Hearing the remote past seems impossible. Archaeoacoustics is a contemporary field intent on reconstructing the evolution of early communication systems, offering the possibility of developing methodologies relating to past sound signaling and music. Through a contribution of the emerging sensory field of archaeoacoustics and an example of acoustic assessments conducted at the site of Coves del Toll, can we understand signals of the past in order to investigate human behaviour and trace its cognitive evolution? This paper explores alternative methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding prehistoric sonic behaviours in early hominids and aims to set out a framework to theoretically and philosophically approach the “sound record” of the past. The theoretical proposition of this paper integrates the musical and sound art disciplines of spectralism and sound ecology to challenge the current limitations of listening to sound.

Spatial navigation is supported by visual cues (e.g., scenes, schemas like arrows, and words) that must be comprehended quickly to facilitate effective transit. People comprehend spatial directions faster from schemas and words than scenes. We hypothesize that this occurs because schemas and words efficiently engage space-based attention, allowing for less costly computations. Here, participants completed a spatial cueing paradigm, and we calculated cue validity effects – how much faster participants responded to validly than invalidly cued locations – for each cue format. We pre-registered Experiment 1 and found significant cue validity effects with schemas and words, but not scenes, suggesting space-based attention was allocated more efficiently with schemas and words than scenes. In Experiment 2, we explicitly instructed participants to interpret the scenes from an egocentric perspective and found that this instruction manipulation still did not result in a significant cue validity effect with scenes. In Experiment 3, we investigated whether the differential effects between conditions were due to costly computations to extract spatial direction and found that increasing cue duration had no influence. In Experiment 4, significant cue validity effects were observed for orthogonal but not non-orthogonal spatial directions, suggesting space-based attention was allocated more efficiently when the spatial direction precisely matched the target location. These findings confirm our hypothesis that efficient allocation of space-based attention is guided by faster spatial direction comprehension. Altogether, this work suggests that schemas and words may be more effective supports than scenes for navigation performance in the real-world.

As of yet, visual working memory (WM) training has failed to yield consistent cognitive benefits to performance in untrained tasks, despite large improvements in trained tasks. Investigating the mechanisms underlying training effects can help explain these inconsistencies. In this pre-registered, pre-test/post-test online training study, we examined how training affects the quantity and quality of representations in visual WM using continuous-reproduction tasks. N = 64 young healthy adults were randomly assigned to an experimental group or an active control group to complete four training sessions of practce in an orientation-reproduction or a visual search task, respectively. We observed that, in the trained task, only the quality, but not the quantity, of visual WM representations significantly increased in the experimental group relative to the control group. These improvements did not generalise to untrained stimuli or paradigms. Therefore, our findings suggest that training gains are not driven by enhanced capacity. Instead, gains in the quality of visual WM representations that are tied to specific stimuli and paradigms may reflect enhanced efficiency in using the existing visual WM capacity.

There has been a lengthy debate about whether salient stimuli have the power to automatically capture attention, even when entirely task irrelevant. Theeuwes (2022) has suggested that an attentional window account could explain why capture is observed in some studies, but not others. According to this account, when search is difficult, participants narrow their attentional window, and this prevents the salient distractor from generating a saliency signal. In turn, this causes the salient distractor to fail to capture attention. In the present commentary, we describe two major problems with this account. First, the attentional window account proposes that attention must be focused so narrowly that featural information from the salient distractor will be filtered prior to saliency computations. However, many previous studies observing no capture provided evidence that featural processing was sufficiently detailed to guide attention toward the target shape. This indicates that the attentional window was sufficiently broad to allow featural processing. Second, the attentional window account proposes that capture should occur more readily in easy search tasks than difficult search tasks. We review previous studies that violate this basic prediction of the attentional window account. A more parsimonious account of the data is that control over feature processing can be exerted proactively to prevent capture, at least under certain conditions.

People often listen to music while doing cognitive tasks. Yet, whether music harms or helps performance is still debated. Here, we assessed the objective and subjective effects of music with and without lyrics on four cognitive tasks. College students completed tasks of verbal and visual memory, reading comprehension, and arithmetic under three conditions: silence, instrumental music, and music with lyrics. Participants judged their learning during and after each condition. Music with lyrics hindered verbal memory, visual memory, and reading comprehension (d ≈ –0.3), whereas its negative effect (d = –.19) on arithmetic was not credible. Instrumental music (hip-hop lo-fi) did not credibly hinder or improve performance. Participants were aware of the detrimental impact of the lyrics. Instrumental music was, however, sometimes perceived as beneficial. Our results corroborate the general distracting effect of background music. However, faulty metacognition about music’s interfering effect cannot fully explain why students often listen to music while studying.

The sense of touch is underrepresented in cognitive psychology research. One of the reasons is that controlling the timing of stimulus presentation, which is a hallmark of cognitive research, is significantly more difficult for tactile stimuli than visual or auditory stimuli. In the present work, we present a system to display tactile stimuli (braille cells) and collect response time with the capability for static and dynamic (passive haptic) stimuli prsentation that will contribute to the development of tactile research. While the system requires some construction, it can be put together with commercially available materials. Here, we present the step-by-step instructions for constructing the tool, the code used to control it, and some basic experiments to validate it. The data from the experiments show that the device can be used for a variety of tactile perception experiments.

A longstanding research question in cognitive psychology concerns how the underlying mechanisms of working memory impact long-term episodic memory. In this series of six experiments, we manipulated three different factors within a complex span task that interleaves memoranda and distractors to investigate the contribution of these factors to the creation of episodic traces: (1) the cognitive load of processing the distractors, (2) the number of distractors, and (3) the free time following the distractors. All three factors have been identified in the prior literature as important to maintenance in working memory and, consequently, later retrieval from episodic memory. Thus, it is important to understand their unique and joint effects to the long-term durability of memory traces. Across six experiments, delayed recall (i.e., episodic memory) of the items studied during the complex span tasks (i.e., working memory) was best accounted for by accumulated free time, whereas the effects of cognitive load and number of distractors were inconsistent or negligible. These results conflict with prior work suggesting that cognitive load and the number of distractors impact episodic memory. However, the current results replicate and extend those suggesting that time spent processing items in working memory promotes the creation of episodic memory traces.

Warning stimuli preceding target stimuli for behaviour improve behavioural performance, which is referred to as phasic alerting. Similar benefits occur due to preceding orienting cues that draw spatial attention to the targets. It has long been assumed that alerting and orienting effects arise from separate attention systems, but recent views call this into question. As it stands, it remains unclear if the two systems are interdependent, or if they function independently. Here, we investigated whether the current attentional set for orienting modulates the effectiveness of alerting. In three experiments, participants classified visual stimuli in a speeded fashion. These target stimuli were preceded by orienting cues that could predict the target’s location, by alerting cues that were neutral regarding the target’s location, or by no cues. Alerting cues and orienting cues consisted of the same visual stimuli, linking alerting cues with the attentional set for orienting. The attentional set for orienting was manipulated in blocks, in which orienting cues were either informative or uninformative about the target’s location. Results showed that while alerting generally enhanced performance, alerting was unaffected by the informativeness of the orienting cues. These findings show that alerting does not depend on the attentional set that controls orienting based on the informational value of orienting cues. As such, the findings provide a simple dissociation of mechanisms underlying phasic alertness and spatial attentional orienting.

Previous studies used gaze behavior to predict product preference in value-based decision-making, based on gaze angle variables such as dwell time, fixation duration and the first fixated product. While the application for online retail seems obvious, research with realistic web shop stimuli has been lacking so far. Here, we studied the decision process for 60 Dutch web shops of a variety of retailers, by measuring eye movements and pupil size during the viewing of web shop images. The outcomes of an ordinal linear regression model showed that a combination of gaze angle variables accurately predicted product choice, with the total dwell time being the most predictive gaze dynamic. Although pupillometric analysis showed a positive relationship between pupil dilation and product preference, adding pupil size to the model only slightly improved the prediction accuracy. The current study holds the potential to substantially improve retargeting mechanisms in online marketing based on consumers’ gaze information. Also, gaze-based product preference proves to be a valuable metric in pre-testing product introductions for market research and prevent product launches from failure.

It has been proposed that cognitive control processes may be implemented in a contextually appropriate manner through the encoding, and cued retrieval, of associations between stimuli and the control processes that were active during their encoding, forming “stimulus-control bindings” as part of episodic event files. Prior work has found strong evidence for such a mechanism by observing behavioral effects of stimulus-control bindings based on a single pairing (one-shot learning). Here, we addressed the important question of how durable these one-shot stimulus-control bindings are. Over three experiments, we investigated the durability of one-shot stimulus-control bindings in relation to both the passage of time and the number of intervening events between the encoding (prime) and retrieval (probe) of the stimulus-control bindings. We found that stimulus-control bindings are quite robust to temporal decay, lasting at least up to 5 minutes in the absence of similar intervening events. By contrast, binding effects were more short-lived in the face of interference from the encoding of similar events between the prime and probe, with a maximum duration of ~2 minutes. Together, these results shed new light on the characteristics of the binding mechanisms underlying the integration of internal control processes in episodic event files and highlight that interference, rather than temporal decay, may be the main limiting factor on long-term effects of item-specific one-shot control learning.