ABSTRACT Viewing sets of food products is common in consumer environments. Previous research on visual perception suggests the phenomena of global judgements (or summary statistical representation), which means that people often extract summary statistical information of multiple objects (e.g., average size, hue) at a glance. Consumers may form summary statistical representations of food products. Despite the growing number of studies on the cognitive processing of food products, global judgements of caloric information and how differences in age influence the global judgements remain unexplored. Here, we aimed to reveal global judgements of caloric perception in younger and older adults. Across two studies, participants (adults in Study 1 and younger and older adults in Study 2) viewed food image sets (single, two, four, or six images) and estimated the average caloric counts. The results revealed that the participants could accurately estimate the average caloric counts to some extent at two set sizes. Moreover, the participants were less able to extract global judgements of caloric information at four and six set sizes. Overall, our findings reveal limited cognitive processing for assessing average caloric content, and age differences modulate the estimation accuracy.

ABSTRACT Attention to words is closely related to the process of learning to read. However, it remains unclear how attention to words in environmental print (such as words on product labels) is changed with the growth of preschool children’s reading ability. We thus used eye tracking technique to compare attention to words in environmental print in children at low (32, 15 males, 5.12 years) and high (32, 17 males, 5.16 years) reading levels during a free viewing task. To characterize which aspects of visual word form children attend to, we constructed three types of stimuli embedded in the same context: words in environment print, symbol strings (similar shape to words but without strokes), and character strings (comparable with words in the number of strokes and the structures). We observed that children at both reading levels showed lower percentages of fixations and fixation time in words relative to symbol strings, suggesting they start to attend to the coarse aspect of visual word form. Interestingly, only children at higher reading level showed lower percentages of fixations and fixation time for words relative to character strings, suggesting that attention to the fine-grained aspect of visual word form emerged, and was closely to reading ability.

ABSTRACT Localizing targets repeating or changing their position typically leads to a benefit for location changes, that is, inhibition of return (IOR). Yet, IOR is mostly absent when sequentially responding to arrows pointing to the left or right. Previous research suggested that responding to central arrow targets resembles a discrimination response. For the latter, action control theories expect the modulation of response repetitions and changes by task-irrelevant feature repetitions and changes (e.g., colour), caused by stimulus-response (S-R) binding – a modulation typically absent in localization performance. In the current study, participants gave left and right responses to peripheral targets repeating or changing their position, and to central arrow targets repeating or changing their pointing direction. Targets could repeat or change their colour. For central targets, responses were heavily modulated by colour repetitions and changes, suggesting S-R binding. No S-R binding, but only IOR was found for peripheral targets. Analysis of reaction time percentiles suggested that this pattern was not caused by fast response execution. These results show that S-R binding approaches allow to explain effects typically discussed in the context of attentional orienting, highlighting the similarities of two research strands working in parallel for years without much of exchange.

ABSTRACT Visual short-term and working memory can be disrupted by irrelevant, distracting input occurring after encoding. Distractors similar to the original memory are known to be interfering, but it is unclear whether dissimilar distractors have the same disruptive effect. The presence of dissimilar distraction would be problematic for views of similarity-based interference, hence the present study investigated modality-specific distraction using a procedure that required participants to compare single target and probe objects over a delay. An irrelevant distractor could be presented during the delay separating the target and probe, but it varied in its similarity to the target. In four experiments, recognition was disrupted by the presence of a distractor, even when the distractors were highly dissimilar to the target. Furthermore, the interference effect was not reduced when the same distractors were repeatedly used throughout the experiment, and interference from dissimilar distractors was only lessened when it was extremely predictable. These findings indicate that susceptibility to dissimilar distraction is a persistent limitation in visual short-term memory.

ABSTRACT While visual information directly influences the preparation and control of aiming movements, less is known about the influence of a degraded visual context such as target blur. Participants aimed as quickly and accurately as possible within a virtual aiming environment to clear or blurred targets using a stylus on a digitizing board. Findings showed a more prolonged time to initiate movements for blurred compared to clear targets, but no influence for movement time, or end-point accuracy and precision. The adaptation in movement preparation may reflect an initial uncertainty surrounding the visual context; namely, the visual target characteristics that are typically needed to avoid any error. Meanwhile, the absence of any influence within movement reflects the processing of the coarse and dynamic visual characteristics of the limb, which was independent of the degraded visual context of the target. These findings may contribute further insights toward low vision and possible functional adaptations.

ABSTRACT Many eye tracking studies of visual search have focused on the role of the number of fixations and the nature of scan paths. Less attention has been paid to fixation durations and to how those durations are affected by stimulus features. Previous studies have shown that fixation durations can be as important as the number of fixations in explaining search times with complex stimuli (e.g., in search for specific faces). In the present study, simple stimuli were used in a search experiment where participants searched for a closed ring among rings with a gap. We manipulated distractor heterogeneity (DH), target-distractor similarity (TDS), and stimulus density (SDY, set size within a constant search window), and estimated the contributions of these factors to gaze behaviour and trial search time. The results show that fixation durations contribute less to variation in overall search time with simple search stimuli as compared to previous studies with more complex stimuli. However, fixation durations still increased with DH, TDS, and SDY. These effects were mainly additive, and we did not find an interaction between DH and closer element spacing at high levels of SDY that might have been expected since both DH and SDY influence distractor grouping.

ABSTRACT It is well known that humans demonstrate massive and surprisingly rich recognition memory for objects and/or scenes and that context typically aids retrieval of episodic memories. However, when we combine picture memory for 100 objects with the context in the form of a background scene, we find that irrelevant contexts lead to substantial impairments of object memory. Twelve experiments used a standard long-term, picture memory paradigm. Backgrounds could be semantically consistent or inconsistent scenes or simple arrays of objects. In all cases, the target object to be remembered was clearly marked by an outline box. Backgrounds were always known to be irrelevant, but, nevertheless, significantly reduced old/new discrimination for target objects. Interference from the scene was apparently unavoidable, suggesting that the seemingly effortless encoding that makes it easy to store scenes into memory, makes it hard to avoid interference with the encoding and recognition of objects placed in or on those scenes.

ABSTRACT A black frame presented around one of 12 pictures during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) was frequently misperceived as surrounding the preceding or following picture in the sequence (temporal migration; Intraub, 1985, 1989). Would temporal migration of the frame be reduced if the frame and picture shared a common property (colour)? Two different colour frames were created for each picture: one matching and one mismatching the picture’s most prevalent colour (Experiment 1) as determined by a computational image colour summarizer (Krzywinski, 2018). Presentation rate was 100 ms/picture. Colour-matching significantly reduced temporal migration (4.3%), but the effect was small. To determine if greater colour-overlap would yield a larger effect, frames composed of colour “tiles” that matched or mismatched each picture’s four most prevalent colours were presented at a rate of 111 ms/picture (Experiment 2). Again, a small, significant reduction in temporal migration was observed (3.2%). Although pictures and frames are distinct forms, the probability of correct integration of the two appears to be affected by the presence of a common property (colour). Results are discussed in terms of an integrative short-term buffer. Possible application of the temporal migration paradigm to studying visual integration of components of real-world scenes is addressed.

ABSTRACT Expert radiologists can quickly extract a basic “gist” understanding of a medical image following less than a second exposure, leading to above-chance diagnostic classification of images. It is currently unclear whether this pattern of results is applicable to pathology, another medical imaging domain demanding visual diagnostic interpretation. To further characterize the rapid interpretation medical images, this study examined eye movements and diagnostic decision-making when pathologists were briefly exposed to digital whole slide images of melanocytic skin biopsies. Twelve resident (N = 5), fellow (N = 5), and attending pathologists (N = 2) with experience interpreting dermatopathology briefly viewed 48 cases presented for 500 ms each, and we tracked their eye movements towards abnormalities, their ability to classify images as containing or not containing invasive melanoma, and their ability to localize critical image regions. Results demonstrated rapid shifts of the eyes towards critical abnormalities, high diagnostic sensitivity and specificity, and surprisingly high accuracy localizing critical diagnostic regions. Furthermore, when pathologists fixated critical regions with their eyes, they were subsequently more likely to successfully localize that region on an outline of the image. Results are discussed relative to models of medical image interpretation and innovative methods for monitoring and assessing expertise development during medical education and training.

ABSTRACT The integrative framework proposed by Luck and colleagues [Luck, S. J., Gaspelin, N., Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., & Theeuwes, J. (2021). Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 29(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2020.1848949] represents major progress in the field of attention research, and remaining areas of disagreement provide an opportunity to test hypotheses by drawing on other research traditions. From the perspective of research in cognitive-affective neuroscience, we first suggest ways in which recent analytic innovations in human neuroimaging can be used to test hypotheses proposed by Folk and Remington about how biases within distinct brain systems may be integrated within a control state. We then shift focus and extend recent critiques of the generalizability of vision-centred frameworks of emotional guidance of attention to the integrative framework, citing evidence that vision-based frameworks of attentional capture do not necessarily extend to other sensory modalities.