in addition to adhesion receptors, a surprising variety of stimuli, acting either on specific surface receptors or on intracellular molecules, such as PKC or Rho, can induce also tyrosine phosphorylation of FAK. I suggest that a potential mechanism by which such distinct factors may modulate the tyrosine phosphorylation of FAK is the promotion of integrin or (...) other adhesion receptor clustering at focal adhesions. BioEssays 21:1069–1075, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSpatial cueing paradigms are popular tools to assess human attention to emotional stimuli, but different variants of these paradigms differ in what participants’ primary task is. In one variant, participants indicate the location of the target, whereas in the other they indicate the shape of the target. In the present paper we test the idea that although these two variants produce seemingly comparable cue validity effects on response times, they rest on different underlying processes. Across four studies using both (...) variants and manipulating the motivational relevance of cue content, diffusion model analyses revealed that cue validity effects in location tasks are primarily driven by response biases, whereas the same effect rests on delay due to attention to the cue in identification tasks. Based on this, we predict and empirically support that a symmetrical distribution of valid and invalid cues would reduce cue validity... (shrink)

Many research fields concerned with the processing of information contained in human faces would benefit from face stimulus sets in which specific facial characteristics are systematically varied while other important picture characteristics are kept constant. Specifically, a face database in which displayed expressions, gaze direction, and head orientation are parametrically varied in a complete factorial design would be highly useful in many research domains. Furthermore, these stimuli should be standardised in several important, technical aspects. The present article presents the (...) freely available Radboud Faces Database offering such a stimulus set, containing both Caucasian adult and children images. This face database is described both procedurally and in terms of content, and a validation study concerning its most important characteristics is presented. In the validation study, all frontal images were rated with respect to the shown facial expression, intensity of expression, clarity of expression, genuineness of expression, attractiveness, and valence. The results show very high recognition of the intended facial expressions. (shrink)

If two stimuli need different times to be processed, this difference should in principle be reflected both by response times (RT) and by judgments of their temporal order (TOJ). However, several dissociations have been reported between RT and TOJ, e.g., RT is more affected than TOJ when stimulus intensity decreases. One account for these dissociations is to assume differences in the allocation of attention induced by the two tasks. To test this hypothesis, different distributions of attention were induced in (...) the present study between two stimulus positions (above and below fixation). Only bright stimuli appeared in one position and either bright or dim stimuli in the other. In the two RT experiments, participants had to respond to every stimulus appearing in one of the two positions. Reaction times to bright stimuli were faster when they appeared in the position where dim stimuli were likely to occur. This finding suggests that the allocation of attention was adapted to the asymmetrical arrangement of stimuli, not suggested by explicit instruction. In the two TOJ experiments, the temporal order of stimuli appearing in the two positions had to be judged. Although bright stimuli appearing at the bright-and-dim location were judged to be earlier, this effect was small and insignificant. Further, the intensity dissociation between RT and TOJ was insensitive to random vs blockwise presentations of intensities, therefore was not modified by attentional preferences. Thus, asymmetrical arrangement of stimuli has an impact on the allocation of attention, but only in the RT task. Therefore dissociations between TOJ and response times cannot be accounted for by an attentional bias in the TOJ task but probably by different use of temporal information in the two tasks. (shrink)

Recently, a new method of considering successful intentional thought suppression has emerged. This method, the think/no-think paradigm has been utilized over a multitude of settings and has fairly robustly demonstrated the ability to interfere with memory recall. The following experiment examined the effect of intentional thought suppression on recognition memory of nonverbalizeable shapes. In this experiment, participants learned word–shape targets. For some of the pairs, they rehearsed the shape when presented with the word; for others, they suppressed the shape (...) when presented with the word. Finally, participants were shown multiple shapes, one at a time, and asked to identify which they had previously seen as paired with a word. Results of the experiment indicated that, similar to results involving words, participants were less accurate in identifying suppressed shapes, as compared to rehearsed shapes. Implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

When attempting to predict future events, people commonly rely on historical data. One psychological characteristic of judgmental forecasting of time series, established by research, is that when people make forecasts from series, they tend to underestimate future values for upward trends and overestimate them for downward ones, so-called trend-damping. Events in a time series can be experienced sequentially, or they can also be retrospectively viewed simultaneously, not experienced individually in real time. In one experiment, we studied the influence of presentation (...) mode on two sorts of judgment: predictions of the next event and estimation of the average value of all the events in the presented series. Participants' responses in dynamic mode were anchored on more recent events than in static mode for all types of judgment but with different consequences; hence, dynamic presentation improved prediction accuracy, but not estimation. These results are not anticipated by existing theoretical accounts; we develop and present an agent-based model—the adaptive anchoring model —to account for the difference between processing sequences of dynamically and statically presented stimuli. ADAM captures how variation in presentation mode produces variation in responses in both forecasting and judgment tasks. ADAM's model predictions for the forecasting and judgment tasks fit better with the response data than a linear-regression time series model. Moreover, ADAM outperformed autoregressive-integrated-moving-average and exponential-smoothing models, while neither of these models accounts for people's responses on the average estimation task. (shrink)

This study investigates the procedural learning, retention, and reactivation of temporal sensorimotor sequences in children with and without developmental coordination disorder. Twenty typically-developing children and 12 children with DCD took part in this study. The children were required to tap on a keyboard, synchronizing with auditory or visual stimuli presented as an isochronous temporal sequence, and practice non-isochronous temporal sequences to memorize them. Immediate and delayed retention of the audio-motor and visuo-motor non-isochronous sequences were tested by removing auditory (...) or visual stimuli immediately after practice and after a delay of 2 h. A reactivation test involved reintroducing the auditory and visual stimuli after the delayed recall. Data were computed via circular analyses to obtain asynchrony, the stability of synchronization and errors. Firstly, an overall deficit in synchronization with both auditory and visual isochronous stimuli was observed in DCD children compared to TD children. During practice, further improvements were found for the audio-motor non-isochronous sequence compared to the visuo-motor non-isochronous sequence in both TD children and children with DCD. However, a drastic increase in errors occurred in children with DCD during immediate retention as soon as the auditory stimuli were removed. Reintroducing auditory stimuli decreased errors in the audio-motor sequence for children with DCD. Such changes were not seen for the visuo-motor non-isochronous sequence, which was equally learned, retained and reactivated in DCD and TD children. All these results suggest that TD children benefit from both auditory and visual stimuli to memorize the sequence, whereas children with DCD seem to present a deficit in integrating an audio-motor sequence in their memory. The immediate effect of reactivation suggests a specific dependency on auditory information in DCD. Contrary to the audio-motor sequence, the visuo-motor sequence was both learned and retained in children with DCD. This suggests that visual stimuli could be the best information for memorizing a temporal sequence in DCD. All these results are discussed in terms of a specific audio-motor coupling deficit in DCD. (shrink)

It has been consistently demonstrated that fear-relevant images capture attention preferentially over fear-irrelevant images. Current theory suggests that this faster processing could be mediated by an evolved module that allows certain stimulus features to attract attention automatically, prior to the detailed processing of the image. The present research investigated whether simplified images of fear-relevant stimuli would produce interference with target detection in a visual search task. In Experiment 1, silhouettes and degraded silhouettes of fear-relevant animals produced more interference than (...) did the fear-irrelevant images. Experiment 2, compared the effects of fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant distracters and confirmed that the interference produced by fear-relevant distracters was not an effect of novelty. Experiment 3 suggested that fear-relevant stimuli produced interference regardless of whether participants were instructed as to the content of the images. The three experiments indicate that even very simplistic images of fear-relevant animals can divert attention. (shrink)