Contextual Cues Research Articles

Beyond minutiae: inferring missing details from global structure in fingerprints

Visual inference involves using prior knowledge and contextual cues to make educated guesses about incomplete or ambiguous information. This study explores the role of visual inference as a function of expertise in the context of fingerprint examination, where professional examiners need to determine whether two fingerprints were left by the same person, or not, often based on limited or impoverished visual information. We compare expert and novice performance on two tasks: inferring the missing details of a print at an artificial blank spot (Experiment 1) and identifying the missing surrounds of a print given only a small fragment of visual detail (Experiment 2). We hypothesized that experts would demonstrate superior performance by leveraging their extensive experience with global fingerprint patterns. Consistent with our predictions, we found that while both experts and novices performed above chance, experts consistently outperformed novices. These findings suggest that expertise in fingerprint examination involves a heightened sensitivity to gist, or global image properties within a print, enabling experts to make more accurate inferences about missing details. These results align with prior research on perceptual expertise in other expert domains, such as radiology, and extend our understanding of scene and face recognition to fingerprint examination. Our findings show that expertise emerges from an ability to combine local and global visual information—experts skillfully process both the fine details and overall patterns in fingerprints. This research provides insight into how perceptual expertise supports accurate visual discrimination in a high-stakes, real-world task with broader implications for theoretical models of visual cognition.

Eyes on Newborns: How NICU Staff's Attention and Emotions Shape Neonatal Pain Assessment.

Assessing pain in neonates is crucial for their management but is inherently subjective. This study investigated the effects of visual attention, gaze patterns, and empathic responses of neonatal healthcare professionals on their assessments of neonatal pain. Conducted at the Department of Neonatology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, we employed eye-tracking to monitor staff's responses to videos depicting neonates experiencing non-noxious thermal, brief noxious, and prolonged noxious stimuli. Videos were presented in two formats: full body view, providing contextual information, and face-only view, lacking contextual details. Pain assessments were measured using a Faces Pain Rating Scale (FPRS), exploring the impacts of contextual cues, professional experience, and job roles. The study found brief and prolonged noxious stimuli eliciting significantly higher FPRS scores compared to non-painful stimuli, with the full body view resulting in higher pain ratings than the face-only view. The mouth region attracted focused attention. Nurses generally reported higher pain scores and exhibited larger pupil diameters compared to physicians, suggesting a stronger empathic response. This research highlights the essential role of visual cues and empathic responses in neonatal pain assessment, demonstrating how professional roles and stimulus presentation format impact evaluations, and underlining the need for standardised protocols to improve neonatal pain management accuracy. The study emphasises the importance of visual cues and empathy in neonatal pain assessment, highlighting the roles of healthcare professionals and stimulus presentation formats. It addresses challenges in understanding neonatal pain, advocating for standardised protocols. Using eye-tracking technology, the research explores how professionals' visual attention and empathy affect pain evaluations, suggesting more objective assessment methods.

Music as a contextual cue in human predictive learning

Music as a contextual cue in human predictive learning

Unraveling neural adaptation to vocal and non-vocal sounds in autism.

Autism is linked to a strong need for sameness and difficulties in social communication, associated with atypical brain responses to voices and changes. This study aimed to characterize neural adaptation in autistic adults using a Roving paradigm and assess how vocal vs. non-vocal, as well as neutral vs. emotional sounds, influence this adaptation. Neural adaptation was measured in 20 autistic and 20 non-autistic adults using a Roving paradigm, where sounds were repeated 4, 8, or 14 times. Neural responses and Repetition Positivity (RP) amplitudes were analyzed as indices of adaptation. RP amplitudes showed no significant differences between groups for vocal or non-vocal sounds, but adaptation dynamics varied. Non-autistic adults adapted more quickly to non-vocal (5-8 repetitions) compared to vocal sounds (12-14 repetitions). In contrast, autistic adults adapt faster to vocal than to non-vocal sounds. Moreover emotional prosodic content influenced RP amplitude in autistic adults only, suggesting heightened sensitivity to emotional cues in social contexts. The study highlights how atypical neural adaptation in autism how emotional content impacts social communication deficits. These insights enhance understanding of autism-related adaptation challenges.

Trait responsiveness to verbal suggestions predicts nocebo responding: A meta-analysis.

Nocebo responding involves the experience of adverse health outcomes in response to contextual cues. These deleterious responses impact numerous features of mental and physical health but are characterized by pronounced heterogeneity. Suggestion is widely recognized as a contributing factor to nocebo responding but the moderating role of trait responsiveness to verbal suggestions (suggestibility) in nocebo responding remains poorly understood. We conducted a pre-registered meta-analysis (PROSPERO registration number CRD42023425605) to quantitatively synthesize available research on the relationship between suggestibility and nocebo responding. Four electronic databases were searched for original studies involving both the assessment of suggestibility and symptom reports in response to an inactive stimulus. Of 7729 search results, 10 articles presenting 13 correlations between suggestibility and nocebo responding were analysed. A random-effects meta-analysis revealed a significant, albeit weak, positive correlation, r = .21 [95% CI: .04, .37], between suggestibility and nocebo responses, such that more highly suggestible individuals displayed larger responses. Sensitivity and meta-regression analyses demonstrated that studies of higher methodological quality, including those that maintained experimenter blinding, exhibited stronger effect sizes. These results corroborate proposals that trait responsiveness to verbal suggestions confers greater response to nocebos and warrants renewed attention to the role of suggestibility in symptom induction and perception.

Increased brightness assimilation in rod vision.

Our visual system uses contextual cues to estimate the brightness of surfaces: brightness can shift toward (assimilation) or away from (contrast) the brightness of the surroundings. We investigated brightness induction at different light levels and found a potential influence of rod photoreceptors on brightness induction. We then used a novel tetrachromatic display to generate stimuli differentially exciting rods or cones at a fixed light adaptation level. Under rod vision, brightness assimilation was enhanced while brightness contrast was not altered in comparison to cone vision. We ruled out that this effect was mediated by the low resolution of night vision. Our findings suggest that rod vision affects the high-level interpretation of visual scenes that results in differences in brightness assimilation but not contrast. Our results imply that the visual system employs more perceptual inferences under rod vision than under cone vision to solve visual ambiguities in complex spatial displays.

There's no place like home: How local tissue microenvironments shape the function of innate lymphoid cells.

Innate lymphoid cells (ILC) have emerged as critical immune effectors with key roles in orchestrating the wider immune response. While ILC are relatively rare cells they are found enriched within discrete microenvironments, predominantly within barrier tissues. An emerging body of evidence implicates complex and multi-layered interactions between cell types, tissue structure and the external environment as key determinants of ILC function within these niches. In this review we will discuss the specific components that constitute ILC-associated microenvironments and consider how they act to determine health and disease. The development of holistic, integrated models of ILC function within complex tissue environments will inform new understanding of the contextual cues and mechanisms that determine the protective versus disease-causing roles of this immune cell family.

EXPRESS: Eye on Context: Individual Differences Reveal the Mechanisms of Statistical Learning.

If a searched-for target object is consistently encountered within repeating spatial distractor arrangements, target detection becomes more efficient relative to non-repeated, i.e., random arrangements (contextual-cueing effect). On the other hand, target location changes within otherwise unchanged distractor arrays substantially weaken the cueing effect. Previous studies reported substantial variations in individual participants' abilities to learn and relearn invariant contexts. Therefore, the current study examined how individual differences in attentional control and focus, as indexed by the well-established Stroop and Navon tasks, respectively, relate to contextual cueing (CC) in a learning phase/relocation phase design. During the visual search, we recorded behavioral reaction times (RTs) and fixation locations, the latter permitting us to decompose search RTs into search- and motor-related substages. We could thus evaluate the processes responsible for CC and the lack thereof after target relocation while also testing whether search and motor components of CC are different for individuals depending on their Stroop/ Navon scores. Repeated contexts yielded faster RTs (and reduced fixation numbers), though there was a substantial decrease in cueing from learning to adaptation, consistent with previous studies. Critically, contextual learning, but not relearning, varied across individuals: participants with high-Stroop interference displayed overall larger CC during early target search, while a more local Navon task bias was associated with increased CC during later processes of target response decisions. Our results demonstrate that analyzing individual differences can help validate the processes responsible for CC in search tasks, particularly distinguishing between early search and later response-related mechanisms.

Nonverbal expressions of shame predict suicidal ideation among rurally-situated, but not urban situated, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) adults

In the United States (US), lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people experience disproportionate rates of suicidality associated with minority stress. This study aimed to investigate whether nonverbal expressions of experienced stigma (i.e., shame) predicted suicidal ideation among LGBTQ individuals with a focus on location-based disparities (comparing those living in a more rural setting to those living in a more urban setting). More specifically, we examined whether nonverbal expressions of shame predicted suicidal ideation three months later and whether this relationship was moderated by region. LGBTQ individuals (N = 133) from one rurally-situated and one urban location were videorecorded while talking about a time they felt bad about their LGBTQ identity in an observational, prospective (two-time point) design. Recordings were coded for the intensity of nonverbal expressions of shame (shoulders slumped, chest narrowed). Participants also completed several self-report measures including state shame and suicidal ideation at both the time of the recording and three months later. Moderation analyses revealed that for LGBTQ adults living in more rural settings, nonverbal shame, predicted increased suicidal ideation three months later (Bstd = 0.64, p = .005), and this was not the case for those living in more urban settings (Bstd = -0.08, p = 0.70). Self-reported shame did not predict suicidal ideation for LGBTQ adults from more rural or urban locations. These findings highlight the importance of recognizing nonverbal cues in context (i.e., in locations with more structural stigma) when assessing mental health risks and when shaping interventions for LGBTQ populations.

A SNARC-like effect for visual speed.

Numerical and nonnumerical magnitudes can be represented along a hypothetical left-to-right continuum, where smaller quantities are associated with the left side and larger quantities with the right side. However, these representations are flexible, as their intensity and direction can be modulated by various contextual cues and task demands. In four experiments, we investigated the spatial representation of visual speed. Visual speed is inherently connected to physical space and spatial directions, making it distinct from other magnitudes. With this in mind, we explored whether the spatial representation of visual speed aligns with the typical left-to-right orientation or is influenced dynamically by the movement direction of the stimuli. Participants compared the speed of random dot kinematograms to a reference speed using lateralised response keys. On each trial, all dots moved consistently in one single direction, which varied across the experiments and could also vary from trial to trial in Experiments 2 and 4. The dot movements were left-to-right (Experiment 1), random across a 360° spectrum (Experiment 2), right-to-left (Experiment 3), and random left-to-right or right-to-left (Experiment 4). The results supported a relatively stable left-to-right spatial representation of speed (Experiments 1-3), which was compromised by mutable motion directions along the horizontal axis (Experiment 4). We suggest that representing stimuli as belonging to a single set rather than different sets, may be crucial for the emergence of spatial representations of quantities.

Atypical implicit and explicit sense of agency in autism: A complete characterization using the cue integration approach.

There exist indications that sense of agency (SoA), the experience of being the cause of one's own actions and actions' outcomes, is altered in autism. However, no studies in autism have simultaneously investigated the integration mechanisms underpinning both implicit and explicit SoA, the two levels of agency proposed by the innovative cue integration approach. Our study establishes a first complete characterization of SoA functioning in autism, by comparing age- and IQ-matched samples of autistic versus neurotypical adults. Intentional binding and judgments of agency were used to assess implicit and explicit SoA over pinching movements with visual outcomes. Sensorimotor and contextual cues were manipulated using feedback alteration and induced belief about the cause of actions' outcome. Implicit SoA was altered in autism, as showed by an overall abolished intentional binding effect and greater inter-individual heterogeneity. At the explicit level, we observed under-reliance on retrospective sensorimotor cues. The implicit-explicit dynamic was also altered in comparison to neurotypical individuals. Our results show that both implicit and explicit levels of SoA, as well as the dynamic between the two levels, present atypicalities in autism.

Natural language processing to identify suicidal ideation and anhedonia in major depressive disorder.

Anhedonia and suicidal ideation are symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD) that are not regularly captured in structured scales but may be captured in unstructured clinical notes. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques may be used to extract longitudinal data on suicidal behaviors and anhedonia within unstructured clinical notes. This study assessed the accuracy of using NLP techniques on electronic health records (EHRs) to identify these symptoms among patients with MDD. EHR-derived, de-identified data were used from the NeuroBlu Database (version 23R1), a longitudinal behavioral health real-world database. Mental health clinicians annotated instances of anhedonia and suicidal symptoms in clinical notes creating a ground truth. Interrater reliability (IRR) was calculated using Krippendorff's alpha. A novel transformer architecture-based NLP model was trained on clinical notes to recognize linguistic patterns and contextual cues. Each sentence was categorized into one of four labels: (1) anhedonia; (2) suicidal ideation without intent or plan; (3) suicidal ideation with intent or plan; (4) absence of suicidal ideation or anhedonia. The model was assessed using positive predictive values (PPV), negative predictive values, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and AUROC. The model was trained, tested, and validated on 2,198, 1,247, and 1,016 distinct clinical notes, respectively. IRR was 0.80. For anhedonia, suicidal ideation with intent or plan, and suicidal ideation without intent or plan the model achieved a PPV of 0.98, 0.93, and 0.87, an F1-score of 0.98, 0.91, and 0.89 during training and a PPV of 0.99, 0.95, and 0.87 and F1-score of 0.99, 0.95, and 0.89 during validation. NLP techniques can leverage contextual information in EHRs to identify anhedonia and suicidal symptoms in patients with MDD. Integrating structured and unstructured data offers a comprehensive view of MDD's trajectory, helping healthcare providers deliver timely, effective interventions. Addressing current limitations will further enhance NLP models, enabling more accurate extraction of critical clinical features and supporting personalized, proactive mental health care.

Playing with Privacy: Exploring the Social Construction of Privacy Norms Through a Card Game

Investigating digital privacy behavior requires consideration of its contextual nuances and the underlying social norms. This study delves into users' joint articulation of such norms by probing their implicit assumptions and "common sense" surrounding privacy conventions. To achieve this, we introduce Privacy Taboo, a card game designed to serve as a playful breaching interview method, fostering discourse on unwritten privacy rules. Through nine interviews involving pairs of participants (n=18), we explore the decision-making and collective negotiation of privacy's vagueness. Our findings demonstrate individuals' ability to articulate their information needs when consenting to fictive data requests, even when contextual cues are limited. By shedding light on the social construction of privacy, this research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of usable privacy, thereby facilitating the development of democratic privacy frameworks. Moreover, we posit Privacy Taboo as a versatile tool adaptable to diverse domains of application and research.

Contextual cues can be used to predict the likelihood of and reduce interference from salient distractors.

Our attention can sometimes be disrupted by salient but irrelevant objects in the environment. This distractor interference can be reduced when distractors appear frequently, allowing us to anticipate their presence. However, it remains unknown whether distractor frequency can be learned implicitly across distinct contexts. In other words, can we implicitly learn that in certain situations a distractor is more likely to appear, and use that knowledge to minimize the impact that the distractor has on our behavior? In two experiments, we explored this question by asking participants to find a unique shape target in displays that could contain a color singleton distractor. Forest or city backgrounds were presented on each trial, and unbeknownst to the participants, each image category was associated with a different distractor probability. We found that distractor interference was reduced when the image predicted a high rather than low probability of distractor presence on the upcoming trial, even though the location and (in Experiment 2) the color of the distractor was completely unpredictable. These effects appear to be driven by implicit rather explicit learning. We conclude that implicit learning of context-specific distractor probabilities can drive flexible strategies for the reduction of distractor interference.

The Problems of Linguistic Analysis of Elliptical Sentences in Modern English

Elliptical sentences, characterized by the omission of contextually inferable elements, present unique challenges in linguistic analysis. These constructions, though prevalent in both spoken and written discourse, require careful consideration of syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive factors for accurate interpretation. This paper explores the complexities of elliptical sentences in Modern English, drawing on various linguistic theories and methodological approaches, including transformational-generative grammar, pragmatic inference, and corpus-based analysis. The findings indicate that ellipsis is widely used in informal communication and advertising, while its interpretation often relies on contextual cues, leading to potential ambiguity. The discussion highlights the difficulties posed by regional and stylistic variations, as well as the implications for natural language processing and language teaching. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for a multidisciplinary approach to fully grasp the intricacies of elliptical constructions and their broader applications in linguistic research and education.

Visual priming and parsing preferences: A self-paced reading study of PP-attachment ambiguity in Dutch verb-final structures

Understanding how language users navigate through syntactic ambiguities is crucial for unravelling the intricacies of sentence processing. This study explored ambiguity resolution within verb-final double prepositional phrase structures in Dutch. While previous research has largely focused on SVO structures such as those found in English, there is a scarcity of evidence regarding initial syntactic decisions in verb-final structures. The study pursued two aims: firstly, to investigate whether visual cues can direct the parser towards an intended interpretation; and secondly, to examine the potential of visual cues in priming verb subcategorization information within ambiguous sentences in the absence of linguistic input. A reading task was administered to address these objectives by assessing per-word reading times. Furthermore, ambiguity within the structures was resolved by presenting an animation clip that displayed the intended interpretation of each sentence before reading it. The results indicated that the animations provided before the reading task modulated the processing of NP- and VP-attachment interpretations of the ambiguous structures under study. However, these contextual cues did not prime subcategorized information of verbs earlier than their appearance within the sentence, as evidenced by unchanged reading profiles for the regions preceding the verb. This study demonstrates that visual contexts modulate the word-by-word processing of Dutch verb-final structures, and that verb argument structure appears to influence this process. The results are examined through various sentence processing theories, lending support to constraint-based models.

"Expectancy-Mood Neural Dynamics Predict Mechanisms of Short- and Long-Term Antidepressant Placebo Effects".

Acute experimental models of antidepressant placebo effects suggest that expectancies, encoded within the salience network (SN), are reinforced by sensory evidence and mood fluctuations. However, whether these dynamics extend to longer timescales remains unknown. To answer this question, we investigated how SN and default mode network (DMN) functional connectivity during the processing of antidepressant expectancies facilitates the shift from salience attribution to contextual cues in the SN to belief-induced mood responses in the DMN, both acutely and long-term. Sixty psychotropic-free patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) completed an acute antidepressant placebo fMRI experiment manipulating placebo-associated expectancies and their reinforcement while assessing trial-by-trial mood improvement, before entering an 8-week double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial (RCT) of a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) or placebo. Learned antidepressant expectancies predicted by a reinforcement learning model modulated SN-DMN connectivity. Acutely, greater modulation predicted higher effects of expectancy and reinforcement manipulations on reported expectancies and mood. Over 8 weeks, no significant drug effects on mood improvement were observed. However, participants who believed they were receiving an antidepressant exhibited significantly greater mood improvement, irrespective of the actual treatment received. Moreover, increased SN-DMN connectivity predicted mood improvement, especially in placebo-treated participants who believed they received an SSRI. SN-DMN interactions may play a critical role in the evolution of antidepressant response expectancies, drug-assignment beliefs, and their effects on mood.

The Gap between Speaker’s Meaning and Hearer’s Meaning in Communication: Within and Beyond Classical Gricean Theory of Meaning

Under the guidance of classical Gricean theory of meaning, it is conventionally accepted that speaker’s meaning is contingent upon speaker’s intention in communication, whereas hearer’s meaning involves the recognition and interpretation of speaker’s intention according to other principles of meaning in pragmatics. Consequently, a gap emerges between speaker’s intended meaning and the meaning comprehended by the hearer. This paper presents the gap at first and then illustrates three primary factors contributing to it: namely, the unclear boundary between what is said and what is implicated, the indistinct contextual cues, and the different backgrounds of both speaker and hearer. Finally, for the purpose of facilitating effective communication, strategies are proposed to bridge the gap, emphasizing the importance of shared linguistic knowledge and contextual information between speaker and hearer, as well as the hearer’s assuming about the speaker’s intention. It is hoped that the paper would provide some new aspects for the research of communication.

The Influence of Dual Roles on Review Helpfulness: A Trust Transfer Perspective

As more and more review platforms add social networking services, the majority of platforms have evolved into a binary social-commercial environment. In this particular context, readers assess review posters with dual roles in the decision-making process: friend role and reviewer role. Unlike previous studies from a single-role perspective, this study develops a dual-role model for exploring review helpfulness mechanisms based on role theory. More importantly, this study further investigates whether contextual cues of trust transfer affect the interaction effect of the dual role. We first apply a qualitative methodology by using semi-structured interviews with 32 readers of review platforms to extract the relevant dimensions of the dual role. Then, using actual online review data collected from Pconline.com in China, we conduct an econometric analysis to test our hypotheses. The results confirm the interaction of reviewers’ dual roles and the effect of contextual cues of trust transfer in a dual role-based model. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Designing Positive Psychology Interventions for Social Media: Cross-Sectional Web-Based Experiment With Young Adults With Cancer.

Young adults (ages 18-39 years) with cancer face unique risks for negative psychosocial outcomes. These risks could be lessened with positive psychology interventions adapted for social media if intervention messages encourage intentions to do the activities and positive message reactions and if young adults with cancer perceive few downsides. This study aimed to assess whether social media messages from evidence-based positive psychology interventions encouraged intentions to do the intervention activities and intended positive message reactions, overall and among sociodemographic or cancer characteristic subgroups. We also aimed to identify perceived downsides of the activity that would negatively impact the interventions' feasibility. Young adults (ages 18-39 years, cancer diagnosis ages 15-39 years) were randomized to a between-persons web-based experiment. Participants viewed a social media message with social context cues (vs not) for 1 of 2 types of intervention (acts of kindness vs social connectedness). Participants reported intentions to do the activity, along with their perceived social presence in the message (how much they felt the sense of others) and forecasted positivity resonance (whether they would experience socially connected positive emotions when doing the activity), with 5-point items. Participants also reported their self-efficacy (how certain they can do the intervention activity) with a 0-100 item and potential downsides of the activity categorically. More than 4 out of 5 young adults with cancer (N=396) reported they "somewhat" (coded as 3) to "extremely" (5) intended to do the intervention activity (336/396, 84.8%; mean ranged from 3.4-3.6, SD 0.9-1.0), perceived social presence in the messages (350/396, 88.4%; mean 3.8, SD 0.7), and forecasted positivity resonance (349/396, 88.1%; mean 3.8-3.9, SD 0.8). Participants reported having self-efficacy to complete the activity (mean 70.7% of possible 100%, SD 15.4%-17.2%). Most (320/396, 80.8%) did not think of the downsides of the interventions. Messages with social context cues (vs not) and both intervention types were rated similarly (all P>.05). Black young adults reported lower intentions, perceived social presence, and forecasted positivity resonance than White young adults (all P<.001). Participants in active treatment (vs completed) reported greater intentions to do the activities (P<.001). Positive psychology intervention messages adapted for social media were perceived as acceptable and feasible among young adults with cancer. The social media-based messages encouraged increasing one's social connectedness and performing acts of kindness. Young adults with cancer also predicted they would have feelings of positive social engagement (positivity resonance) when doing the interventions-the key ingredient for experiencing the health benefits of these activities. This study provides promising evidence for the development of age-appropriate, highly scalable interventions to improve psychosocial health among young adults with cancer.